Off the Stripper Pole and Into the Movies

SensUal Joy

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A few years ago, Brook Busey-Hunt was typing copy at a Minneapolis advertising agency and walked by the Skyway Lounge, a skeevy strip bar where desiccated women grind out a living a dollar at a time. Good Catholic girl that she was, Ms. Busey-Hunt saw an ad for amateur night and had a naughty epiphany. And the rest is, well, a stage name, a blog, a book and a screen writing career.

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Now named Diablo Cody, she wrote a screenplay that became “Juno,” a film directed by Jason Reitman set for release by Fox Searchlight on Wednesday. The story of a maniacally verbal 16-year-old girl who becomes pregnant and decides to give the baby to a childless couple, “Juno” is on most every short list for an Oscar for original screenplay.

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Sitting recently at the Rainbow, a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles draped in rock history, Ms. Cody, 29, did not pretend that her life was anything other than a fairy tale, albeit one where the role of the glass slippers is played by a pair of stripper’s stilettos.

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“You make this really unexpected, half-cocked decision and all of a sudden it creates this weird energy that turns into something else,” she said during lunch. A self-described geek who had led a very insular life, she said that getting naked for strangers was her version of self-improvement, a way of transgressing her upbringing and opening up other doors. Unlike many strippers who resemble balloon smugglers with very large hair, Ms. Cody is a crisscross of tattoos and post-punk fashion, sort of Suicide Girl meets Riot Grrrl.

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Those trips down dimly lighted runways, followed by a short stint as a phone-sex worker — “You have to convince them that your parents don’t know you are on the phone and that you are just aching to get with your physics teacher” — became an unmentionable titled blog. Mason Novick, a talent manager from Benderspink, a Los Angeles agency, came across the blog and eventually put her in touch with a New York literary agent, who sold “Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper,” which was published in 2005. Mr. Novick suggested she give screen writing a crack, and she bought a copy of the “Ghost World” screenplay so she could correctly format what became “Juno.”

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The movie has all the hallmarks of an art-house film — endlessly quirky dialogue with a soundtrack to match — but contains an old-fashioned moral center. At a time when many films about teenagers are a mess of machinations and hookups, “Juno” ends in a very tender hug.

Ellen Page, the young Canadian actress who starred in “Hard Candy,” plays Juno, a teenager who can’t get through a sentence without coining a metaphor. Juno becomes pregnant after a single sexual experiment born of ennui and friendship, and proceeds to waddle her increasing heft through the rest of the film while using her mouth as a plaything and weapon.

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In one instance she turns it on Michael Cera (from “Superbad”), who plays her so-geeky-he’s-sweet boyfriend. When she finds out he is going to the prom with a girl he admits “smells like soup,” she is livid and trapped. “I am wearing a fat suit I can’t take off. I am a planet,” Juno says, a huge belly protruding under her vintage T-shirt.

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Apart from the pregnancy, the character is heavily autobiographical, with her thrift-store fashions and kitschy taste; Ms. Cody’s beloved hamburger phone gets a cameo. And like Juno, Ms. Cody has an ability to capture the human transaction between genders and generations. In Ms. Cody’s case, she understands the nature of the compact between the demanding lout with a dollar in his hand and his objectified temporary fantasy. Stripping, she wrote in her memoir, required her to “bounce like the phantom cheerleader in the vault of every man’s memory.”

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Ms. Cody smiles plenty, but she is all done preening for the benefit of others. She now prefers creating characters on the page as opposed to the stage. Especially after her first script fell into such eager, talented hands.

Her new life may not always be so sweet, but the work is plentiful. Her future includes another book; a pilot for a series about a woman with multiple personalities called “The United States of Tara,” which was conceived by Steven Spielberg for Showtime; and several more features. (The Hollywood writers’ strike, however, has put a temporary hold on her movie and television work.)

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“I have never been an ambitious person, and my participation in this industry is a fluke, but only male writers can afford to be coy and self-deprecating,” she said, her hand absently stroking a Hello Kitty necklace. (“Tarina Tarantino. I bought it for $75 at a trashy mall in the Valley. I bought $220 jeans that same day and my cheeks burned with shame.”)

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“I plan on hanging on to my soul, but I am not precious about writing,” she added. “I am here to work and make money.”

Mr. Reitman said Ms. Cody would do just fine in Hollywood.

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“Just look at the name she chose for herself,” he said. “Yes, this is a fairy tale, but she is going to jump on every opportunity that comes her way. Her writing is both original and real, which is very rare in Hollywood.”

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The blow back from such immediate success did not take long to materialize, including a suggestion by Rob Nelson, a hometown film critic who once edited her newspaper work, that she is a self-conjured confection. “It’s as if the kid wrote her own Wikipedia entry before living it,” he wrote in The Rake, a Minneapolis monthly.

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While Ms. Cody said she was enjoying the success of “Juno,” the criticism can sting. “Stripping toughened my hide,” she said, “but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal.”

Her hair may be a riot of colors — red is usually featured, but it can change almost depending on her mood — and she may have once made a living letting it fall in the faces of her lap-dance clients. But Ms. Cody has mastered the fan dancer’s art of showing much and revealing little.

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“I’m totally a person who hides in plain sight,” she said. “I think there’s a lot written about me being totally candid and outrageous, when I’m actually pretty cagey.”

Part of the mystique came from an appearance promoting her book on “Late Show With David Letterman,” during which she referred to herself as the “naked Margaret Mead.” She went on to assert, “Everything is prostitution in a way.”

