There’s a lot of buzz around a young woman named Diablo Cody, and for good reason: her screenwriting debut, Juno, is completely fucking terrific. Cody manages to walk the line of being indie and precious and giving her characters quirky, perhaps overstylized dialogue while keeping everything emotionally real and honest. I saw the film with Jeremy a couple of weeks ago, and he commented on how Juno is filled with the kinds of things he usually hates in an indie movie, but it still works.
On top of that Cody (who picked up that name while blogging about her career as a stripper) is an excellent self-promoter, and she’s good looking too, which means every male journalist in town wants to sit down with her (sorry, boys, she’s married!). Diablo Cody is going to be nominated for an Oscar this year; if she wins it she’s the new Tarantino – not in terms of what she does but in terms of the slobbering over her in this town (yes, people will slobber over her even more*).
Cody has her next project lined up, and now it has producers in the form of Jason Reitman and Dan Dubiecki, who together form the Hard C production company. Reitman directed Juno, so he and Cody have a happy history.
The new film is called Jennifer’s Body, and it’s been picked up by Fox Searchlight with Transformers star Megan Fox as the lead. A cheerleader in a Midwestern town is possessed by a demon and starts eating all the boys in town. Her best friend – to be played by Fox and bizarrely described as a ‘plain Jane’ in the trades – has to kill her. Sentenced to an insane asylum, the friend must then escape and seeks revenge on the Satanic hard rock band that started all the trouble in the first place. Sounds a touch Buffy, but if you had told me that ‘girl gets pregnant and decides to give it up to a yuppie couple for adoption’ would form the backbone of one of my favorite movies in 2007, I would have scoffed, so I’m keeping an open mind. Of course what’s interesting is going to be seeing how Hollywood treats her on her second movie, regardless of the quality. There are no darling female screenwriters here (or directors, really. This is a man’s game, baby), so will the collective Hollywood beast continue to support Cody or will they turn and destroy her, especially if Jennifer’s Body is no Juno? And with a concept such as that – and a Megan Fox in the leading role – how could it really be?
There’s no director attached yet, but I wonder if Reitman isn’t gearing up to helm this one himself. He tells the Hollywood Reporter: "Comedy and horror have always been inescapable cousins," Reitman said. "They both draw a similar type of storyteller, one who wants to manipulate the audience. Whether you want to make an audience laugh or you want to make an audience freak out, you’re looking for a similar firsthand relationship with the viewer where you are pushing them to react.
"We want to make unusual films, and anything that turns a genre on its ear interests Dan and I," he added. "And if you look at ‘Bonzai [Shadowhands],’ ‘Juno’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ they bring a new voice to genres people are very aware of."
Jennifer’s Body is scheduled to start shooting in late winter.
*Perhaps if we moved this all to Georgia you people could harvest the slobber and get some drinking water.