The Juno writer has met a backlash with her Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried-starring teen horror Jennifer’s Body. “I gotta say, I felt plain on that set,” she admits

Diablo Cody, legs tucked daintily beneath her on the sofa in a hotel facing the Pacific Ocean, and clutching a cup of coffee, is talking about how celebrity makes some people crazy and mean.

“There are some people out there who think that I’m repulsive, that I’m not even human. This guy said, if he had a choice between having sex with me and cutting his dick off, then he’d cut his own dick off. And I was like, first of all I think you’re lying. But second, if he is telling the truth, then that says something pretty profound … about him. I think he was exaggerating, but it’s so odd you’d ever feel the need to write such a thing in a public forum. And if he were to meet me, even for a few moments,” the one-time stripper turned screenwriter adds in a sweeter, more conciliatory tone, “perhaps he could be persuaded not to lop off his Johnson.”

In a world where men now seem ready to lop off their own Johnsons rather than have sex, Cody’s violent new high school sex comedy horror movie, Jennifer’s Body, should fit in nicely. My mind reels back to the first–wave feminism of the 70s, thinking, wasn’t lopping off Johnsons considered mere women’s work back then? Progress takes many strange forms, apparently.

‘This guy said, if he had a choice between having sex with me and cutting his dick off, then he’d cut his own dick off’

As does the backlash, which has been building since before her last movie, the indie romcom Juno, won Cody a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award, guaranteeing the enmity of the people she’d outpaced to the top.

“I had been experiencing a backlash on a grass–roots level for a long time,” she says. “First I was a success in my home town, then there was a little backlash there. It happened in stages, with each new level of success. And then when you win an Oscar, it’s like a global backlash. Obviously you can’t expect everyone to like all your work, but it’s always the people who don’t like it that say it the most loudly. But on the other hand, nobody has ever said anything about me that comes anywhere near what I think about myself. None of them has ever approached my level of self–loathing, even my biggest hater!”

If we dwell on the backlash, it’s because it has become bigger news than the new movie itself, which is being reviewed within its carping context, and often unfairly. Not that a mean–spirited, vengeful backlash against a successful, genuinely witty female writer with a high public profile couldn’t have been predicted with numbing accuracy years ago.

Cody almost purrs when I tell her that Jennifer’s Body reminds me in small ways of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. Both are acid–tinged depictions of what happens when two female friends grow up and apart as high school ends and adult reality beckons. Except here one of the friends gets turned into a monstrous succubus and starts eating her way – on a monthly, and Cody affirms, not strictly LUNAR, schedule – through the full gamut of high school boy stereotypes: pierced goth kid, offensive linebacker, wannabe ladies man etc. As played by Megan Fox, several orders of magnitude of icy beauty above the mere mortals around her, Jennifer is the worst type of popular high school girl, fully aware of her newfound beauty and confident enough to brandish it like a weapon against one and all. Her best friend Anita (or “Needy” – one of Cody’s slightly too clever–clever emblematic names) Lesnicki, played by Amanda Seyfried of Big Love, Veronica Mars and Mamma Mia!, has known her since they were three (“Sandbox love never dies,” she notes in voiceover), and acts as her sounding board, agony aunt and punching bag without complaint.

Things change when Jennifer pressures Needy to attend a local show with indie band Low Shoulder, led by Adam Brody of The OC (always more fun to watch when he’s being a dick and a villain). The venue burns down, killing scores of people but the pair escape, with Jennifer taking an ill–advised ride in the band’s makeout mobile. Later that night she shows up at Needy’s house covered in gallons of blood and vomiting horrible oil–black sludge in copious amounts.

Cue the metaphorical version of the female high school experience, some of it obvious, all of it fun: Jennifer the literal maneater – and her monthlies really are murder; the voraciousness of a young women’s newly-discovered sexual/bloodletting appetites and the utter inability of the men around her to quench them. And then there’s the way Needy figures out what’s happened to Jennifer – by feminine intuition! Best plot device ever, it saves a ton of exposition.

‘There’s a dark component to being a teenage girl, because overnight you have this power’

“My high school experience was a lot more like Juno than Jennifer, obviously,” says Cody. “I hung out with a group of pretty inoffensive kids, playing musical instruments, having fun and moving furniture around the neighbourhood.

