100Legally Blonde (2001)

Amanda Brown didn’t just write the book upon which Legally Blonde was based, she lived it, attending Stanford Law school while, indeed, being blonde. On the heels (designer, no doubt) of their breakout, eve-of-the-millennium hit 10 Things I Hate About You, scripting duo Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith read Brown’s book and saw filmic gold. “When we read [the novel] we just thought, Wow, this is such a gift, what a great concept, what a great character,” Smith told Buzzfeed in 2018. “So many bare bones of the plot were architected in Amanda’s book, and that’s what you want. We knew that we knew how to do it.”