Diablo Cody has been kept pretty busy running her Showtime series “The United States Of Tara” but, in an interview with Vulture, the “Juno” and “Jennifer’s Body” scribe has updated us on her cinematic ventures which include a new, original film project as well as her gestating adaptation of ’80s teenage chick-lit “Sweet Valley High.”
“I’m working on a movie about a woman who’s stalking her high-school sweetheart,” Cody explains. “It has elements of humor, but it’s pretty serious and fucked up. You don’t get to see women be antiheroes that often, where it’s like somebody like Mickey Rourke, who gets a comeback in ‘The Wrestler.’ It’s rarer that you’ll have a studio say, ‘Let’s have an actress come back and be ugly!'”
Before all that, Cody has her previously announced adaptation of ’80s book franchise “Sweet Valley High” in the works which she describes as the “ultimate fantasy for a girl who grew up in a Midwestern suburb [and] grew up with those books”

”I don’t know,” Cody responds on how faithful she’ll be to the 152-plus-strong series. “It’s always the strangest question because it’s not, like, ‘Atlas Shrugged’ where people are like, ‘You must have a tremendous amount of respect for this material, you better not fuck this up.’ And yet, people have been surprisingly vocal about the fact that they don’t want me to ruin ‘Sweet Valley High.’ It’s like bubblegum, come on.”
Love her or loathe her, Cody has already led her ‘fempire’ to some success, but the critical and financial bomb of the already modestly budgeted “Jennifer’s Body” may make skittish studios wary of greenlighting the writer’s original material. So expect the wonderful world of “Sweet Valley High” to appear on screen before any female-fronted antihero pictures (no matter how potentially intriguing that sounds).
