Based Upon: (11/30/03) This movie got its start in April, 2002 when Paramount hired Tina Fey to adapt a New York Times Magazine article called 'Girls Just Want to Be Mean' by Margaret Talbot, which profiled the efforts of Rosalind Wiseman, who counsels preteen and teen girls about the politics of girl cliques and snobbery. This news was in advance of the publication a month later of Rosalind Wiseman's own book called 'Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence" (the rights to which Paramount also optioned as a source).

Premise: A teenage girl, Cady (Lohan), who has been away on safari with her parents, arrives at a new high school in Illinois, where she is accepted into a A-list clique of girlfriends (McAdams, Chabert, others). When she attracts the interest of the ex-boyfriend (Bennett) of one of her new friends, however, she is marked for punishment by the rules of the clique, which uses practices like nasty gossip, banishment from their lunch table, three-way calling (conversations between two people with a third person secretly listening in), cruel Internet messages and "the silent treatment" to get their point across. Soon, Cady finds herself using the same tactics in retaliation against her so-called friends... (Gasteyer plays Cady's mother; Fey plays a counselor for teen girls patterned after the author of the book; Meadows plays the school's 10th grade dean).