Diablo Cody

Early life and career

Cody and her older brother Marc were born and raised in Lemont, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She is the daughter of Pam and Greg Busey. Her mother is of Italian descent and her father is of British ancestry. Cody was raised Catholic and attended Benet Academy, a Roman Catholic school in Lisle, Illinois. She took the pen name Diablo Cody (diablo is Spanish for "devil") after repeatedly listening to the song "El Diablo" by Arcadia.while passing through Cody, Wyoming. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a media studies degree. While at the University of Iowa, she worked in the acquisitions department in the main university library. Her first jobs were doing secretarial work at a Chicago law firm and later proofreading copy for advertisements that played on Twin Cities radio stations.

Cody began a parody blog called Red Secretary, detailing the (fictional) exploits of a secretary living in Belarus. The events were thinly-veiled allegories for events that happened in Cody's real life, but told from the perspective of a disgruntled, English-idiom-challenged Eastern Bloc girl.

Her first bona fide blog appeared under the nickname Darling Girl after she had moved from Chicago to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Stripping and journalism

On a whim, Cody signed up for amateur night at a Minneapolis strip club called the Skyway Lounge. Having enjoyed the experience, she eventually quit her day job to become a full-time feminist stripper. Cody also spent time working peep shows at Sex World, a Minneapolis adult novelty and DVD store.

While still stripping, Cody began writing for City Pages, an alternative Twin Cities weekly newspaper. She left City Pages just before it changed editorial hands, and has since written for the now-defunct Jane magazine. In December 2007, Cody began writing a column for the magazine Entertainment Weekly.

At the age of 27, Cody wrote her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. The memoir began after Mason Novick, who would soon become Cody's manager, showed interest in her sharp and sarcastic voice. Based on the popularity "The Pussy Ranch" had received, he was able to secure her a publishing contract with Gotham Books.

Screenwriting

After completion of her book, Cody was encouraged by Mason Novick to write her first screenplay. Within months she wrote Juno, a coming-of-age story about a teenager's unplanned pregnancy. The Jason Reitman-directed comedy stars Ellen Page and Michael Cera.

In July 2007, Showtime announced that it would be producing a pilot of Cody's DreamWorks television series, United States of Tara. Based on an idea by Steven Spielberg, Tara is a comedy about a mother with dissociative identity disorder, starring Toni Collette. The series began filming in Spring 2008, and premiered on January 18, 2009.

In October 2007, Cody sold a script titled Girly Style to Universal Studios, and a horror script called Jennifer's Body to Fox Atomic. Released on September 18, 2009, Jennifer's Body starred Megan Fox as the title character and Amanda Seyfried as the supporting character. She revised writer-director Steven Antin's script for his musical film Burlesque.

Cody is a friend of screenwriters Dana Fox (What Happens in Vegas, Couples Retreat) and Lorene Scafaria (Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist) and they often write their screenplays together in order to get advice from one another.

Cody made a small cameo appearance as herself in the U.S. broadcast television series 90210 (2008). She appeared in the same episode that marked the return of Tori Spelling as Donna Martin, in which Cody needed Spelling's character to make a dress for a red carpet event.

In 2009, Cody signed on to script and produce a film adaptation of the Sweet Valley High Young Adult book series. In 2011, she was brought in to revise first-time feature director Fede Alvarez's script for the remake of Sam Raimi's 1980s horror film The Evil Dead.

Since October, 2011, Cody has hosted an online celebrity interview program called "Red Band Trailer," on the broadband channel, L-studio. She originally launched the series privately on YouTube in summer 2010, and the Lexus channel picked it up the following year.

On the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, on February 24, 2012, she said her next project would be directing her first film, which is about a young woman who abandons religion after surviving a plane crash. In February 2013, she said that the film is called Paradise (firstly known as Lamb of God). Julianne Hough, Holly Hunter, Octavia Spencer and Russell Brand are in the cast. Mandate Pictures produced it.

Cody is the spokesperson of Barnard College's Athena Film Festival.

Projects

In May 2013, it was announced that Cody will host her own talk show, Me Time with Diablo Cody, at TBS. The program will tailor "around Diablo’s unique perspective on all things pop culture and told in her very own tongue-in-cheek way," and "reveal a side of Hollywood and celebs that the public very rarely gets to see." Steve Agee will be presenting and writing with her as well. Cody is also a producer, alongside Mark Cronin and Courtland Cox. The pilot of the talk show is in works.

She is currently developing a teen-drama TV series with Josh Schwartz for Fox called Prodigy. According to The Hollywood Reporter, it is about "a 16-year-old genius who through home schooling has been isolated from her peers. Hoping to experience a “normal” teen social life before she enters the adult world of academia, she enrolls in her local high school. Her experiment goes off the rails when she finds herself adopted by a wild crowd, getting caught up in a whirlwind of romance and crime." Cody is also linked to Warner Bros. Television's romantic comedy Alex +Amy.

Personal life

In her book, she wrote fondly of her boyfriend "Jonny" (musician Jon Hunt of Minneapolis psych-folk band, Lovely Dark). They were married from 2004 until 2007, during which time she was known in personal life as Brook Busey-Hunt.

On April 6, 2010, Cody announced that she was expecting her first child with her husband Dan Maurio, who worked on Chelsea Lately, on which Cody also appeared frequently as a "roundtable" guest. The couple married in the summer of 2009. Their son was born in 2010. Cody had her second child in 2012.

As of 2008, Cody resides in Los Angeles.

Nominations and awards

Juno was runner-up for the Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award, won second prize at the Rome Film Festival, and earned four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. Cody herself won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for her debut script, which also picked up a Golden Globe nomination and an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. She also won screenplay honors from BAFTA, the Writers Guild of America, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, the Satellite Awards, and the 2008 Cinema for Peace Award for Most Valuable Work of Director, Producer & Screenwriter (which she shared with Jason Reitman, John Malkovich, Mason Novick, Russel Smith and Lianne Halfon).

For Young Adult, Cody was nominated by awards associations such as the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Writers Guild of America. With Reitman, the director, and the actors Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt, she shared the Chairman's Vanguard Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. In 2012, the Fempire, the collaboration of writers Cody, Dana Fox, Liz Meriwether, and Lorene Scafaria received the Creativity and Sisterhood Award from the Athena Film Festival for their support for one another in the competitive film industry.