Legally Blonde is one of those great movies from the 2000s that’s brimming with one-liners we still repeat to this day. In honor of its 25th anniversary, one of the movie’s writers shared an amusing anecdote I’ve always been curious about. How did the amazing “bend and snap” scene come to be?
Kirsten Smith has previously called the invention of the bend and snap a “spontaneous invention” that was the result of “a completely drunken moment in a bar”. But there’s much more to it. In her words:
Our favorite parts to write were the relationship. The set pieces, like the bend and snap, and that whole arc with Jennifer Coolidge’s character, Paulette, and the UPS guy, came later in the script. There were a couple of weeks where we knew we had to create this B-plot, and it wasn’t going great. We rejected a lot of ideas.
In the new interview, Smith said she loved writing Legally Blonde’s many iconic moments, but many of them actually came about later in the process. She and her co-writer Karen McCullah Lutz knew they wanted to give Jennifer Coolidge’s Paulette more to do, but it took some thinking. As she added to Gold Derby:
We were like, ‘OK, what happens if the nail salon gets burgled? What are we going to do?’ but we actually came back to asking ourselves, ‘What is our superpower?’ and that is romance and character dynamics, so we took it from there. We thought, ‘What if Paulette is interested in someone and Elle can help her with that? What if she’s got a bad relationship with an ex that she can solve with her legalese?’ so we returned to our North Star.
While I certainly would have thought the bend and snap was in the DNA of Legally Blonde from the beginning, that wasn’t the case. The scene came out of the rewrite stage via some notes from producer Marc Platt.
Legally Blonde would have certainly been a bit of a different movie if there was a crime at the salon instead. But it just wouldn’t have been the same without the plotline revolving around Paulette’s crush on the UPS guy. The screenwriters ultimately felt a sprinkle of romance in the B-plot would be better served than a crime due to their personal strengths as writers. I think they made the right choice.
Smith also recalled the famed scene being a “much longer sequence” and originally feeling like “the movie fully stopped” for a musical number. But after it went through the editing room, the co-writer felt like the Legally Blonde scene “became the perfect length.”
Kirsten Smith’s new comments on Legally Blonde come following the franchise getting its own series called Elle. The series is currently No. 1 on the Prime Video charts after dropping on the streaming service a couple of weeks ago. Elle is about a high-school-aged Elle Woods as her family moves from Los Angeles to Seattle, uprooting her social life completely. You can check out the new show, executive produced by Reese Witherspoon, now. And it’s always a good time to revisit Legally Blonde!