Movie Cloning (Juno)

Quiz time. This is a two-part question.

Quick—name a movie that is a few years old that is about a teenage girl who becomes pregnant? Need a hint? One of the key character’s name in the film is Juno. Anyone? If you guessed the 2007 film Juno starring Ellen Page you got the first part of the question correct. The second part is a little trickier. Name another movie about a teenage girl who becomes pregnant and one of the key character’s name in the film is Juno?

That would be the 2005 South Korean film Jenny, Juno. (Or Jeni, Juno depending on translation.) Written and directed by Ho-joon Kim it’s story about a 15-year-old girl named Jenny who becomes pregnant by a boy she meets in school named Juno. The young couple decides not to have an abortion. Interesting, no?

It was exactly three years ago today that I first saw Juno written by Diablo Cody. I was so inspired by Diablo Cody’s back story—raised in Chicago, college at University of Iowa, blogging in Minneapolis—that a few days after seeing the movie I launched the blog Screenwriting from Iowa as a way to focus on writers coming from unusual places. (It’s grown into a daily blog on screenwriting and filmmaking.)

The fact that Cody would go on to win an Oscar for her Juno screenplay and my blog would win a Regional Emmy in Minneapolis (both in 2008) was nice symmetry.  I never heard about the movie Jenny, Juno until recently. But now that I’ve been tracking movies that are like other movies this is hard to miss. I’ve read that Cody says that she had not heard of Jenny, Juno until after Juno was made and called the film a “spiritual cousin.”

I’ll take her at her word on that but it is an amazing coincidence.  The two stories do end up heading in different directions. Juno’s director Jason Reitman has also said that he was unaware of the film  Jenny, Juno before making Juno. Which is also interesting since they both have a similar look and feel.  (Would it not seem weird if there was a South Korean film about a female boxer named Rocky (or Rocki) that came out in, say, 1978?)

I haven’t seen all of Jenny, Juno but one post has a list of 15 similarities of the films starting that they both begin with a pregnancy test. Perhaps it’s all just one big coincidence. Or maybe it was just something in the air, like when the Wright Brothers were working on being the first in flight along with a few other people around the world. All those flying contraptions were similar but different—spiritual cousins.

I’ll let you decide how similar the films are based on their movie trailers. But if you’re interested, you can find the entire film of Jenny, Juno online.

Scott W. Smith