Legally Blonde (2003)

 

Director: Charles Herman-Wurmfeld

Screenplay: Rachel Sweet

Inspired by the novel by Amanda Brown

Cast: Jennifer Hall as Elle Woods; Paul Korver as Casey Whitehouse; David Moscow as Oscar; Caitlin Mowrey as Keaton Wescott; Christina Pickles as Professor Abbott; Harve Presnell as Henry Whitehouse; Celia Weston as Mrs. Ingrid Tolleson

Ephemeral Waves

 

My nicotine patch is wearing off.

Countless films have had television series made of them - even Casablanca (1942) with a 1983 one season with a young Ray Liotta in a tiny role. Legally Blonde, after the success of a 2001 film, starring Reese Witherspoon plays Elle Woods, a sorority girl obsessed with style but also wishing to become a lawyer, led to 2003 a sequel Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde but also a television pilot. (There would be two sequels in total, the third a direct-to-video sequel, a planned "official third film, and the musical). The television pilot was obviously meant to capitalise on the success of the films, created the same year as the first sequel, but never went beyond an unsold pilot lost to fuzzy bootlegging.

Which is not surprising is that it is not a great pilot. What is strange is the knowledge that its quirky premise as a franchise could have been something special. Even without context of the films, which have their own following, there is a fascinating premise here of the stereotype of women upturned to have empowerment. Elle Woods has the natural blonde hair, is enthusiastic and obsessed with fashion, the stereotype of the ditzy natural blonde yet especially with this version coming to law school with knowledge and the legal mind that undercuts the insults she gets from others presuming she is dumb. It is inherently a feminist idea to imagine here, that for her pink clothes and a Chihuahua called Bruiser Elle is intelligent, just however someone who is atypical to the image of a female lawyer, whatever that exactly means. Instead, this one also loves Dido and tries to claim to know Tom Cruise to get a rented apartment.

Replacing Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Hall as Elle Woods is the best thing in the pilot with her peppy enthusiasm. Mainly an actress for television, sadly her cinematic filmography is not as large, a shame as she has the enthusiasm, certainly managing to make this caricature a fun and likeable figure. I do not joke with the idea of this being able to subvert ideas of feminism, least in the sense that appearance is in the eye of the beholder. Likewise the stereotypes of a fashion obsessed glam figure is itself a potential cage unfairly put on women when, whether their preferences in dress and style, they have the capability to be very intelligent and skilled people. It is not really a joke either even in this pilot's broad form, with Elle as capable and potentially sharp in her ability to be a defence attorney or prosecution as she is in her choice of shoes. That the premise is playing with the stereotypes of natural blondes as well is something to bear in mind, as it is pretty obvious (and in itself problematic to know does need to be spelled out repeatedly) that stereotypes can apply to anyone and all of them are cruel.

Clearly, the premise worked for one theatrical film, even if because of Reese Witherspoon as a lead actress carrying it on her shoulders, but here you have an example that any premise can work, but bad or flat execution fails them regardless. I think of a later day Anthony Perkins television pilot from just before his death, The Ghost Writer (1990), which had him as a horror writer whose newly wedded wife and new step children had to adapt to his creeping haunted house, but the execution there was a broad and flat comedy. Here, with unremarkable early 2000s pop punk and pop on the score blaring, the vibrant fruit of the premise dies on the vine too.

The scenario depicted, a mock trial about whether a larger male student is allowed to play on the women's hockey team or not, is reduced to wearing pink and convoluted arguments rather than a potentially more subversive ideal of Elle being a damn good lawyer in the making who just happens to be overtly "girly". That, and to draw the longest bow for the review, is that this would have been the closest you probably got to a show tackling transgender politics we would have to talk about in the late 2010s, but again, anything profound is lost, especially as in over twenty minutes, Legally Blonde zips by on a surface level.

Legally Blonde the pilot barely gets through the initial setup of its premise, as much around Elle finding an apartment, and an inkling of a friendship with the original antagonist named Keaton, before it finishes never to be seen again as a world. Neither does it help the pilot that, whilst she is meant to be sympathetic as a young woman belonging to a rich privileged family wishing to stand on her own, a black sheep for wanting to become a lawyer, Keaton is really not a nice character, an obvious one who is cruel and blunt for the sake of it. Even their female lecturer, after insulting Elle originally, least shows a sardonic wit and appreciates her students when they think smartly.

It leaves one envision an alternative world, or the truth that the idea of television pilots can be more enticing than the results. I can see in these unsold or cancelled pilots, for their abruptness, fragments of realities which never find a conclusion, fragments like dreams, like how we cineastes obsess over fragments of films, unfinished projects or even lost ones like the segments of the Dead Sea Scrolls partially broken into fragmented sentences. It is in this one, or at least I, cannot help but think of how you could take this format of the unsold pilot and transform them into surreal dreamt fragments. Even releasing them even officially as DVD extras would have made sense if the rights were possible to wrangle.

But you also have to realise that, with this pilot's flat look, it really does not stand out. Neither does it help the show, baring its lead, does not have a supporting cast to really stand on. Keaton is not really likable; the male love interest is only interesting when first seen wearing an eye patch for sight issues, only for him to discard it; even attempts at adding minor personality to characters likely to never reappear, like the older woman who ultimately gives Elle an apartment as much as being a natural blonde once, get lost in the pilot's generic form.

The only thing that really stands out is a feint hint of early 2000s nostalgia with the music, but alongside the pilot clearly being paid by singer-songwriter Dido with its constant praise of her in one scene, even that is merely a fragment. I may have been born in 1989 but my adolescence proper was in the early 2000s, where the soundtrack was nu-metal's last gasps, pop punk bands like New Found Glory and the beginnings of streamlined emo by the mid-2000s, which really do not really appear in this pilot at all. This pilot's light colourful sheen only can carry it along so far too, and honestly, it is not a surprise it never was picked up for a full season.