Diablo Cody explains why she ‘sh-t the bed’ with her ‘Barbie’ script
Honest to blog, there’s a universe where Diablo Cody wrote a script for “Barbie.”
Long before Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” was even thought possible, Cody was hired to rewrite a potential Barbie movie for Sony. “Diablo’s unconventionality is just what Barbie needs,” producer Walter Parkes said in 2015. “It signals we’re going for a legitimately contemporary tone. We’re bringing her on because she had great ideas, but even more importantly, she truly loves Barbie.”
But it didn’t take long for Cody, an Oscar winner for “Juno,” to exit the project. Later that same year, the trades reported Sony had brought together three writers, including Hilary Winston, to work on separate drafts of the Barbie film. It was Winston’s work that apparently attracted Amy Schumer to star, although when her casting was announced in 2016, it was revealed Schumer and her sister Kim Caramele planned on doing their own rewrite of the material.
What happened next is the stuff of Wikipedia: Schumer dropped out in 2017 and cited scheduling conflicts. This year, however, she said the real reason was creative differences and agreed with Andy Cohen when he suggested the Sony version wasn’t necessarily going to be “feminist and cool.”
Eventually, Warner Bros. secured the Barbie rights, Margot Robbie came in as a producer and star and Gerwig stepped in to direct the feature and co-write the script with her offscreen partner, Noah Baumbach. All those other versions of “Barbie” are lost to history, including whatever Cody had planned but never finished. “I never even produced an initial draft. I failed so hard at that project,” she told ScreenCrush in 2018. “I was literally incapable of writing a Barbie script. God knows I tried.”
She added in the same interview, “Look, I think the idea of a Barbie movie is super fucking cool and I hope something goes in there and kills it. And I mean kills it in a positive way. I hope it’s a great movie is what I’m saying! Which is why I initially signed on to do it, which I think is a cool idea, especially now.”
Now, in a piece published by GQ on Friday, Cody expounded on why she wasn’t able to write a successful Barbie film. “I think I know why I shit the bed,” she said. “When I was first hired for this, I don’t think the culture had not embraced the femme or the bimbo as valid feminist archetypes yet. If you look up ‘Barbie’ on TikTok you’ll find this wonderful subculture that celebrates the feminine, but in 2014, taking this skinny blonde white doll and making her into a heroine was a tall order.”
She added that another issue was the push to make the feature more subversive or antagonistic to the foundational aspects of Barbie itself. “That idea of an anti-Barbie made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of ten years ago,” Cody said. “I didn’t really have the freedom then to write something that was faithful to the iconography; they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is.”
As it turns out, Gerwig maybe did – although reviews of “Barbie” remain under tight embargo. “I hope two things made that journey feel surprising but inevitable,” Gerwig told Rolling Stone of her film. “I started from this idea of Barbieland, this place with no death, no aging, no decay, no pain, no shame. We know the story. We’ve heard this story. This is an old story. It’s in a lot of religious literature. What happens to that person? They have to leave. And they have to confront all the things that were shielded from them in this place. So that felt like one thing.”
“Barbie” is out on July 21.
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