‘Difficult’ Madonna loses screenwriter
Studio executives hope that a movie about Madonna’s early career, when she arrived in New York City with $35 and struggled to make it as a dancer before emerging as a chart-topping singer, could be the next “Bohemian Rhapsody”-type blockbuster.
But Madonna’s biopic may not get made if the famously demanding pop diva can’t find a screenwriter who she feels can make the story “authentic,” according to a new report in The Sun.
And it turns out that Diablo Cody, the Academy Award-winning author of “Juno,” isn’t that screenwriter, wrote The Sun columnist Simon Boyle. Cody has quit the Universal Pictures project after finding Madonna “too difficult to work for,” The Sun reported.
Cody and Madonna “didn’t see eye-to-eye” on the film. “Madonna and Diablo spent weeks working on the screenplay and made good progress,” an insider told The Sun. “But Madonna is understandably very particular about how she wants it to be. She’s a perfectionist and because it is about her life, she is being very careful about how things come across.”
“Diablo needed more freedom to be able to make it work and ultimately decided she couldn’t contribute any more,” the insider added.
It would seem that Cody had earned such freedom. She penned other well-regarded scripts for “Young Adult” and “Tully,” directed feature films, has been a successful TV showrunner and recently earned a Tony Award nomination for her book for the musical “Jagged Little Pill.”
It sounds like a big part of the problem lies in the fact that Madonna wants to co-write the script for what in many ways is a vanity project. The once-aspiring movie star also plans to direct, a questionable proposition given that her two longago efforts as a feature-film director were commercial and critical flops.
In fact, Madonna’s 2011 film “W.E.,” about a woman’s obsession with the unhappy life of King Edward VIII’s controversial wife, Wallis Simpson, was widely panned. Critics called it “shallow,” “simpering,” “disastrous” and unlikely to help “turn Madonna’s faltering movie career.”