TIFF 2010: Toronto International Film Festival

Emma Stone as "Olive Penderghast" in Screen Gems' EASY A.

LOS ANGELES -- Plenty of teenagers daydream of dropping out of school and bolting to Hollywood. But how many follow through with a PowerPoint presentation for their parents?

Emma Stone laughs throatily at the memory, recalling when -- during her freshman year of high school -- she conspired to convince her mother and father she should move from Arizona to Los Angeles to become an actress.

"My dad is a businessman, so I think I grew up thinking presentations were a good way to get your point across instead of just sitting down and having a conversation," she says. "I'm also really emotional so if I feel very strongly about anything, I get overwhelmed with emotion, so I knew sitting down and going, 'I've got to move! I've got to move!' wasn't going to be a good approach. So I did it in a more business-y way. But I cried the whole time."

Whether because of the PowerPoint presentation or the tears, Stone's parents agreed to let their daughter move to Los Angeles (accompanied by her mother).

"I always loved acting and sketch comedy and improv and theatre, which I did, at a local youth theatre," Stone says. "But the actual moment about moving to L.A. was a little like Howard Beale in Network -- like when he wakes up 'Why me?' I had a moment like that in the middle of class and was like, 'Got to move.' And then I made the presentation that night and moved two months later. It was weird."

She quickly began to land work -- including a role on the short-lived TV series Drive in 2007. From there, she segued into films. Her big-screen credits include Superbad, The House Bunny, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and last year's sleeper hit Zombieland.

"I've only been doing this for three long years," she says. "I'm such an old woman."

"She's going to be a huge star," predicts Will Gluck, who directs her in Easy A.

Opening everywhere Sept. 17 after it premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, the smartly sarcastic comedy stars Stone as a virgin who, tired of going unnoticed, starts a rumour that she's wildly promiscuous. Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson and Lisa Kudrow co-star. It's Stone's first lead role -- a breakthrough for the now-21-year-old.

"(The pressure) was less about the size of the role than doing the role itself justice. Yeah, that was my concern throughout the whole thing. The size of it you can't think about too much or else you go crazy. And by you, I mean me."

Female-led comedies, she realizes, are rarities. "You feel like you've struck gold when you read a comedy part for a female, it's such a rare thing, which is horribly sad."

For that reason, Easy A attracted nearly every actress from the age of 18 to 30, Gluck says. But he adds Stone -- thanks to an audition tape she submitted via webcam, which he insisted all contenders do -- easily won the gig.

Of course, as her celebrity grows, so will, presumably, the gossip about her. Stone knows it's not a reach to suggest she may find herself under the same intrusive, fact-deficient microscope her character does.

"We've seen it not just with actors, but politicians and sports figures, where you feel you know them so well -- 'How could they mess up?' and it becomes such a story and rumours spiral out of control. But nowadays I'd rather have rumours than the truth. Know what I mean? Wouldn't you feel safer with rumours than the truth and people knowing all the truth about your life?"

But that's not the reason, she adds, why you won't find her on Facebook or Twitter.

"I can't get too involved. Since I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be a website designer. In my day, there weren't blogs or social networks; it was all e-zines and drop-down menus so it's been fascinating to watch the progression of social networking. I have an addictive personality and can't use it -- any of it. Because if I have a Twitter or Facebook, that's all I will do. So I don't. But I completely appreciate it."

Almost as fast as how technology changes? How quickly Hollywood careers come and go, she acknowledges.

"Movies were being made all the time in other generations, but you look back at actresses like my favourite, Diane Keaton, and you look at her track record and it's 1971, 1974, 1975, 1978 -- there's more space between each thing. Whereas next year I have three movies coming out.

"I know I need to appreciate it right now because it's a very fleeting changing thing, nowadays with the now, now, nowness of everything. They like to latch on and it's like 'Come on, come on, come on -- let's go' and then it's to the next person, 'Come on, come on, come on -- let's go!' So I know that's the way it is. I have to try to navigate it and have that not be the case because I'd really like to do this for a while."

kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca