Background
The movie is set in the fictional town of Mount Rose, Minnesota, which in turn is based on Rosemount where writer Lona Williams grew up. The film was originally titled "Dairy Queens" but was changed for legal reasons.
The characters in the movie all sport exaggerated, over-the-top parodies of Minnesota accents. The film was shot throughout the Carver County area, mainly in Waconia, Minnesota, although names of real Minnesota communities were shown on the sashes of contestants later in the movie.
News reporter Diane Sawyer is mentioned throughout the film as Kirsten Dunst's character Amber Atkins's idol, as Sawyer was a former beauty pageant winner. Amber's other idols include her beauty pageant mother who raised her alone in a trailer park, and the previous year's pageant winner who is hospitalized for anorexia. Competing in the beauty pageant for a scholarship is juxtaposed against the opportunities that boys have in leaving Mount Rose, such as hockey scholarships and prison.
Two Melissa Manchester songs are featured in the film as songs used in the talent portion by contestants. Mary lip-syncs "Don't Cry Out Loud", while Jenelle sings and signs "Through the Eyes of Love". Fanfare for the Common Man is played to introduce the parade for the rigged competition and the plight of Hank.
Soundtrack
Release
The movie was originally scheduled to be released on April 30, 1999 before being pushed to July 23 of that year.
Critical response
The film received mixed reviews.
Allison Janney and Denise Richards in particular received praise for their performances from a number of critics. Dennis Harvey of Variety called the film "a fitfully amusing satire that would have gained a lot of mileage from just a tad more subtlety." Roger Ebert liked the idea of the film, but wrote that the script failed to translate to the screen and was not funny enough, due to subtle miscalculations of production and performance.
Jeff Vice of the Deseret News criticized the film for being derivative, comparing it to the 1975 pageant comedy Smile, the 1996 film Fargo, and the mockumentary Waiting for Guffman. Entertainment Weekly gave the film a D grade, and compared the film unfavorably to Smile and The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom.
In July 2019, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of its release, Drop Dead Gorgeous was released for streaming for the first time on Hulu, which was "met with a host of celebratory tweets, particularly among women and queer people, who have long recognized it as a cult classic", according to The Independent's Adam White. Tolentino summed up the movie as "...offensive, for sure—completely awful, really, and possibly deadly. It is also irreplaceable, hilarious, surprisingly tender, and lavishly, magnificently absurd."
Adam White further praised the movie's radical departure from lighthearted teen movies of the late 1990s, stating that it "was made for a generation of freaks and outsiders, whose ambitions, oddities, queerness and poverty were otherwise ignored by anything similarly mainstream or funny." He added that it was "acidic and truthful about beauty, class and ambition, satirised all-American moralism and blew up Denise Richards, then fresh from Wild Things, as she rode a giant paper-maché swan." Alex Zaragoza of Teen Vogue echoed other reviews in praising the movie's appeal to outsiders and misfits, and departing from the teen rom-com tropes of other movies released that year like 10 Things I Hate About You and She's All That.