AT THE MOVIES - Giving birth to 'Juno' - Former stripper Diablo Cody finds a checkered past inspires great writing.

In fact, Cody, whose real name is Brook Busey-Hunt, spent a year stripping in clubs and masturbating for paying customers in a peep show in Minneapolis. For her parents, hard drugs would have been preferable. "My mother would have rather I wrote a distaff 'Million Little Pieces' than a stripper memoir, because I was raised in a Catholic household and sex is the ultimate taboo. If I don't cross my legs in a certain way when I'm seated in a dress, [my mom] gets a little nervous."

Cody's first screenwriting effort, "Juno," debuted on Wednesday, and it contains a memorable scene in which 15-year-old Juno (Ellen Page) confesses to her parents that she's pregnant. Clearly, shades of Cody's own past crept into the script, as Juno's father and stepmom (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney) first try to guess what horrible thing their daughter is trying to summon up the courage to tell them. ("Do you need a large sum of money? Legal counsel?") And after Juno has retreated upstairs, the stunned pair commiserate. Her stepmom says with a sigh, "I was hoping she was expelled or into hard drugs," to which her dad responds, "That was my first instinct too. Or D.U.I. Anything but this."

Like Juno, the 29-year old Cody has to deal with a birth of her own -- of her film, her meteoric screenwriting career, her full-tilt plunge into the media limelight. Over lunch recently at a Melrose Avenue restaurant, the writer, a Los Angeles transplant as of April, appeared slightly dazed, as if she were just waking up after a long night of partying. In fact, this is her first day off from a marathon of travel, a different plane every day, as she's barnstormed Europe and the U.S. talking to journalists about "Juno." She's dressed in a turquoise T-shirt, with sparkling silver letters proclaiming "Rock and Roll Party all night long," and has a cap smashed down on her black Louise Brooks bob. On one arm is a tattoo of a pinup girl, which she recently had burnished, and the newly applied ink left her bedsheets looking like "the shroud of Turin."