Shocking Secrets About Drop Dead Gorgeous Revealed

2. Even before the bad reviews and box office woes, Williams didn't have the best experience on-set, often clashing with first time director Michael Patrick Jann. 

"I just found [Jann] to be a bit of an a--hole," she recalled to Buzzfeed. "I remember going out in the rain, crying, going to my rental car, like, having a full body cry because I felt like, Oh my god, this could get away and not turn out the way I see it. There were a couple things like that, and then I pulled myself together...I really didn't favor him."

Jann, who wouldn't direct another feature film until 2023's Organ Trail, admitted, "I think I probably could have been nicer. As a 26-year-old, I was probably a little more like, 'No, we're f--king doing it this way. What are you talking about?' I was maybe a tiny bit insensitive at that time in my life."

4. The movie was originally supposed to be called Dairy Queens. However, the corporation that owns Dairy Queen allegedly didn't love that idea or the association with the mockumentary-style dark comedy, so they filed a lawsuit and Drop Dead Gorgeous became the title. 

5. Before Kirsten Dunst landed the lead role of Amber Atkins, the pageant queen with dreams of becoming the next Diane Sawyer, then reigning teen queen Melissa Joan Hart auditioned for the part. The Sabrina the Teenage Witch star ended up starring in Drive Me Crazy, a teen rom-com that came out a few months later.

When it came to casting Dunst, it wasn't the young actress' breakout roles in Interview With a Vampire or Jumanji that convinced Jann she could play Amber; it was Celebrity Teen Jeopardy.

"She was so sweet and so normal, and so guileless," he said. "That's the girl who can grab the microphone out of the dead reporter's hand and joyfully keep reporting with no guile. There's no evil in her. There's no premeditation...for someone who'd been in movies since she was a kid, like a tiny, tiny kid…she was at ease with being ill at ease, which was charming to me."

7. "It was my introduction to, 'Oh, that person's a huge f--king star.'" That's how Jann described his experience on-set with Alley to Buzzfeed, revealing this about her first day of filming: "She gets up there and she announces that she's just quit smoking, she's on a diet, and she's got her period. And she's not f--king kidding."

He went on to allege she refused to wear many the costumes the wardrobe department had picked for Gladys, instead asking for the outfits to be sent to the Scientology Celebrity Centre in Hollywood to try them on there.

8. Drop Dead Gorgeous marked Amy Adams' feature film debut, with the star going on to receive six Oscar nominations. And from the start, everyone on set knew Adams, who played the promiscuous cheerleader Leslie Miller, had something special. 

"I remember Amy coming in, and immediately I was like, ‘Well, that's it, she's got that part,'" Allison Janney (who played Annette's bestie Loretta) told BuzzFeed. But funnily enough, Janney forgot that they were both in the movie when Adams later guest-starred on Janney's hit TV series The West Wing. "We were filming in Pittsburgh and we went out to dinner together and she was like, 'Do you remember I was in [Drop Dead Gorgeous]?'" Janney recalled with a laugh to VH1.

In an interview with Cinema Blend, Adams said, "That was my first movie I ever made! Everything about that movie was just so surreal to me. That was the first time I realized like, 'I think I could go to Hollywood and at least get some commercials or something.'"

9. While her seven-season run on The West Wing would net her four of her seven Emmys and she'd go on to win an Oscar in 2018 for her work in I, Tonya, Janney ended up getting to audition for the movie thanks to the late Brittany Murphy, who was first cast as contestant Lisa Swenson.

"I had just done A View From the Bridge on Broadway with Brittany Murphy," Janney told the Huffington Post of the Clueless star. "John Papsidera cast Drop Dead Gorgeous, because I think Brittany auditioned for the movie and told him he needed to cast me in it, if I'm not crazy."

10. Now comfortable with ad-libbing, Janney revealed she only went off script once in Drop, Dead Gorgeous. "The one ad-lib I said that I was proud of was 'I got some!'" she told the Huffington Post. "That was my one ad-lib because I don't think I knew how to ad-lib at that point in my career." Janney did have a hand in establishing Loretta's look, however, including her over-the-top orange tan.