“But there’s a dark component to being a teenage girl, because overnight you have this power. It was so strange to me. I’d always been … I don’t wanna say this ‘weird kid’ … reading books and so on. Then as a teenager, suddenly guys are paying attention, construction workers are whistling at you. And your mom isn’t letting you out of the house in those shorts. It’s like you’ve mutated and suddenly you have a totally different skill set. That power can corrupt you. For me, I went wild. I couldn’t believe my luck. ‘Oooh, I’m in control now, I can have a boyfriend, I can smoke, I can wear a BRA!’ It was all so exciting. I was born to be a teenager, I’m still ready to be one now, and I’m 31 years old. I was obsessed with being a teenager and I’m still obsessed with teenagers. To me it’s the most heightened bizarre time in a person’s life. It’s like you’re a werewolf or a vampire and always changing. There is something horrible and fascinating about girls going through puberty and adolescence. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Virgin Suicides … I really liked that movie and I remember when I was writing this that I wanted to catch that same strange, ominous feeling that it captures about being a teenager.

“At the time I wrote the movie, I was feeling kinda dark, feeling maybe that I was turning into somebody I didn’t like. I had become really driven, and I realised that I had a chance at a career as a writer, so it brought out this desperation in me, gave me some teeth. Part of me was trying to suppress that instinct and be the kind of laidback down–to–earth midwesterner that I really am. And part of me was like ‘NO! We’re gonna make this happen!’ I was being pulled in two different directions, and it felt like it made sense to write a horror movie.”

You have to love a parallel universe where blonde starlet Amanda Seyfried plays the plain–Jane role, I offer.

“I know, and I really had to fight for Amanda Seyfried’s glasses! I said to them, ‘I don’t think the glasses are going to dim her beauty.’ I gotta say I felt very plain on that set.”

The Funny People star has signed to play both siblings in a ‘romantic comedy’

Humpty Dumpty is already on his way to the big screen, in the form of a 3D horror movie planned for release next year. Now it looks like Jack and Jill are set to follow him into multiplexes, with Adam Sandler signing up to play both characters – now twin siblings – in a new romantic comedy.

Variety reports that Jack and Jill will be penned by Steve Koren, an erstwhile Saturday Night Live performer who worked with Sandler during the comic’s own time on the US TV institution.

It’s not known whether the film will have any connection to the traditional nursery rhyme, whose roots arguably lie in 18th-century French history: “Jack” can be read as code for King Louis XVI, who was guillotined (lost his crown), and was followed by his queen, Marie Antoinette, “who came tumbling after”.

Sandler will next be seen in cinemas in Dennis Dugan’s high-school reunion comedy Grown Ups, alongside Salma Hayek and Steve Buscemi, which opens in the US next June. Jack and Jill is planned for release in early 2011.

Ricky Gervais skips down the tightrope between industry satire and mainstream humour with a deftness few MCs can manage. So he’s an inspired choice to host next year’s Golden Globes – as these clips show

The announcement that Ricky Gervais will host next year’s Golden Globe award ceremony – the first time they have had a single MC, rather than rolling presenters, since 1995 – is a triumphant homecoming of sorts. It was victory there that marked The Office’s and Gervais’s own coming-out onto the world entertainment stage, and set the template for the irreverent approach to award ceremonies in which he has delighted ever since.

In 2004, when The Office was nominated for a Golden Globe for best comedy series and Gervais nominated for best TV comedy actor, the nods were unexpected: for all its recognition in the UK, the series was hardly user-friendly by US TV standards and had only been seen on the niche channel BBC America. Expectations were accordingly low: in the DVD featurette about the cast and crew’s trip to Los Angeles for the awards, Gervais is seen insisting ahead of time that they have “no chance”, which seemed reasonable enough given that the competition included Will & Grace, Arrested Development and Sex and the City.

They won both categories but did indeed present an unusual sight on a stage dominated by Hollywood icons: leads Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis flanked by pudgy Gervais, lanky Stephen Merchant and producer Ash Atalla, a diminutive Asian chap in a wheelchair. If Gervais felt out of his depth, he didn’t show it. “I’m not from these parts,” he smirked at the largely baffled audience. “I’m from a little place called England. We used to run the world before you.” Any whisper of conspicuous humility, Hollywood-style, went out the window when he picked up his second, individual gong. “Two! Bookends. Excellent. You need the set.”

Since then, Gervais has missed few opportunities to use his American awards – he also won Emmys in 2006 and 2007 – as sticks to beat their British counterparts. When Merchant won the Best Comedy Actor award for his role in Extras at the 2006 British Comedy Awards, Gervais butted into the ceremony via satellite link from New York to congratulate his collaborator on what must seem like an honour.

