"Crossroads"

Main Characters

As ten year-olds, Lucy, Mimi and Kit are best friends who bury a dream box that is to be opened at midnight on the day they graduate from high school. During the next eight years, they drift apart and although they are on speaking terms, they are anything but best friends.
Lucy (Britney Spears) is the valedictorian beauty with a zero social life, to the point of never having been to a football game. Her father, Pete (Dan Aykroyd) is a single parent, who owns a local auto shop and has saved his money for her to go to medical school. Lucy wants to be a singer, and does karaoke in her bedroom, when she's not dreaming of reuniting with her mother Caroline (Kim Cattrall), who left them for a better life in Arizona. Lucy is also thinking of having all-the-way sex with nerd Henry (Justin Long). With the topics of music, med school, her mother and when to lose her virginity, Lucy has a lot on her mind.
Mimi (Taryn Manning) was the trailer trash girl in the trio, now five months pregnant from a date rape she's keeping a secret. She has decided to hook up with Ben (Anson Mount) and travel to California after graduation. She wants to audition for a singing contract. Ben is just off parole and can now leave the state of Georgia. He's a guitarist in a local rock band who wants to lead his own group.
Kit (Zoe Saldana) is the most popular girl in school and stuck on herself, big time. She started out as a young chubby kid who went to fat farm camps in the summer at the urging of her mother. She thinks that her second worse time in life was going to the camp and the first was reaching the goal and being envied by her mother. She's currently engaged to a guy who is now in college in California, and who may be doing things that might cause her to rerank the worse events in her life.
The three girls come together for the road trip. Lucy wants to go to Arizona to see her mother; Mimi to California for her audition and to put her foot in the Pacific Ocean; and Kit to see her boyfriend, who has announced he is not coming back to Georgia for the summer. As with any road trip movie, big surprises are in store for all.

Positive Elements: Kit, Lucy and Mimi overcome their differences and, through lots of heartfelt confessions and girl-power chitchat, develop a deep respect and affection for one another. We learn that Ben spent time in jail for nobly rescuing someone from physical abuse.

Mimi responsibly avoids alcohol because she is an expectant mother, and speaks of her unborn child in terms that humanize the baby - a precious life she intends to keep. The pain of divorce and the effects of selfish, parental abandonment on children is made clear when Lucy's attempt to find her mother ends in heartbreak. Tempted to surrender her virginity on graduation night, Lucy decides against it.

Mimi's plight, a consequence of poor judgment and alcohol, should make young girls think twice about accepting a ride with someone who's been drinking. Unfortunately, several of these positives get squelched by mixed messages.

Sexual Content: Lucy and her nerdy lab partner, Henry, prepare to lose their virginity together in a hotel room (she reveals herself to him in lingerie and climbs in bed while Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" plays on the stereo). Henry fears going to college a virgin, saying that guys who do are "treated like lepers." Even though she decides against going all the way with Henry, Lucy has sex with Ben after they reach California.

Behind her bedroom door, Lucy belts out a Madonna tune while wearing next to nothing. On the road, the girls play up their sex appeal to win a karaoke contest. The song they sing is Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," about a girl who takes a stranger home for an implied sexual encounter.

Spears' younger fans probably aren't mature enough to process the film's emotionally charged "lessons" about date-rape, teen pregnancy and dealing with miscarriage.

Without using "the word," the girls giggle about Lucy's admission that she has never touched a boy's penis. While not blatantly sexual, the fact that strangers Lucy and Ben share even separate beds alone in a hotel room sets a dangerous example of compromise.

Violent Content: Kit and Mimi get into a slap-and-claw scuffle until Lucy breaks it up. Mimi decks a guy who makes a crass comment about her low moral standards. Kit punches her fiance for two-timing her. Mimi falls down a flight of stairs and suffers a miscarriage. Ben belts a guy getting too frisky with Lucy on the dance floor. Without getting explicit, Mimi talks about being raped.

Profane Language: About 30 mild profanities, several appearing in song lyrics (no "s"-words or "f"-words). Mimi flips a guy the finger.

Drug & Alcohol Content: The girls get tipsy downing combinations of alcohol and fruit punch. Patrons at a bar and Kit's fiance drink beer. Alcohol is mentioned in conjunction with a rape.

