Hidden Valley Rant: Diablo Cody to Adapt Sweet Valley High

“Well,” I smirked to myself last week, “I guess I’m not jealous of Diablo Cody anymore.”

I had just finished watching the preview of Jennifer’s Body – Cody’s second movie since her Oscar-winning Juno. It could have been a kick-ass post-feminist Scream, but turned out to be just so much blood down the drain.

And believe me, I loooove hot, girl-versus-girl stories – from Wild Things and Poison Ivy to more obscure fare like Old Enough – and 80s TV Show “Double Trouble”.

I mention this because a couple days after I saw Cody’s film, a box arrived – the first of eight (containing books and memorabilia) that I’d shipped to LA from my hometown in New Jersey.

In this box, atop the voodoo tarot card set and art history tomes, were some two dozen candy-colored paperbacks.

These were my “Sweet Valley High“s – Francine Pascal’s fictional series about two blond, identical twins: Elizabeth (the good) and Jessica (the bad) who lived in a mythical California town.

SVH’s appeal back in the 1980s was perhaps no different than that of shows like “Laguna Beach” and “The Hills” today. It was a way for dysthymic girls with zits and worrisome vaginas to evaporate, however briefly, into a fabulous sun-splashed world of skinny, clear-skinned bikini babes and hunky boyfriends.

As recently as last month I found myself twittering about them:

“Since the studios are adapting beloved books, can we get Sweet Valley High the movie, w/ Dakota Fanning as the good twin? Bad twin hmm..? (Sep 9th).”

And now the books sit in piles on my coffee table, as I debate whether to display them on the shelf (as originally intended) or pack them away again, where they can’t remind me of the big news:

Diablo Cody is Adapting Sweet Valley High.

Welp, guess I’m jealous again! And just when I thought I’d overcome my envy of the cool-named-stripper-writing-pregnant-heroine-movie-hit-Oscar-winning-it-girl! Never mind that I never wanted to write a movie about a pregnant teen, that’s not the point!
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