“Not to me,” he added. “I’ve won American ones. But to people in that room, this is probably the highlight of their career…Enjoy the night there with the cream of British comedy. I’m off to have dinner with Jerry Seinfeld and Ben Stiller. That’s true.” A couple of years later, he again appeared via video link at the Comedy Awards, accepting an award by shrugging that to go in person would be “beneath me, to be honest. I’ve won Golden Globes and Emmys.”

Not that Gervais has shown much inclination to take US award ceremonies much more seriously since becoming a staple over there. Presenting a gong at this year’s Emmys, he ribbed the audience by noting that “the thing about the Oscars and the Golden Globes [is] they’ve got film stars there with their jawlines and chiselled looks, making me feel bad. In this room – I’m not being funny – I’m probably above average.” He also emphasised his happiness to make industry in-jokes, making a quip about syndication practices then commenting that it was a “joke just for the 5000 people in this room, not for the 5000 people watching at home.”

He has also made great play of the debt Steve Carell supposedly owes him for starring in the US version of The Office. At the 2007 Emmys, Gervais won the award for lead actor in a comedy series for Extras. In his absence, Carell, who had also been nominated, bounded on stage with conspicuous joy to accept the gong instead. The following year, Gervais, presenting an award, milked the bit to great applause when he confronted Carell and, eventually, retrieved the award.

It was during that exchange that Gervais hit on what, one presumes, award-show organisers like about him. “I’ve gone off-road,” he giggled. “Everyone’s getting nervous now, there’s nothing on the autocue, I could do anything. This is live.”

He also seemed to go “off-road” at this year’s Globes, when he referred from the stage to Kate Winslet’s cameo some years before in Extras. Playing herself, she appeared in a fictitious Second World War movie on the assumption that it would lead to award-season glory. “Well done, Winslet, I told you,” Gervais said from the stage at the Beverly Hilton, where she had won a Best Actress Globe for her part as a former Nazi camp guard in The Reader. “Do a Holocaust movie and the awards come. Didn’t I? Trouble is with Holocaust films, there’s never any gag reel on the DVDs …”

When Gervais takes to the stage next year, then, he’ll be on familiar ground, expected to dish up a little risqué humour without derailing proceedings. Here’s hoping he rewards those expectations. After their victory in 2004, Stephen Merchant noted of the Golden Globe that “it’s such a badly designed award … it looks like something you’d win at a judo tournament.” Gervais countered that “it is good for shoving up your arse.” Even from an unconventional host, that might be a bit much.

Vulgar, pointless, unfunny comedy produced by Will Ferrell about a team of ruthless hustlers called in to save a Californian used car firm from extinction. They’re salesmen whose deaths even the compassionate Arthur Miller would greet with equanimity.

Vulgar, pointless, unfunny comedy produced by Will Ferrell about a team of ruthless hustlers called in to save a Californian used car firm from extinction. They’re salesmen whose deaths even the compassionate Arthur Miller would greet with equanimity.

This crass fratboy comedy could face an icy reception but there are laughs, writes Peter Bradshaw

Jeremy Piven’s monster popularity in TV’s Entourage has cleared the way for a leading role in this fratboy comedy in the Anchorman mould. He plays the standard-issue lovable/obnoxious guy, Don Ready, a legendary freelance car salesman who rides into town to help ailing local dealerships with his hardball selling techniques and badass non-PC attitudes. Rabbit Angstrom he ain’t. This film is so crass and so lowbrow its hairline is level with the carpet underlay. And yet, and yet, I must hang my head and confess I did laugh a fair bit, particularly at Will Ferrell’s flashback-cameo as Don’s partner McDermott, who died in a freak car-salesman accident for which Don still blames himself. McDermott sky-dived into a car-lot as a stunt, dressed as Abraham Lincoln in a stovepipe hat shouting: “I freed the slaves; now I’m freeing you from the slavery of high car prices!” Due to his knapsack being accidentally packed with sex toys instead of a parachute, the event was disastrous. For some UK critics, this comedy appeared to land just as heavily. I fear there will be some icy notices. But there are laughs and it’s a reasonable DVD rental.

Mother Teresa, Sarah Palin and Oprah’s Dr Phil – Suzi Yoonessi traces the ancestry of her Alaska-set feature, showing at the London film festival from 25 October

Any movie in which two or more American couples go on holiday together is unfunny, embarrassingly sentimental or both. In this ripe example, four couples leave wintry Chicago to spend a week at an idyllic resort in French Polynesia, expecting to have sex, lounge on the beach and water-ski. Instead, they’re forced into regimented couple therapy by French spiritual guru Jean Reno, from which they all emerge happily readjusted to middle-class married life. The two leading actors, Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, wrote the witless script, so have only themselves to blame. It left me feeling in need of a sauna and a Marx Brothers DVD.

