Tina Fey spent the summers of 2002 and 2003 hunched over an old desk in the musty back room of a rental house on Fire Island. Fueled by Entenmann’s coffee and chocolate donuts, Fey, then the head writer of “Saturday Night Live,” broke the script that became “Big Girls” on her laptop.
“She used to sit around, just sit around and eat donuts and drink coffee, like a secretary from the ’50s or something,” said her husband, composer Jeff Richmond. “Not glamorous, but very conducive to creativity.”
In the two decades since, Fey has turned her first and only screenplay into an empire. Paramount’s original film, based on Rosalind Wiseman’s non-fiction “Queen Bees and Wannabes” earned $130 million during its 2004 theatrical run and helped make its cast, which included Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, superstars. In 2018, a musical stage adaptation with a book by Fey and music by Richmond opened on Broadway. In June, the show will begin West End run. And this week, a movie musical adapted from the previous iterations, and written by Fey, arrives in theaters.
(Last March, Wiseman criticized Fey and Paramount for not involving her in subsequent releases. When asked about the review, Fey said she had no comment.)
But beyond the commercial success of “Mean Girls,” Fey’s script that sounds endlessly — “You can’t sit with us”; “There is no limit”; “I’m a cool mom”; “Stop trying to make fetch happen” — has become embedded in our culture.
“It became part of my vernacular, every sound bite,” said Samantha Jayne, who directed the newest “Mean Girls” with her husband, Arturo Perez Jr., and was a teenager when the 2004 original came out. my DNA”.
The 2024 film mostly follows the characters and story that audiences know by heart, with the addition of song and dance: New kid Cady (Angourie Rice) teams up with outsiders Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) to take down the evil one. Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and the Plastics, until Cady is also drawn into their harmful ways. Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their original roles as Ms. Norbury and Mr. Duvall, and there’s still Mathletes, Spring Fling, and Pink Shirt Wednesdays.
“High school is the one remaining American experience that everyone has,” said Lorne Michaels, who produced the new film along with Fey and others. He and Fey have worked on every version of “Mean Girls” except one widely panoramic 2011 TV movie. “It’s just a central, iconic thing.”
But high school, and the very nature of comedy, has evolved, both on and off screen. Now, rumors have spread on social media. Viral videos are uploaded on TikTok. In the film, Coach Carr (Jon Hamm) no longer has sexual relations with underage students, and North Shore High has no cafeteria cliques defined by race. With each iteration of “Mean Girls,” Fey has tried to keep her script razor-sharp, yet relevant and palatable to new generations and viewers.
“As long as I don’t accidentally make Monkey Jesus — you know, like when that lady tried to make that painting — then we’ll be in good shape,” Fay said.
In a recent video interview, Fey discussed her 20-plus year journey with the material and what’s next. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
What was your initial vision of what a ‘Mean Girls’ movie could be when you read it article 2002 about Wiseman’s book and adolescent relational aggression?
First I thought, Oh! It will be about this teacher. It will be like “Stand and Deliver”. And the more I read the book, the more research I did, [I realized] the girls were the most interesting part. The true stories of how the young women behaved were insidious, but also somewhat funny in their wicked wit.
How has your technical writing process changed over the years?
The rookie mistake I made was asking to adapt a book that had no story. I had these amazing attitudes and anecdotes, but no characters or story. So I literally read Syd Fieldreading “Save the cat”, he had a million index cards. And then going on stage, technically, you get a three-act and you have to break it into two acts. You have no voice, you have no close-ups. Things should be playing on the balcony. Now, with the movie musical, you can have all the things in your arsenal: You can play things only with people’s eyes. You can make people sing about their feelings. Jokes can be big and visual, or they can be Easter eggs.
As someone who was in high school in 2004, seeing the tagline “This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls” on music movie trailer it was a shock.
This came from Paramount’s marketing department. I want to console millennials by telling them that it’s just an expression in the English language. And also, when the movie came out, some older than you went. Some 26 or 27 year olds may have been in the theater with you.
