Drop Dead Gorgeous: How an Unstreamable Cult Classic Made A Spectacle Out Of America

Update: Since this article was written, Drop Dead Gorgeous has since become available for streaming on a number of platforms.

Drop Dead Gorgeous, the mockumentary-style beauty pageant satire, has haunted me throughout my life. Depending on who you ask, the film can be described in one breath as: a box-office failure, the only reason to still own a DVD player, a relic of Y2k-era film, and lastly, but most accurately, a black sheep amongst a generation of squeaky clean teenage rom coms that didn’t dare break dress code, if dress code meant the fairytale ending—a trope as ingrained into Hollywood as the Pledge of Allegiance is ingrained into classrooms. Drop Dead Gorgeous, the pessimistic goth child wrapped in a hyperfemme aesthetic, turned the fairytale into a warzone; a teenage comedy wrapped in sequins and barbed wire. 

Drop Dead Gorgeous is a film I can barely remember and yet it is forever burned into my memory like my sister’s pirated Limewire DVD that first introduced me to the film in the first place. I can still visualize specific moments: a charred hand grasping a beer can, a cringe performance with a lifesize Jesus on a crucifix, and of course—an extremely flammable swan float. The movie is a staple in my and so many others' rolodex of films that have influenced our taste in art, our sense of humor, and some of our general pessimism that is so deeply intertwined to our femininity. So when the opportunity arose for my partner and I to swap our favorite comedies, you can imagine my excitement to share the underrated dark comedy. That is, until I realized I couldn't find it.

I scoured Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Youtube, Peacock, Disney+, Tubi, Criterion Channel, Vudu, HBO Max, and a slew of sites that surely would have infected my computer with an incurable virus (I’m sure some of you reading this are yelling at me through the computer the name of some obscure streaming software and to that I tell you—I already looked). I searched in a frenzied state like a parent desperate to find their missing child. Where was my movie? I came up empty-handed, feeling cheated after having sat through my partner’s favorite comedy (Airplane). I was furious, ripped off by Hollywood and left to glue together scraps of the film’s best scenes from clips on Youtube. It only left me wanting more, desperate for more of Allison Janney’s hilarious one-liners. I did what most people do when they feel scorned by the internet—I dove deeper. I searched and searched for the hands that were responsible for placing one of my favorite films in movie purgatory. Once again I turned up with more questions than answers (contact information in Hollywood is difficult to find for this very reason). I pivoted my vengeance into curiosity, sifting through a slew of polarizing press, depending on which decade you pulled it from. Gradually, I pieced together the downfall-turned-uprising of one of movie history’s most underrated films of all time.

Drop Dead Gorgeous belongs to writer Lona Williams. Absurd events from William’s own involvement with a high school beauty pageant inspired her to create the fictional town of Mount Rose, Minnesota (Williams’ hometown is Rosemount). The screenplay, initially titled ‘Dairy Queens’ (changed for obvious legal reasons) wasn’t the first copyright issue the film would come up against. When naming the fictional pageant for the film, every name the crew came up with had already been taken by another real-life contest. “Every combination of American, Junior, Miss, Teenage, Queen, Princess, it's all been taken,” Michael Patrick Jann, the film's director, recounts in one filmed interview. The crew settled on ‘Sarah Rose Cosmetics Mount Rose American Teen Princess Pageant Beauty Pageant,’ a name as preposterous as the situation itself. 

“The sheer volume of absurdity in beauty pageants is overwhelming; we’re trying to capture all of it,” announces Jann confidently in the same interview. 

It begs the viewer to ask, “What kind of person would subject themselves to one of America’s most demented past times?” ENTER: Amber Atkins, the sunny, optimistic protagonist played by Kirsten Dunst who finds time to practice her tap routine at her after-school job painting the faces of dead people at a local mortuary. Amber is desperate to break free of her trailer park roots. While the boys in her town have promising football scholarships, the pageant is Amber’s only way out. She has high aspirations and no chance at reaching them unless she can wield her beauty and charm to win a golden ticket out of Mount Rose. It’s Amber’s unbridled optimism that the film relies on so much not just as a comedic device, but as a way to expose the tragedy of poverty in America. It's this gun-to-head positivity, held together by a mask of hairspray, that aims to raise the curtain on the charade that is the American dream. 

