If I see one more cutesy headline about Diablo Cody being a stripper-turned-screenwriter I might have to hang myself from a stripper pole. Okay, that’s not possible… then how about I’ll have to start protesting the movie Juno on principle?

From the New York Times review, "Off the Stripper Pole and Into the Movies" to the International Herald Tribune’s ""Climbing the Stripper Pole to Hollywood Stardom" to EW's "Diablo Cody: From Ex-Stripper to A-Lister" to about 8,000 Google hits for the words "Diablo, Cody and stripper," it’s really enough already. I fear that as the end-of-the-year "Best Of" lists and Oscar predictions are published in the coming weeks, and as Juno earns recognition in these places, we will only see more mention of Cody’s stripping in cyberspace.

All this press about the screenwriter's stripping ways detracts from what makes Juno a wonderful film – Cody's writing and Ellen Page's performance in the title role. Though Cody admits the story is somewhat autobiographical in that it relates to the Midwestern suburban upbringing she had, it has nothing to do with skanky nudie clubs. The movie is not even that obsessed with the act of sex, though it is a little; it's a tale about teen pregnancy, after all. The movie follows the emotional rollercoaster ride that a witty, smart, and confused 16-year-old girl, Juno MacGuff, embarks on as she takes a baby to term. She wrestles with the meaning of love, physical changes, and is forced to "deal with things way beyond her maturity level" to quote one of the many insightful lines in the film.

The film is a unique one, as it takes a girl's coming-of-age story into the kind of comedy terrain that’s usually for the boys -- such movies as American Pie and Superbad, are good examples. It's hard to think of any hilarious such films devoted to females since John Hughes ruled the teen genre roost in the '80s (who could ever forget such classics as Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink?), or since Ghost World (2001) in which teenaged Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson shined.

So, then why is such a wonderfully unique feminist film as Juno being talked about as that movie written by that former stripper?

Is it that the "sex sells" strategy that rules supreme in movie marketing now works to move forward a screenwriter’s career too? Cody, herself, has milked the publicity machine dry on this stripper thing. From writing a book, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper on her transformation from corporate copy writer to stripper at 23 to appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman to divulge to Dave all the seedy details of her stripping to changing her name from Brooke to Diablo to calling her blog for the Minneapolis City Pages Pussy Ranch.

Hollywood has long had a place in its heart for the young screenwriter that rises through the ranks against all odds. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon got loads of press for writing the Oscar-winning script for Good Will Hunting when they were in their early twenties. When Pulp Fiction took off, many film critics honed in on the fact that Quentin Tarantino was a 23-year-old slacker video store clerk when he first started screenwriting (at that time he penned True Romance and Reservoir Dogs). And everyone thought it was pretty cool when an irreverent, college dropout from Jersey called Kevin Smith wrote Clerks at the age of 24.

These screenwriters outlived the catchy headlines that first introduced them to the moviegoing world, and are now respected in the movie industry for their talent and merit. There's no reason to think that Diablo Cody won't last in this industry either, as Juno is the indie hit of the year, and she's now writing for Steven Spielberg's new project The United State of Tara; success doesn't get much bigger than that. One thing is for sure, though: if Juno is nominated for an Oscar, it would make that boring awards show a lot more exciting if the stripper persona of Cody showed up for the festivities rather than the writer.

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