In the 1970s, Stuart Hample was a struggling cartoonist. Then he hit on the idea of turning the angst-ridden life of his favourite standup comedian, Woody Allen, into a comic strip

In the early 1960s, I saw Woody Allen perform, sometimes for no pay, at comedy clubs in Greenwich Village – the Bitter End, Upstairs at the Duplex – on occasion falling flat. There was the night he got no laughs. Working for no money, or maybe 50 bucks, and not a single laugh. None (except from me at the rear of the room). The material, of course, was singularly original, luminously funny.

Afterwards, in the dressing room, Woody was despondent. His manager, Jack Rollins, lit up a cigar and said: “What went wrong, Wood?” “The audience was hostile,” Woody said. Rollins exhaled thoughtfully. “An audience has to like you, to connect with you emotionally before they’ll laugh at your jokes. They sensed that you were fighting them.” He bit off a speck of cigar leaf and continued: “Could you come out and do your act, just for yourself, regardless of whether you get laughs or not?” Woody wasn’t sure. Jack urged him to try it for at least 20 performances.

Fast forward to 1975, a pretty good year. President Nixon was gone. The US pulled out of Vietnam. Charlie Chaplin was knighted. I sold a comic strip called Rich and Famous. But Rich and Famous failed to make me either of those things. I turned out the strip at night; by day, I ground out TV commercials for a cigarette brand furtively peddling cancer. My dream was to find another way of putting food on the table.

I had a lightbulb epiphany. It occurred to me that Woody might make a terrific comic strip. But how would he – 39 and by now wildly successful – react? I ran a test scene in my head. Me: ”Woody, I have an idea for a comic strip based on you. Possible?” Woody: “Sorry. Up to my neck writing a movie, editing another movie. Writing a piece for the New Yorker. Don’t need the money. Try me next year.”

So I asked him in person. Woody was intrigued enough to say: “Show me some sketches.” I based my drawings on how he looked in his late 20s, when we’d first met. He OK’d the Woody cartoon character (he even had it animated for a sequence in Annie Hall) and said: “What about the jokes?” I brought jokes. He looked through them. “Maybe,” he said, “I could help you with the jokes.”

Assuming he was offering to write them, I wanted to shout: “My saviour!” Instead, I said: “OK.” Which was more appropriate, since his help turned out to be dozens of pages of jokes from his standup years. Some were mere shards, such as “tied me to Jewish star – uncomfortable crucifixion”. Others were even more minimal: “bull fighting”, “astrology” (Woody occasionally translated these hieroglyphs).

Angst-ridden, flawed and fearful

But there were longer notations: “Sketch – man breaking up with female ape after his evolution.” And there were little playlets: “Freud could not order blintzes. He was ashamed to say the word. He’d go into an appetiser store and say, ‘Let me have some of those crepes with cheese in the middle.’ And the grocer would say, ‘Do you mean blintzes, Herr Professor?’ And Freud would turn all red and run out through the streets of Vienna, his cape flying. Furious, he founded psychoanalysis and made sure it wouldn’t work.”

A newspaper syndicate agreed to publish the feature. They requested six weeks of sample strips. I went each Saturday to Woody’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, where he judged the material and offered suggestions on how to develop characters and pace gags, and pleaded with me to maintain high standards. On 4 October 1976, the strip was launched. Woody, the pen-and-ink protagonist, was angst-ridden, flawed, fearful, insecure, inadequate, pessimistic, urban, single, lustful, rejected by women. He was cowed by mechanical objects, and a touch misanthropic. He was also at odds with his antagonistic parents; committed his existential panic to a journal; had regular sessions with his passive-aggressive psychotherapist; was threatened by large, often armed, men; and employed his modest size to communicate physical impotence the way Chaplin, in the guise of the Little Tramp, suffered humiliation.

I often wondered why Woody gave the concept a green light. In 1977, he related the following anecdote. He had cast the actress Mary Beth Hurt in his movie Interiors. Hurt regularly phoned her mother in Iowa to reassure her that she was safe and happy. During one of those calls, she proudly announced that she was going to play Diane Keaton’s sister in a movie “by somebody you probably haven’t heard of, a director named Woody Allen”. “I know about him,” said her mother, “he’s in the funny pages.” Woody’s manager figured it was no bad thing if his image was disseminated daily out in the heartland.

