Cody’s career change

What happened

Diablo Cody’s first screenplay, for the teen-pregnancy hit Juno, won her an Oscar and completed a meteoric rise to fame. Along with critical acclaim, Juno has made more than $100 million at the domestic box office, making it one of the most lucrative Oscar nominees this year. “"I want to thank my family,” Cody said at the Oscars, wearing a leopard-print shift that exposed her tattooed arm, “for loving me exactly the way I am."

What the commentators said

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Now, that was one “unlikely journey,” said Diane Garrett in Variety. The former stripper went from blogger to award-winning screenwriter in a heartbeat -- she won an Indie Spirit Award over the weekend, before the Oscars. And she has more big-time projects in the works already.

“Not long before writing ‘Juno,’” said Bill Zwecker in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Cody was a stripper in Minnesota,” with an “eclectic resume also includes being prom queen.” Admirers are hounding her for a movie about her own life, but that will have to wait until she’s finished with the horror-comedy “Jennifer’s Body,” starring Megan Fox, and the Showtime pilot she’s working on with Steven Spielberg.

To think it all started in August 2004 when a Hollywood manager-producer was “Googling profane names for the female anatomy,” said the Los Angeles Times. The producer, Mason Novick, stumbled upon the blog of a stripper named Brook Busey -- a.k.a. Diablo Cody -- and likes her writing style. She sends him an autobiographical account of her sex-industry experiences -- and that gets published -- then she sends him a script, and that wins an Oscar.