Much of the comedy in the original “Mean Girls” has held up incredibly well. But there are some jokes and stories about race, sexuality, and pedophilia that didn’t make it, and were changed for later versions. How do you approach updating your writing?
I was writing in the early 2000s based on my experience as a teenager in the late 80s. To no one’s surprise, the jokes have changed. You don’t drill the way you used to drill. Even if your intention has always been the same, it’s just not how you do it anymore, which is okay. I’m a big believer that you can find new ways to make jokes with less random side-splitting.
Branding is central to “Mean Girls,” and the way they drop those bars —
If we actually had people talking to each other the way they talked to each other in 1990, everyone would be in the hospital. People were really tough. People are still horrible, they’re just more likely to type it anonymously. I’d like to attend, but not teach, a graduate school class on the ways in which people are just as divisive and horrible as they’ve ever been, but now negotiate it with virtue.
There are specific word changes throughout the new script. Like you the Burn Book, Dawn Schweitzer is now called “horned shrimp” instead of “fat virgin”. What happens in the selection of these terms?
I know even Regina would know what not to fly. She will find a way to cause pain to people, but she is not going to get herself into trouble. For example, there is a joke in the original film when Janice gets up on the table and Regina says, “Oh my god, it’s her dream come true: diving into a huge pile of girls.” It was mine and Sam Jayne’s sense that Regina wouldn’t try it now because she knows the kids around her would be like, “That’s homophobic.” She would know she wasn’t homophobic, and hopefully she wouldn’t really be is homophobic.
I was waiting for Ms. Norbury’s speech telling the girls to stop calling each other “sluts” and “sluts” and it didn’t happen. But I realized they didn’t call each other those words much in this scenario anyway.
Some of it just had to go faster to make room for songs. This is not necessarily a moral modification.
Gen Z has seen body positivity and body neutral movements. When Regina puts on weight in the movie musical, the other students’ initial reaction is positive — but then she’s still embarrassed. Why was weight important to still be an issue here?
Look at the famous people influencing Gen Z, and we’re still talking about their bodies. We either attack other people for talking about it, praise people for being a size, or question how they got to a different size. It seemed like a line for me to understand. We still want to talk about how weird and messy everything is for girls, while acknowledging that these standards aren’t mandatory — but a lot of people still subscribe to them.
Have there been any cultural changes you’ve seen updating the script from the 2018 scene to now?
If anything, these attitudes have gone far beyond young women. It’s in our policy. It’s in everything. People now like to sugar coat and be very virtuous pointing out why you are a problem, but it’s the same behavior. It’s still, “Don’t look at me. Look at them. I am doing well. I may not have nice hair, but she’s fat.”
We learned so much with it [stage] they show that there need be no rigidity in the casting of these roles, in terms of how they look and how they identify. This story works with a lot of interesting permutations. Anyone with charisma is a good Regina. Anyone who looks like they might break up might be a lovely Gretchen.
How do you stay in tune with what teenagers are doing today? Is this through your daughters Alice, 18, and Penelope, 12?
I polled some young people I know, including some young people who live in my house. Things like, “Should the Burn Book be a physical book or should it be a Snapchat or something?” They were saying, “No, don’t hurt us. It’s a book. Tell the story. We understand.”
Have you toyed with the idea of making a sequel that would bring back the original cast to play their characters as adults?
I have a feeling Paramount would love this. I haven’t given this much thought. To me, part of why the stakes are so high in the story is because everyone is so young and the emotions are huge and the love is huge and the friendship is huge in a way [that it isn’t with] middle aged moms. I like to write for middle-aged people, but I don’t know.
There were References that you tried to bring back all four original female leads in small roles in this film. What would that look like?
We’ll never know. They are busy people so it didn’t work out, but we tried and we all love each other.
What’s the appeal of going back to that material versus doing something different?
I have other things I would like to do. But I’m so grateful that this movie seemed to stick with people. When I look at it, I remember how hard I worked on it in the beginning. I feel like his bricks and mortar was the best possible job I could at the time. It’s not perfect, but it holds water.