Once upon a time, a California blonde decided she'd like to go to Stanford Law School—because of its proximity to Neiman Marcus. Nope, not Elle Woods. We'll get to her.
"I wanted to go to Stanford when I saw the mall," Arizona State grad Amanda Brown admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle of enrolling at the prestigious institution in the early '90s. "When I went for my interview I checked out the Polo Store, checked out Neiman's. So I became myopically focused."
With what she called "very good" test scores, she got in easily. What? Like it's hard?
Apparently not, though it does turn out that law school isn't for everyone.
In her first week, Brown checked out a meeting of The Women of Stanford Law and realized just how unlikely she was to find someone who shared her love of shopping and flipping through Elle magazine. "The woman who was leading it spent three years at Stanford trying to change the name 'semester' to 'ovester,'" she recalled. (Sound familiar?) "I started laughing and I realized everyone in the room took it very seriously. So I didn't make any friends there."
Or anywhere, really, Brown spending her time between lectures penning letters to family and friends lampooning the personalities that she'd encounter, including "this one particularly horrible Trekkie" who told her to just go home and get married already.
She turned more than 300 pages of notes into Legally Blonde, a feel-good take on the importance of not judging a (text) book by its cover. Her novel—written on pink paper because it gives it a little something extra, don't you think?—was sent "out to studios and publishing houses the same day," she told the Chronicle. It was roundly rejected as a book, but incited a bidding war for the film rights—MGM emerging the victor.
With a then-24-year-old Reese Witherspoon signing on as our pink-loving Gemini vegetarian heroine Elle Woods, "she was so good that you're like, 'Okay, if she signed on for this, this is for real," Selma Blair said during the cast's 2020 reunion, explaining why she eagerly accepting the part as Elle's preppy rival Vivian Kensington.
And yet expectations were still tempered when the comedy opened July 13, 2001, the $141 million box office haul blowing the expected $12 million opening weekend out of the water. Then there were the awards (Golden Globe nods for both the film and Witherspoon) the $125 million grossing 2003 sequel, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde, the 2007 Broadway musical and enough begging and pleading to make Legally Blonde 3a reality.
How's that for showing just how valuable Elle Woods can be? (She once had to judge a tighty-whitey contest for Lambda Kappa Pi. Trust her, she can handle anything.)
To celebrate Witherspoon's 48th birthday March 22, we rounded up our favorite behind-the-scenes secrets from the cast and crew. And we promise it'll be just like your senior year of college, except funner!
This story was originally published on Tuesday, July 13, 2021 at 12 a.m. PT.
Teams have made their big splashes in free agency and made their draft picks, it's time for you to do the same. It's fantasy football mock draft time. Some call this time of year best ball season, others know it's an opportunity to get a leg up on your competition for when you have to draft in August. The staff at Yahoo Fantasy did their first mock draft of the 2024 season to help you with the latter. Matt Harmon and Andy Behrens are here to break it all down by each round and crush some staff members in the process.
For decades, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has maintained a de facto monopoly on positioning, navigation and timing, because it’s cheap and already integrated into billions of devices around the world. The startup plans to launch a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit that would act as a commercial GPS alternative. Xona was founded in 2019 by seven Stanford graduate school alumni; most met during grad school.
OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own models' rules of engagement, whether it's sticking to brand guidelines or declining to make NSFW content. Large language models (LLMs) don't have any naturally occurring limits on what they can or will say.
A year ago, Joselu was a 33-year-old journeyman on a path to anonymity. Now, after two late goals in the Champions League semifinals, he's a Real Madrid hero.
The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) said in an email to affected trademark applicants this week that their private domicile address — which can include their home address — appeared in public records between August 23, 2023 and April 19, 2024. U.S. trademark law requires that applicants include a private address when filing their paperwork with the agency to prevent fraudulent trademark filings.