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''This is pathetic that you can't find a frickin' bar open in the afternoon,'' says Cody, sweating on the sidewalk. ''Sir, we're on a sad quest for alcohol,'' she tells a grizzled old man in Levi's. He points her down a back road, and 10 minutes later, she swings open an unmarked door and enters a pit of darkness that smells strongly of disinfectant and rancid beer. The leathery woman behind the bar examines Cody's license. ''You're the second Gemini today,'' she tells her, then returns to her conversation with one of Ye Rustic Inn's regulars: ''...Anyways, I drink a lot of Wild Turkey. That is my thing.''
''This looks exactly like my parents' old restaurant,'' says Cody happily, sliding into a cracked round burgundy booth beneath cloudy stained-glass windows. ''They owned a German-themed supper club called the Matterhorn with moose heads on the walls and live entertainment — as in a guy with an organ singing 'Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.'''
She slides the wide left leg of her jeans up to her thigh to show off a large pinup-babe tattoo. She has ''Jonny's Girl'' inked on her right tricep, and the word yes on her left wrist (which she got in response to Jonny's marriage proposal). On her rump there's a little fairy sitting on a moon sprinkling pink dust. ''Which was cute, I thought, when I was young,'' she says. ''If you want to know who I was at 18, you look at my left butt cheek.''
If you need more personal insight than a Tinker Bell tattoo, you'll find it in Juno. Like her character, Cody was best friends with a sexy cheerleader. She dated a boy exactly like Cera's sweetly vulnerable Paulie Bleeker (although she didn't actually get pregnant). And she talked for hours each night on a hamburger phone. ''My mom started to cry when the hamburger phone appeared on screen,'' says Cody. ''When we started filming, Fox Searchlight bought everybody hamburger phones as a welcome gift. So now my stepdaughter has one and thinks it's the coolest thing ever.'' (Jonny's 8-year-old daughter, fondly referred to as ''Peanut'' throughout Candy Girl, has bonded with Cody over their mutual love of America's Next Top Model.)
''I think teenage girls deserve a better shake in cinema,'' she says, pointing to My So-Called Life's Angela Chase as the rare female character in pop culture she'd actually want as a friend. ''God knows people might say the dialogue in Juno is too stylized, but I've met so many hyperarticulate teenage girls who are not just shallow and image-obsessed.'' Because scripts get passed around, screenwriters can be acclaimed long before anyone has actually seen their movies. With buzz for Juno building, Cody has found herself a hero among young Hollywood women desperate to play something besides arm candy. ''I never get to meet with male actors because they don't need me,'' she says. ''But actresses? Constantly.''
And because she is the new broad in town, studios are sending her any and all projects that star a woman. ''If there's a female protagonist or a romance, they just assume it's up my alley. What, because I have a vagina?'' Cody's taste runs more toward movies like Rosemary's Baby and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (she props a Spicoli black-and-white-checked sneaker onto the booth as evidence of her devotion), or sharply funny TV like Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. ''God, I would slit my wrists to meet Judd Apatow.''
After Cody saw Superbad, she immediately went home and started writing a female response to the teen comedy, which Universal promptly snatched up. Girly Style, named after the wuss version of push-ups, tells the story of some nerdy college women. Cody has two other scripts in development as well: Time and a Half, a satire about the cult of modern-day hipsters, and a horror movie about a girl who eats boys. ''It's Juno but with cannibalism and evisceration,'' she explains. One day soon, she hopes to direct. ''If I were a dude, I don't know that I'd be so eager,'' she admits. ''But I feel like I have a responsibility to try because there's such a paucity of female directors. There are worse things you can do in life than direct a bad movie.''
NEXT PAGE: ''Oh, and here's something awesome about Lance Bass: When you go into his bathroom, he has the MTV Moonman award holding his toilet paper.''
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