Legally Blonde

Robert Luketic’s film comes from Amanda Brown’s novel, drawn from Brown’s own years at Stanford Law School. The ending you watch is not the one shot first. Originally Elle kissed Emmett on the courthouse steps and the film jumped a year forward. Preview audiences turned it down, and the writers were blunt: this was not a romantic comedy, the point was never the couple, and viewers wanted to see Elle succeed. The graduation speech that replaced it was filmed at Dulwich College in London, because Reese Witherspoon was there shooting The Importance of Being Earnest. Anyone starting this as a romance is watching a cut rebuilt precisely in order not to be one. The campus is not one place either. Harvard was played by USC, UCLA, Caltech and a Pasadena high school, and when Stanford and USC refused their names the production invented a fictional college. At the 2002 Golden Globes the film was nominated for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and Witherspoon for Best Actress in the same strand; neither turned into a win. A good fit if you accept a murder case cracked by knowing a fresh perm must not be washed the first day. Not for anyone waiting on a kiss to close it out, because that kiss was thrown away on purpose.