Fertile Minds

by Sam Adams

If you're familiar with a certain little yellow bus, then you have some idea of the relentless energy of Fox Searchlight's marketing operation. There's no one better at taking film-festival buzz for certain high-style indies and turning it into a widespread (and yet organic-seeming) phenomenon. There's no question that Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, the director and writer of Searchlight's latest find, Juno, are grateful to be getting what Cody calls "the Little Miss Sunshine treatment." But as they sit down for an interview a few days before the movie's Philadelphia opening, it's clear the weeks of nonstop publicity have left the pair a little punchy. As they get up to speed, Reitman starts speaking in broken French to lighten the mood, and Cody dissolves in something close to genuine hysterics. A few minutes later, I mention a movie to which Juno has been constantly compared, and Cody winces, as if pained by the reference. "I'm sorry — I love Napoleon Dynamite," she says. "I just had a shooting pain in my tit."

It's not the kind of information one typically shares with a complete stranger, especially when there's a tape recorder running. But it's no surprise coming from Cody, whose sharp-witted dialogue has attracted almost as much notice as her background. As even monks in Mongolia know by now, Cody, née Brook Busey, launched her writing career with a memoir called Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unusual Stripper. The irresistible story hook — and the fact that she's shy of 30 and something of a looker — has made Cody the most-photographed writer since Quentin Tarantino. But it was her script, and not her bio, that first drew Reitman in.

"The tone was frank, it was humorous, it was warm, and it was kind of a practical point of view on the logistics of pregnancy," Reitman says. "That's what I felt the first time I read it."

Cody concedes that, in the wrong hands, her hyper-aware dialogue could have been insufferable. "If our actors had come at this with a sitcom delivery, it could have been noxious," she says.

But the movie's pitch-perfect tone has penetrated even the most well-fortified critics. Cody expresses irritation with the I-don't-usually-like-this-kind-of-thing crowd, but at the same time says, "Those are really the most valuable compliments. I love knowing we got through to people in spite of themselves."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Juno opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse. See Shaun Brady's review on p. 50.