Spotlight: Diablo Cody

We here at LifeinBoxes heart Juno. The sweet and quirky indie film has been an intrigue to us since the project was first announced (Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, and Jennifer Garner in one movie??), and then we got excited about the trailer, and then we saw it, and... well, it definitely lived up to all of our expectations. People can talk about heavy marketing all they want, but really, the true test of the quality of a movie comes from word of mouth. Juno opened in select cities and slowly rolled out nationally. And boy has the little indie-movie-that-could really shown its legs. As of this week, Juno is the #2 movie in the nation, behind National Treasure. It is also expected to be Fox Searchlight's biggest grossing movie ever.

The success of Juno rests on a lot of things. It's brilliantly acted (give Ellen Page all the awards she's up for), it has a sweet and moral message without ever being condescending, and it's funny. But all of that falls on the great script first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody wrote. I don't think people realize the importance of a screenplay. It is the basis of all films, bad or good. The thing is, while you can make a bad movie out of a good screenplay, you simply can't make a good movie out of a bad screenplay. No matter how hard you try, if the screenplay isn't good, your movie isn't going to be either.

Diablo Cody's rise to the top is what Hollywood tales are made of. A former stripper, she started blogging about her stripping experiences, which caught the eyes of a Hollywood producer. He became a fan, landed her a book deal, which led her on the path of screenwriting. She wrote Juno at a Starbucks inside a Target in like 6 months, and it has been produced as a film without the usual many revisions most scripts go through. To have your very first attempt at a screenplay be produced is amazing. To have it be made into a film without loads of rewrites and revisions? That's pretty unheard of. To have people take you and your project seriously, despite having no formal screenwriting experience or training, in an industry where names and connections trump quality sometimes? That's a miracle. All of this just speaks to the brilliance of Juno.

Sometimes the movie does get bogged down by its too-witty dialogue. The characters are all way too articulate, way too funny. But the film is good. It has heart, it has characters that are not one-dimensional, and Juno is a great role model. Yes, despite the fact that she's 16 and knocked up, she is a strong female character, something that Hollywood desperately needs more of. Cody says, "I have a responsibility to write strong female characters. I'm going to continue to do it." We'll be seeing a lot more of Cody and these strong female characters; since the success of Juno, she's in hot hot demand in Hollywood at the moment. Once the strike is over, she's set to continue working on Jennifer's Body, a horror comedy, and The United States of Tara, a Showtime series produced by Steven Spielberg.