I took on a handful of writers. The star was David Weinberger, a brilliant 26-year-old PhD student in philosophy, who submitted some jokes out of the blue and won instant praise from Woody. Like all new strips, we lost a few newspapers along the way. The folks at the syndicate became nervous. I started receiving notes of caution: go easy on God references so we don’t offend Bible Belt readers; don’t do gags with Woody in nightclubs – they compare unfavourably with his live performances; change the name of your character Death to Fate. (Woody said: “Better to call him Death. A character named Death can be quite funny. You have to take some chances. It’ll be more alive if you use Death. Besides, you don’t want just another strip that succeeds, do you?”)

Woody always envisaged I’d give him a wisecracking, zeitgeisty cartoon that would deal with relationships, politics, social commentary. He wanted his strip to be amusing but also intelligent. But the anxious syndicate honchos demanded more gags and subjects accessible to the largest possible readership. Woody’s response was that an artist has to follow his own intuition, rather than obey some huckster driven by readership surveys.

This is borne out by my notes from a meeting with Woody, during which he said: “We will gain more than we will lose by establishing an identity; my tendency would be to risk being more offensive. I always believe that if I love a thing, 90% of the time there will be some people out there who also like it.”

Woody’s scribblings to me on the strips I sent for his approval offered suggestions: “The key is developing people. They must have desires – goals – so we are interested in them. I still feel you must be daring. The strip can probably exist on the level of ‘cute’ little jokes each day, but if you really want to involve the readers, it needs more substance – more plot.”

Another Woody reminder: “We need more strips I’m not in. My folks. My lovers.” And another: “We must not just use jokes that exploit my image – jokes should have genuine insights. Don’t pander. Don’t be afraid to be far out. Lead your audience; don’t look to them to lead you.”

And: “Need more character engagement – instead of jokes being free-floating, they must be jokes on the way to character development. Jokes are like the decorations on the Christmas tree – but it’s a beautiful tree you need to start with. Only then can you hang baubles on it. (Sorry for the disgusting metaphor.)

“Please don’t make me so masochistic. I’m not in life. Trying and failing is funny. Masochism is not.”

Meanwhile, the executives continued to fire off cautionary messages: aim at the broad base; the strip is too philosophical; let’s not have such an emphasis on therapy jokes. When the director of sales told me we had lost a paper in California because the editor felt the strip dealt too much with rejection, disappointment, and sometimes even God, Woody said: “I take that as a compliment. What’s the worst thing that can happen? So they’ll cancel the strip.”

Off to the therapist with Woody

Equilibrium returned periodically, courtesy of Woody’s steadfast sense of irony. One Saturday, he said: “I’m getting a ride to my therapist’s. If you want to come along, I’ll have my guy take you home.” We climbed into a waiting car. I noticed the ubiquitous floppy fedora he wore to conceal his identity, resting on the armrest. After a 10-minute drive, the car rolled down Fifth Avenue to a sleek apartment building and pulled to a stop. The sidewalk was empty. Woody sat unmoving, chatting amiably. But then, when a gaggle of pedestrians appeared, he jammed the protective hat on his head and dashed into the building.

A few days later, I drew this sequence in a strip. In the last drawing, Woody lies on the couch, having escaped the crowds, and complains to his therapist: “I’m so lonely. Nobody talks to me.” When Woody came upon it, he simply said: “Very perceptive.”

Working with Woody was smooth sailing: he was modest, efficient, dependable, focused, loyal, generous, incisive, serious, and witty. But quietly so. Even when an archetypal Allen quip slips out, there are no eye-rolls, no grandstanding, no bada-boom. He doesn’t hang out with comics, he doesn’t seek the limelight at awards shows, he doesn’t demand his name above the title. He also has incredibly clean hands.

Woody’s DNA is here and there in the strip, but he did not write it. If he had, it probably would have had a smaller audience – but it would have been a hell of a lot funnier.

This is an edited extract from Dread and Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip, published by Abrams on 2 November at £19.99. To order a copy for £18.99 (free UK p&p), go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

Any movie in which two or more American couples go on holiday together is unfunny, embarrassingly sentimental or both. In this ripe example, four couples leave wintry Chicago to spend a week at an idyllic resort in French Polynesia, expecting to have sex, lounge on the beach and water-ski. Instead, they’re forced into regimented couple therapy by French spiritual guru Jean Reno, from which they all emerge happily readjusted to middle-class married life. The two leading actors, Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, wrote the witless script, so have only themselves to blame. It left me feeling in need of a sauna and a Marx Brothers DVD.