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As with her history as a do-me feminist, she makes no apologies for what she said. “I actually think everything is prostitution. We’re kind of constantly bartering with our dignity in life,” she wrote in an e-mail message after the lunch, adding that she always thought it was hilarious when strippers would draw the line at certain activities. “Same goes for people’s ideas, talents, emotions, etc. There’s a price on everything.”

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Michael Tortorello, who edited her when she brought her blog and writing to City Pages, an alternative paper in Minneapolis, senses a mixture of honesty and artifice in her transformation from Brook to Diablo.

“My impression is that once she started blogging and writing, it was if somebody popped a cork on a Champagne bottle and it has not stopped overflowing since,” Mr. Tortorello said. “She is a sweet and honest person, but there is also a mythology, a kind of self-invention by someone who grew up in suburban Chicago.”

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Ms. Cody, who just moved to Los Angeles with her husband, Jonny, a graphic designer, has ambitions beyond writing. She said she would like to direct at some point, partly because she loathes the way women are portrayed in most contemporary films.

“The attitude toward women in this industry is nauseating,” she said. “There are all sorts of porcine executives who are uncomfortable with a woman doing anything subversive. They want the movie about the beautiful girl who trip and falls, the adorable klutz.”

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Ms. Cody, who said she was less than graceful when she first went to work as a stripper, has her boots pretty firmly planted on the ineffable terrain of Hollywood.

“Obviously this is a very image-conscious industry, and I have mine to contend with,” she said. “I answer a lot of questions in meetings here other people probably aren’t asked.

“I show a little leg. But of course I am speaking metaphorically.”

Source – David Carr

The New York Time Movies

Joy says – The review totally intrigues me. What a refreshing angle! I can’t wait to watch the movie!

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The Future of Pole Dancing … No Longer in Shadowy Men’s Clubs?

SensUal Joy

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In popular perception, pole dancing is almost impossible to remove from the context of a gentlemen’s club, where it is performed for the titillation and arousal of .. well, now that investment bankers and their clients can get into trouble for going to them, most classes of well-heeled (and often distinctly not-so-well-heeled) men. However, signs exist that this is changing, and that pole dancing will continue to make inroads into the mainstream. Questions remain however as to what form that will take …

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Pole dancing and its antecedents are wide and varied. The two that most readily spring to mind are Maypole dancing, which by some accounts has its origins as a pagan fertility ritual, and Chinese pole, which appears to be approximately two thousand years old, and is the basis for acrobatic performances by highly trained artists. Both have by now largely shed any overtones of the sexually risque, with one regarded as a charming eccentricity and the other a display of athletic prowess. They contain interesting clues as to the ultimate fate of the pole dancing genre.

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Modern pole dancing – popularly understood to have originated in Canada – has morphed in the two or more decades since its inception into several distinct forms: the original form, which is largely performed in gentlemen’s clubs, remains a vehicle to entice men to either tip or to agree to a lap dance. It is overtly about seduction although it appears to have become more acrobatic (a bit of an arms race – literally – in the genre). However, what practitioners call “pole-styling” appears to be more important than the ability to perform difficult physical maneuvers. While the ability to preen seductively using the prop as prop is important here, it is not likely to be where the genre is going.

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The pole fitness movement, which gains in respectability daily, is probably the other most publicized context into which this form has entered the popular consciousness. Practitioners laud the physical benefits of this activity, as well as the physiological benefits. Detractors point out that the benefits from this may be had by less controversial forms of exercise. Whether or not pole fitness is going to be around is no longer at issue… its continued ability to attract paying customers should ensure that in some form or another, it will survive. Soccer mums will soon be hitting the pole for the day’s aerobics after dropping off their brats; it’s probably already happening.

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Pole dancing competitions now abound, and it is here that pole dancing is gaining grounds as a performance art. Owing allegiance to no formal rules (girl, pole, you’re there!), competitive pole dancing appears to draw inspiration from ballet, Chinese pole, and gymnastics, and has moved to a place where overt sexuality appears to have little role to play. The undeniable athleticism and grace of its most skilled proponents elevates it to an art form, albeit a controversial and frankly surprising one.

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In dance clubs, pole dancing performances remain popular, and while some of these performances retain elements of burlesque and the gentlemen’s club, dancers are pushing the boundaries, with the same fusion of different schools and philosophies of dance and acrobatics which have appeared in pole dancing competitions. That the arena of the competition and that of the dance club will cross-pollinate is certain.

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The conclusion one arrives at – very gingerly, because the history books on this are yet to be written, if at all – is that pole dancing will move increasingly out of gentlemen’s clubs, and into the world of popular dance clubs, will move increasingly onto the competition stage (don’t hold your breath for pole dancing as an Olympics event, although the ancient Greeks would probably have approved), will colonize the fitness clubs and gymnasiums of the future, and gain acceptance as a legitimate performance art genre.

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As a true and old school aficionado of the burlesque and the older form of pole dancing, I sigh wistfully, order another whiskey and soda, relight my (by now) extinguished cigar, and settle down to watch another pole dance in my gentlemen’s club, lamenting its emergence from the shadows. I wonder if I should get a lap dance…

-Changeling

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p.s. Send a blank email to loveprogram@getresponse.com for your complimentary one week coaching program with inspiration stories from your favorite female celebrities such as Kylie Minogue and Madonna - Jumpstart your Happy, Healthy and SensUal life today!

p.s.s. Love Kitten Bootcamp Live! (Love Program Beginners Part I) 7th June 1pm Sat is OPEN FOR BOOKING NOW.

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