Los Angeles - A former stripper-turned-screenwriter is behind a critically acclaimed comedy being tipped for success as Hollywood's annual awards season approaches.
Diablo Cody has emerged as a serious contender for honours with her maiden script for Juno, which went on release in the United States on Friday and is already generating Oscar-buzz.
Cody, 29, shared the best original screenplay award from the National Board of Review this week and is now regarded as a near certainty for Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.
Canadian director Jason Reitman's handling of Cody's script about an unwanted teenage pregnancy has been lavished with critical praise, and described as "one of the brightest, funniest comedies of the year" by the movie review website rottentomatoes.com.
While the reviewers have showered praise on the film, Cody's colourful backstory has garnered almost as much attention.
Born Brook Busey-Hunt, Cody graduated from college with a media studies degree and had secretarial and proof-reading jobs before entering "on a whim" an amateur stripping contest at a raunchy Minneapolis night-spot.
She enjoyed the experience so much that she quit her day job and began full-time work as a stripper, before later blogging about her experiences in the skin-trade with great success.
It was her graphic online blog - Pussyranch - that got her noticed, talent manager Mason Novick stumbling across her online musings by accident during an Internet search.
"She was distinctively funny, and her tone was so great, and she's so current," Novick told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview.
Nevertheless, Cody rebuffed Novick's first approaches, suspicious of the talent agent's intentions. "Some random guy from LA is emailing me," she said. "I'm not going to take the bait."
Eventually Novick's persistence paid off, ultimately resulting in Cody penning a best-selling memoir Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper.
While the book was in the pipeline Novick persuaded her to come up with a screenplay, which resulted in a draft for Juno and a subsequent movie deal.
Director Reitman, best known for his witty 2006 debut Thank You For Smoking, has compared Cody's emergence to that of the cult film maker Quentin Tarantino.
"When I think of the response to Diablo and her screenplay the only person I can equate it to in recent history is Tarantino, that kind of overwhelming excitement about a fresh new voice," Reitman told an interviewer.
Cody's talent has already secured a further project, a horror-comedy titled Jennifer's Body, while Steven Spielberg has tapped her to pen a television comedy, United States Of Tara, about a woman with a personality disorder.
Although Cody has spoken regularly with Spielberg she has yet to meet the legendary film-maker.
"I genuinely love his movies, I always have," she told the Los Angeles Times. "I think ET may be the first movie I ever saw in the theatre."
Cody meanwhile is on record as saying that she eventually wants to direct films, partly to redress the balance about how women are portrayed in mainstream movies.
"The attitude toward women in this industry is nauseating," she told the New York Times. "There are all sorts of porcine executives who are uncomfortable with a woman doing anything subversive.
"They want the movie about the beautiful girl who trip and falls, the adorable klutz."