Negative Elements: Young girls giddily confess that they've lied to their parents. Interspersed with outtakes, an immodestly dressed Britney Spears sings her song "Overprotected" (a belligerent declaration of independence) over the end credits. Other questionable lyrics embedded in the film include Sheryl Crow’s line, "If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad" and a song repeatedly urging a woman to shake her "as*". A group of young women are turned on by the intimation that Ben did time for murder.

Britney's "Crossroads" History

The movie "Crossroads" was born in the middle of a store Fred Segal, where Britney loves to shop. One day, she and Felicia were hanging out and there Britney said she wanted do a movie but not just any kind of movie. She wanted to do something different, something that felt real and important to her. She had been reading a whole bunch of scripts that people had sent her. Britney wanted friendship to be the main theme of the movie and she liked the idea of a road trip.
Larry Rudolph hooked Britney up with Ann, a movie producer, who introduced her to a screenwriter named Shonda. She wrote the HBO movie "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge," which starred Halle Berry. Shonda and Britney actually spent their first afternoon back at Fred Segal, just talking but not about the movie. It was more Shonda getting to know Britney. In fact, she did more observing and listening than talking.
An unusual way to write a movie, but it worked. She got the feel where Britney was at, she picked up on exactly what Britney’s vision was. After that, she set about writing. They would talk every once in a while, and she wrote a script
They made sure some of the movie could be filmed in Louisiana, where Britney's from and where her family lives. It's where Britney feels most comfortable and she could go home every night while they filmed there.

Britney was involved with the whole generalization of the girls going on the road trip and she had a lot of input into their characters and what each one was going through. Just the whole story line, as far as why Lucy was going and why Kit was going. Shonda Rimes came in and helped Britney elaborate on that. It was kind of a combined effort between both of them. Britney came up with the general idea, but the whole story and all the ideas Shonda Rimes helped her with.

At the very beginning they weren't even going to have any music, Britney wasn't even going to sing. Her initiative was just to concentrate on the role and the movie and the story but then they started to work on the script and Britney thought to spice it up a little bit with a song or two.

Casting & Chemistry

Part of making certain that audiences discover Spears' talent as an actress just as her co-stars did, and to ensure that moviegoers experience "Crossroads" as the coming of-age adventure that the filmmakers envisioned, involved the fine art of casting. Some roles, such as the 10-year-old Lucy, were easy to cast, since Spears' little sister, Jamie Lynn, not only looks like Spears, but she's just the right age. Other roles, however, like her core group of friends and especially her love interest were a lot more difficult.
"We searched high and low for the right girls to play Kit and Mimi. It was like putting together a band because these girls really had to be in tune with one another," recalls Davis.
"They had to be real girls," Carli adds, "and it had to be believable that they could have been friends."
To that end, Davis and Carli spent about two months working with casting directors, viewing screen tests and doing in-person auditions until finally they were ready to narrow things down. "We found Taryn first, and we brought her and three other girls into a hotel room to do some scenes with Britney. And happily, she was not only Britney's first choice, but Ann's and mine as well," recalls Davis.
"The three other girls were fine actresses, and anyone of them would have made a great Mimi," adds Carli, " But Tamra and I both instinctively felt that Taryn was the right choice. Still, we had the three others read with Britney just in case our gut instinct didn't pan out, and luckily, it did."
In casting Zoe Saldana, Davis and Carli wanted to see how she meshed with Manning first, and once again, Saldana stood out. Zoe and Taryn hit it off immediately, but since Britney was on her way to Sweden to do a recording, it was via videotape that Zoe and Britney first met.
Carli remembers showing Saldana's screen test to Spears in the lounge of the Delta terminal just before she took off. "She instantly agreed with Tamra and me that Zoe was the perfect choice. And that's how we found our Kit," says Carli.
While casting the two girls who would play Spears' friends was crucial, casting the right guy as her love interest was essential to bringing out one of Lucy's major crossroads - discovering her sexuality. "There had to be chemistry between Britney and whoever played Ben," Davis says. Huge chemistry. Carli couldn't agree more, adding that they also were looking for someone who would not only look good opposite Spears, but who could also hold his own with her. "We wanted a rugged-looking guy's guy to play Ben, not a model," explains Carli. "In fact, we purposely stayed away from the Adonis type that everyone imagines a Britney Spears could have, and we went with a very handsome guy who young men could relate to and who regular girls could believe was attainable."
According to Carli, Anson Mount was the perfect choice, but how he interacted with Spears was still key to his capturing the role, and ironically, Robert De Niro played an important part... literally. "Anson couldn't get away to meet Britney because he was making a film with Robert De Niro in New York, so Tamra and I flew there to meet him, and once we saw that he could be our Ben we had Britney meet with him. And it was funny, I learned later that in order to help Anson prepare for the meeting, De Niro actually read lines with him, taking the part of Lucy!"
As it turned out, De Niro's participation paid off, and with the last of the four members of the core ensemble set, and with Dan Aykroyd and Kim Cattrall signed on to portray Lucy's parents, and Justin Long ready to play Lucy's lovesick lab partner, Henry, filming began on schedule in the spring of 2001. 

