Juno MacGuff is 16, pregnant, and living in Elk River, Minnesota. That is the setup of Juno, the 2007 comedy-drama Jason Reitman directed from a Diablo Cody screenplay. Elliot Page plays Juno, a high-schooler who sleeps with her friend Paulie Bleeker, gets pregnant, and decides to give the baby up for adoption.
The film runs 96 minutes. It premiered September 8 at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation. It earned $232.3 million worldwide against an initial budget of $6.5 million. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and earned three other nominations: Best Picture, Best Director for Reitman, and Best Actress for Page, who was 20 at the time and presenting as female, and is the sixth-youngest nominee in that category.
Trailer, via SearchlightPictures.
Juno’s Clinic Visit and the Pennysaver Ad
Juno first plans to get an abortion. She goes to a women’s clinic in town and meets a schoolmate outside, standing alone in an anti-abortion vigil. Inside, she cannot go through with the procedure. She chooses adoption instead.
Leah helps her look through the Pennysaver classifieds, where she finds a married couple with no children whom she believes can give the baby a good home. She tells her father Mac and stepmother Bren what she has decided, and both back her.
Mac goes with her to meet Mark and Vanessa Loring at their large Saint Cloud house. The two sides agree to a closed adoption. Mark composes commercial jingles from home. His rock band years are behind him, surviving only as memorabilia in one room Vanessa has set aside for his things.
Mark Loring’s Room and the Mall Scene
Juno finds out that she and Mark like the same punk rock and horror films. She begins dropping by his house often just to spend time with him.
On a later trip to the mall, Juno and Leah spot Vanessa with a group of children. She looks entirely at ease. Juno tells Vanessa to speak to the baby, and the baby kicks in response.
As the months pass, Juno’s feelings for Paulie grow harder to ignore. She has acted cold toward him throughout. When she learns he has asked another girl to prom, she confronts him in jealousy. Paulie points out that she was the one who wanted distance, and tells her she broke his heart.
Casting Page, Cera, and the 45 Pages
Reitman had seen Page in Hard Candy and wanted him for the lead. On his first read of the script, he already pictured Page as Juno. He went to the set of another film Page was working on to make the offer.
Reitman also gave the script to J.K. Simmons, who had appeared in his earlier film Thank You for Smoking, without saying that he had Mac in mind. Simmons has said that after reading it, he would have taken even the high school teacher with no lines.
Other actors Reitman wanted from the outset:
- Olivia Thirlby, who had already tried out for Juno and lost, as Leah
- Michael Cera as Paulie Bleeker
- Jennifer Garner as Vanessa Loring
- Jason Bateman as Mark Loring
Reitman brought Page, Simmons, Thirlby and Cera to a Panavision stage in California. They shot 45 pages on 35mm against a black backdrop, and he showed the footage to Fox Searchlight as his proposed cast. He has argued that a screen test beats separate auditions, saying: “This is a movie that’s all about relationships and the idea of auditioning people outside of each other, one-on-one with the casting director, didn’t make sense.”
Garner took a smaller fee than she normally would so the production would not run over budget. Shooting ran through February and March of 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Kimya Dawson and the Soundtrack
Several songs on the soundtrack are performed by Kimya Dawson under different names. It was the first soundtrack to top the chart since Dreamgirls in 2006, and the first number-one soundtrack in Fox Searchlight’s history.
The film made back its $6.5 million budget in twenty days. Nineteen of those days fell during its limited release.
The Abortion Debate Around Juno
Critics praised the film, and many put it on their year-end top-ten lists. It also drew both criticism and praise from people in the anti-abortion and abortion rights camps over how it handles abortion.
Awards and the 2007 Release Calendar
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| February–March 2007 | Filming in Vancouver, British Columbia |
| September 8, 2007 | Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival |
| 2007 | Limited release; budget recouped in 20 days |
| Academy Awards | Win for Best Original Screenplay |
Juno took Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress. Page was 20 at the time of the nomination, presenting as female, and is the sixth-youngest nominee in the Best Actress category.
What Holds Up and What Doesn’t
The casting is the part of this story worth the most attention. Reitman shot 45 pages on a black backdrop and sold Fox Searchlight on a group of actors before he had a finished film. That is a bet on chemistry, and it is why the Lorings and the MacGuffs come across as people with history rather than strangers meeting on set.
The abortion fight is the loudest part of Juno’s legacy and the least useful. Both the anti-abortion and abortion rights communities found things to praise and things to attack. That is a fact about how the film was received, not a ruling on what it says.
The money is the detail that matters more. A $6.5 million budget recovered in twenty days, nineteen of them in limited release, is what let Fox Searchlight widen the film. The soundtrack’s chart run did similar work from another direction. Neither number explains the other, but together they show a small movie that found its audience quickly.
The screenplay Oscar is the award that has lasted best in conversation. The three nominations around it — Picture, Director, Actress — mark Juno as a film the industry took seriously across every category that year. Page’s nomination at 20, the sixth-youngest in the Best Actress category, is the detail that still stands out.
Juno is a 96-minute film that made $232.3 million. Set side by side, those two numbers make the case.
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