As Americans, we are born to chase success. But more often than not, we are left burnt out and bitter. Drop Dead Gorgeous exposes the ugly truth of a society poisoned by capitalism and meets the moment in a way that Americans weren’t yet ready to face when the movie was first released. Michael Patrick Jann sums up the movie best, citing in the same interview, “You can be the most talented anything in a small town, but unless you have a serious drive and ambition and stepped on somebody’s neck to go up, you’re not going anywhere. I think that's sort of just the truth of success in America and that's reflected in the movie.” ENTER: Becky Ann Leeman (Denise Richards), antagonist and nepo-baby, daughter to the richest man in town and a former pageant-winning mother, the latter of whom leads this year's pageant planning committee. Becky was born a winner. And just like Amber Atkins, Drop Dead Gorgeous was born to fail.

Drop Dead Gorgeous premiered July of 1999 to underperforming profits and negative reviews. The film only recouped 10.5 million of its 10-15 million dollar budget. Critics tore the film apart, calling the jokes flat, the material too obvious and comparing it unfavorably to Smile (a more subtle pageant satire from 1975). The critic Steven Rosen writes in a review for the Denver Post, “So passé, the movie is virtually dead on arrival!” In a 2014 interview with Buzzfeed, Jann attributes the film's failure largely in part to last-minute changes made by studio executives. As Jann explains, New Line Cinema wanted to polish over the film’s unorthodox structure in attempts to mold the movie to conform with the likes of Clueless, a much more lighthearted teen classic. In other words, the studio wanted to hush the cynicism that pushed the plot of Drop Dead Gorgeous forward like a vital organ. Ultimately, the studio ran out of time and both Jann and Williams, who had everything to prove (Drop Dead Gorgeous was both of their debuts) ultimately took the brunt of the film’s failures. 

“Instead of succeeding at being offbeat. It failed at being mainstream," says Jann later in the interview.

But any movie buff with an affinity for film history knows box office failure and harsh criticism is the pathway towards cult-classic immortality. Reviews are not always indicative of audience consensus. Similar to the trajectory of other cult-classics like Dazed and Confused and Jennifer’s Body, Drop Dead Gorgeous rose to prominence through a slow burn of discovery, a flame kept alive by its mostly female & queer audiences. Why is it that criticism often speaks louder than an audience’s cheers anyway? Drop Dead Gorgeous seemingly vanished into obscurity yet lingered in the hearts of its fans until 2019 when the film became available to stream on Hulu. Once available again, it sparked an onslaught of media coverage and what felt like a high school reunion on Twitter. But while the excitement was infectious, it was also, well, brief.  The movie has become virtually unstreamable again and unless you have a DVD player, unavailable to watch. And why now, when the movie’s portrayal of a violently absurd reality eerily parallels the America today where women have no legal autonomy over our bodies within the state from which I’m writing this and gun-related murders on marginalized communities continue without consequence. Drop Dead Gorgeous is a reminder to us all that America has always protected the wrong people. One scene in particular makes my blood run cold. We see Becky Leeman clutching a 9mm with her perfectly manicured teal nails, snarling through her smile, delivering perhaps the most infamous line of the movie, “Jesus loves winners,” as she neatly places six bullets into a paperized skull. 

Jia Tolentino writes it best, “What ‘Drop Dead Gorgeous’ understands so well is that being a teen-age girl is, in fact, deranged and dehumanizing and frequently unsubtle.” I would go even farther to say that what Drop Dead Gorgeous does so well is make a horrifying spectacle of America because America is a horrifying spectacle. And just like Drop Dead Gorgeous, the longer we watch, the weirder it keeps getting. In 1999, critics weren’t yet ready to grapple with their own participation in a capitalist society, let alone reckon with their own benefit from living within one. Drop Dead Gorgeous places us into a darker, demented depiction of America that dares to ask us with a blood-stained smile, “How many people is this country willing to sacrifice to get what it wants?”

The existence of Drop Dead Gorgeous acts as a necessary safe space for the LGBTQ+ community. It acts as a 98-minute escape from the terror that exists outside the front door. And so, I call for the return of a beloved film so that it may be passed onto the next generation that has single handedly resuscitated Y2k-era everything back into relevance. They deserve it, we deserve it, Lona Williams deserves it, and Drop Dead Gorgeous deserves its Jennifer’s Body moment in time. But until then, the film remains an absence from my physical world, living in my mind like a shoddy projector—scenes erupting in chaotic bursts and seemingly out of nowhere, helping me to make sense of the real-life circus show before my eyes.

***I was going to make a new petition to have Netflix acquire Drop Dead Gorgeous, but in light of the devastating events in Colorado Springs it feels obtuse. The LGBTQ+ community has lost yet another sanctuary to feel safe to be, please consider donating what you can.