By Desson Thomson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 9, 2007

As Hollywood success stories go, Diablo Cody's is a postmodern doozy.

It goes like this: Midwestern misfit decides -- on what-the-hell impulse -- to try stripping. Blogs about it. Hollywood talent manager reads her witty, provocative postings, encourages a tell-all book. Out comes "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper." She does Letterman. Jokes that she felt anthropological about her lap dancing, like a "naked Margaret Mead."

She then writes "Juno," a screenplay about a teen whose wisecracking life is suddenly beset by an unplanned pregnancy. Fox Searchlight makes the movie. It becomes the buzz of festivals from Toronto to Stockholm. An award, a nomination. More Hollywood deals follow. She finds herself on the phone with Steven Spielberg, who's asking her to write the pilot for a Showtime series . . . .

Cody, 29, isn't hard to spot at a Georgetown hotel restaurant: Leopard-skin coat. Cleopatra-meets-Chrissie Hynde bangs. Addams Family mascara. Purple tunic. Black leggings. Riding boots. A sort of elegant dominatrix despite the "Hello Kitty" medallion and chewed nails, with tattoos everywhere you look -- or care to imagine.

She doesn't make eye contact at first and comes across as some combination of shy and mellow.

That Zen vibe is her ultimate trump card, she says, at Hollywood power meetings where she has already successfully pitched several post-"Juno" scripts, including "Jennifer's Body" (female cannibal rampages at college; eats boys) and "Girly Style" (three nerdy college gals take a gonzo road trip -- her answer to "Superbad"). And yes, she admits, going one-on-one with those (usually) middle-aged men does have its echoes in the pole gyrations she honed at various Minneapolis strip clubs.

"I was never good at selling my body," she says, warming up to full eye contact. "It's one of my failings as a woman. But I'm excellent at selling my shtick."

Her big secret? Nonchalance.

"I'm always very relaxed. I think -- especially out there [in Hollywood] -- people are attracted to a lack of desperation."

They're also attracted to her writing style: She's this year's pop-culture-referencing Wit Girl, a wannabe Dorothy Parker of the blogosphere, whose shock-value, droll postings make readers feel wickedly hip for appreciating them.

Her blog -- we won't print its raunchy name -- reflects the willy-nilly, gonzo momentum of her personal life. Under a nude glamour photo of herself, for instance, she writes her idea of what her breasts might be saying: "Follow me, Diablo! I will locate a storehouse of carrots and Bloussant [herbal enhancer]! We will find a way to stimulate my juvenile tissues and make me grow!"

She might recount a trip to Las Vegas ("the Labyrinthine Republic of Ding-Ding-Ding"), recommend a sex toy or revel in bad-hair lamentation ("I'm like a masochistic little duck that's been paddling in the wake of the Exxon Valdez," she mourns, after a disastrous session involving glued-in hair extensions and "some evil, viscous oily stuff").

Her blog is also where you'll find the news three days ago that she and musician-husband Jonny Hunt (who she has called "the Jesus in my ravaged temple") are splitting up. And about her resulting tattoo change from "Jonny's Girl" to the still-healing "old-skool roses."

Yet her provocations are also softened by a sensitive geek-chic attitude of self-doubt, honesty and even sweetness -- all (conveniently?) in line with the prevailing vibe of youth culture seen in cult films such as "Ghost World," "Napoleon Dynamite," "Knocked Up" and "Superbad."

"She's the real thing," declares Mason Novick, who "discovered" Cody's blogs in 2003 and now is her manager. "That's what is great about her. It's not the Hollywood version. It's not a character. That's what she's like."

So, just how real is "Diablo Cody," whose actual, tax-paying name is Brooke Busey-Hunt?

"I feel like my pre-existing identity was a persona," says Cody, referring to her Chicago suburban upbringing. "I was very socially awkward and not very attractive. Severely nearsighted. Coke bottle glasses. Weird body. Teeth really messed up. Weirdly shaped -- I still am. Stringy hair. I dated geeks exclusively. And even when I blossomed -- to use a nauseating term -- it was so ingrained in me that I was a nerd, it didn't matter. I had found my people and I wasn't going to say, 'Oh look, I have contact lenses now and [breasts], I'm going to go and be popular.' "

Brooke also felt overshadowed by an older, "high-maintenance" brother who ate up all the "psychic space" in the house. (The same one who taught her to smoke, when she was 14, in the back seat of his 1969 Ford Galaxie.) It was only at the University of Iowa that she realized "all this time I myself had been a noisy, dramatic attention whore."

A media studies major, she began writing short stories but didn't try to get published because she was so "competition-averse."

As Cody recounts it in her memoir: After graduation and a couple of dead-end office jobs in Chicago and then Minneapolis, one night she signed up for "amateur night" at a strip club called the Skyway Lounge. She didn't win, but chose to keep working the pole in various clubs as "a final opportunity to raise some serious heck-ola without facing grown-up consequences."

She'd already been blogging, but decided to post about her extracurricular night life under an alias. "Diablo Cody" was born after a drive through Cody, Wyo., listening to a song called "El Diablo." After she quit the clubs, she brought her blog to the alternative weekly Minneapolis City Pages, where she also worked as a writer. Cody portrays her stripping as an offshoot of her budding sense of impulsive adventure. A whim. A diversion. Or, suggests Rob Nelson, who knew Cody and edited a few of her articles at City Pages, it was a calculated move to get herself spotted within the crowded screaming mass that is the blogosphere. Cody "is somebody with talent who got her work noticed in the old-fashioned way," Nelson says. "Stripping goes back to the Bible, in a way. . . . But if you want to be noticed in an environment that's hyper-competitive, and at a time when everyone's attention is divided in countless ways, what else are you going to do?"

Which is where Novick came in. After getting her a literary agent, he urged her to try her hand at scriptwriting. Cody wrote "Juno" sitting in the restaurant area of a Twin Cities Target.

The film's major plot point comes from outside her personal experience. "I surprised myself," says Cody. "I've never been pregnant. I'm a stepmother [Hunt has a daughter], but I'm not a mother."

Fox Searchlight bought the script in 2004 and signed up Ivan Reitman ("Thank You for Smoking") to direct. Cody moved with Hunt and his daughter (whom they call Peanut) to Los Angeles. And Cody's new life produced blog'stacies like this:

"How Did I Get Here?" Moment #5069

On Tuesday, I hung out one-on-one with Oliver Stone at his editing suite. Awesomely weird! My 14-year-old Jim Morrison-worshipping self would have fainted if she knew I'd someday discuss the importance of Dionysian excess with this man.

Of course, the cosmos took me down a few pegs when I got a sudden, explosive bout of food poisoning in my rented PT Cruiser.

For every glorious Oliver Stone moment, there seems to be a corresponding 'scrubbing out my rental in a Whole Foods parking lot' moment. Wheeeeeeeeel-of-Fortune!"

"There's a combination of strength and sweetness" about Cody, says Claudia Lewis, Searchlight's president of production. "She's a provocateur but, at the same time, sweet, flirtatious and complex. A kaleidoscopic personality. There's a quality that is questioning, looks at the world in a savvy way."

Diablo Cody will likely continue to invite a potpourri of labels: Hollywood newcomer. Catholic Geek Gone Wild! Blog-'portunist. Post-fem hedonista. Experience freak. These and other images fly off her like coruscations from a "Saturday Night Fever" disco ball. It's dizzying to Cod-ify them all.