"Maybe her neck would be a different color than her face. And then we discussed that her idea of glamour might not be everyone's," she said. "She might wear blue eye shadow with bright red lipstick. She definitely has a confused sense of glamour, a trailer park-tinged sense of glamour."

11. While she's gone on to become one of the most famous and successful alums from the movie, Janney wasn't invited to the Drop Dead Gorgeous premiere in 1999.

"I was not even included in the poster on that. They usually don't ask you if you're not included on the poster," the Mom star explained. "Because then they have to pay for you to get there, and that involves money for the studio to pay, so of course they're not going to want to pay for everyone in the movie to come. I understand that."

12. Matt Molloy played John Dough, the local pageant judge with an inappropriate level of interest in the young contestants, and the role has earned him some less than ideal fan encounters over the years.

"Six times in my life I have been in a public setting—once in a mall, once in a bakery, each time with a lot of people around—and a teenage girl has turned and yelled, 'You're the pervert!'" he told Buzzfeed. "And I put my hands up and say, 'In a movie. In a movie. Finish the sentence.' But there's this moment where the whole fucking place turns, and it's just like, Oh, you're hanging by your balls, kid. That still happens."

13. In one of the film's most iconic scenes, Denise Richards' mean rich girl Becky performs a tone-deaf (in more ways than one) rendition of Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" while dancing with a Jesus doll on a crucifix. The scene has gone done in cult cinema history, but some of the extras who were on set the day the performance was filmed were not amused. 

"Halfway through my performance they were offended," The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum told VH1, "and actually walked off the set and left."

16. Believe it or not, given her impressive resume, Drop Dead Gorgeous is the project most fans approach Janney about. "I think I get more people coming up to me saying how much they love that movie than any other thing I've done," she told The A.V. Club. "Even more than West Wing."

Her favorite fan encounter? "I was sitting in an airport next to these teenagers, and they were quoting lines that Loretta said," she told Huffington Post. "It took me a while. I was like, 'That sounds familiar.' And then all of a sudden I realize, 'Oh, they're talking about Loretta.' And then I said, 'Excuse me, did you know that I played Loretta?' And they started screaming and of course they had a huge photo op afterward. They really didn't know they were sitting next to me. It was great."

18. Perhaps take this with a few grains of salt from a shaker at Luke's Diner, but Gavin Polone, one of the producers, told Buzzfeed that he found the mother-daughter dynamic explored between the close-in-age Annette and Amber in Drop Dead Gorgeous so dynamic and fascinating that he pitched the concept to Amy Sherman-Palladino, who would go on to create Gilmore Girls. 

"Gilmore Girls wouldn't exist if I had not produced that movie," Polone claimed. (Hey, we do think Lorelai and Rory would totally have watched Drop Dead Gorgeous during one of their many movie nights.)

19. While the film's ending is already pretty dark, the initial version was even more twisted 

"In the original ending, Kirstie actually killed herself in prison," Jann revealed to Buzzfeed. "In the next scene, there was just her feet swinging in the jail cell, and it went from her feet swinging down to an ashtray with a still lit cigarette." Gladys' shooting spree was then originally committed by librarian/former Mount Rose American Teen Princess Iona Hildebrandt. 

"The whole theater went, 'Ugh,'" Jann said of the test audiences' reaction to the ending. "That was too much. That was one step over the line."

20. Twenty years after working together on Drop Dead Gorgeous as BFFs Annette and Loretta, Barkin and Janney reunited on-screen in the 2021 film Breaking News in Yuba County.

"Ok, this is a full circle moment for me! In and out of character with the amazing #EllenBarkin," Janney, who once described Barkin as "a dream to work with," captioned a cute behind-the-scenes 2019 Instagram post. "First time was #DropDeadGorgeoustogether again in #breakingnewsinyubacounty More full circles coming!"