Image: MTV Films.If you were a teen in the early '00s, Crossroads probably made it into your slumber party movie rotation at some point or another. Despite the fact that the coming-of-age movie — starring Britney Spears, a then-unknown Zoe Saldana, and Orange Is The New Black's Taryn Manning — was panned by critics, it was beloved by a select segment of audiences all the same.
Crossroads follows three young girls from a small town in Georgia who take a cross-country trip to fulfill wishes they'd made as children. Lucy (Spears), Kit (Saldana), and Mimi (Manning) are all searching for something. And — not to get too far into plot spoiler territory — one of them is pregnant, one of them is engaged to an aloof dude across the country, and one of them has a dream of becoming a recording artist. But even if the plot's a little predictable, the making of the movie is not. Broadly. just did an excellent breakdown of the flick, and called out quite a few notable items that you might not know about. Like...
1. The fact that a then-unknown Shonda Rhimes was the screenwriter on Crossroads.
2. Rhimes' Crossroads spec script was a retelling of Oedipus's Antigone, reset in the '30s in an African-American town.
3. Tamra Davis was the director on the project. A few other films that she helmed? Half Baked and Billy Madison, among others.
4. If Spears hadn't done Crossroads, she may have ended up in an MTV Films adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Spears would have played Alice in the movie-musical, which was supposed to co-star *NSYNC, as well as other pop acts.
5 . Saldana messed up her audition for Crossroads. Her agent was so set on her nabbing the part that he flew her out on his own frequent flier miles.
6. Anson Mount, who plays Ben in the movie, wasn't sure he wanted to be in a project that starred Spears. Guess who convinced him into it? Robert De Niro.
7. Crossroads ended up being a heavily female staffed production. But that wasn't intentional. "I just hired the best people for this particular job," said Ann Carli, the movie's producer.
8. Spears was definitely not a diva on set: Apparently she had just two requests — Lunchables and edamame.
9. Justin Timberlake actually spent a lot of time on set alongside his then-girlfriend. Davis remembers the pair were really sweet together; she also recalled that Spears had a notebook she scribbled in a whole lot. "All she was writing was 'Britney and Justin,' all these little curlicues," Davis, who still has the book, remembered. "It was like looking at a teenage girl's musings — hearts and butterflies and Justin's name."
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