‘Bring It On’ Still Has Spirit—And a Message—20 Years Later

Not everyone agreed. Bendinger pitched her idea 27 times before a small production company, Beacon Pictures, gave her the green light. As she developed the script, Bendinger wanted to seamlessly blend comedy and commentary. She thought back to her Spin days doing back-to-back interviews with Public Enemy and Salt-N-Pepa, two hip-hop acts with drastically different missions. The former had a specific, political message; the latter prioritized entertainment. Bring It On needed to be both. It needed to have medicine inside the candy. 

Achieving that wasn’t difficult. Bendinger just wrote the story she dreamed up in her head as authentically as possible. “I honestly wasn’t thinking about [the film’s lofty themes],” she says about how she approached the script. “I was weaving this thing together, trying to make it entertaining and trying to make it as clear as possible.” 

The entertainment—the candy—came in the form of Bendinger’s natural wit and penchant for puns, which she credits to growing up with a father who worked in advertising. Missy’s (Eliza Dushku) “I transferred from Los Angeles” song and classic lines like “the whore in horrifying” were all excavated from the campiest corners of Bendinger’s mind—one she says was also shaped by her circle of gay friends. 

The dialogue in Bring It On is flamboyant and over-the-top. As a gay man, I’'m drawn toward that kind of language—Bendinger is too. “I think having been a teenage girl, only child, divorced parents, no family, around adults a lot, I always gravitated toward the gay friend in the room,” she tells me. 

She cites one of Bring It On’s most iconic lines—“You put the itch in bitch”—as an example. “I remember where I was when I thought of it,” she says. She was struggling coming up with a quippy line when she turned to her friend Greg, who was sitting with her. “The way he would turn a phrase!  I just said, ‘You put the itch in bitch.’ Everybody [in the room] dropped their jaw and went, ‘Oh, my God, that’s brilliant.’”

Another good story: the origin of Bring It On’s opening chant, which, yes, Bendinger wrote herself. She was in New York City and talking with a friend—journalist David Coleman—about a project she was working on about modeling. “I was like, ‘People hate models. People hate them on sight. They’re thin, they’re beautiful….’” His response? “Hate us because we’re beautiful? Well, we don’t like you either.”