The Production

When the star of your movie is an international singing sensation who isn't just booked in cities across the United States, but who's also performing in countries around the world, finding a window of opportunity to shoot a film is next to impossible. So, needless to say, fitting "Crossroads" into Spears' schedule was a bit of production magic... and the magician in charge was producer Ann Carli.
"We were definitely all on a very specific time schedule because just prior to coming to rehearsals Spears was in Sweden recording the songs that we hoped would be featured in the film. Then, three days before she was supposed to come to the set and be Lucy, she was scheduled to shoot a Pepsi commercial to air during the Super Bowl. I mean, it was crazy," remembers Carli.
Happily, the parameters of Spears' busy schedule were negotiated and director Tamra Davis set to work with Carli by her side for nearly every day of the shoot. From the start, according to the cast and crew, "collaborative" and "comfortable" were the two best words to describe the atmosphere on the set. "Tamra's directorial style is like flannel pajamas, sort of warm and fuzzy. She actually became like a girlfriend to these young actors. At the same time, she was very centered and secure about her work, and so democratic. She knows what she wants, but she's confident enough about her own vision to listen to other people's suggestions," Carli says.
Speaking from the point of view of someone who knows what it's like to be pulled in several directions at once, Britney Spears found herself in awe of Davis' attention to detail.
"I have so much respect for her," says Britney. "There's so many things she has to think about, and that's hard to do when nine million people - from the crew, to the wardrobe department, to the actors - are asking you questions."
Spears also appreciates the way Davis stuck to a teenager's really and how she was so open to amending a line that didn't feel right. "She was so cool about letting us change things if we felt uncomfortable about what a teenager might really say," remembers Britney. Because of the nature of the film, much of mc shoot was spent on the road traveling to and from the four location sites — New Orleans, Los Angeles, Palmdale, California and Hammond, Louisiana, approximately 40 minutes outside of Spears' hometown of Kentwood. In fact, some of the most important and most difficult scenes took place in the car.
"I got a lot of experience directing driving shots when I did "Guncrazy," so I know the process well. Actually, it's kind of complicated to get close-up shots in a moving vehicle, but you need them in order to see an actor's gestures and to hear conversations. You also need them to achieve a feeling of intimacy that makes the shot work. So what we did was we put the actors and the car they're supposedly driving on a process trailer, or flatbed. This allows my crew to light the actors and position cameras wherever we need to get the best angle," says Davis.
Davis, then, is in the vehicle pulling the trailer, and she keeps tabs on everything by watching the actors on a monitor, and communicating with them via walkie-talkies. "It takes a lot of film to shoot these scenes," says Davis. "You see, it's kind of hard to pull over with an entire crew and tons of police riding in front and in back of you."
Another challenge of shooting a road picture is that rarely is the crew shooting a scene in the actual place that's supposed to be depicted. For example, Palmdale stood in for Arizona, and the karaoke bar in New Orleans was actually a nightclub in a Los Angeles. To achieve that "cheat," Davis says she scouted out bars in New Orleans to get the proper feel of a Louisiana bar. Then, with the help of her production designer, Waldemar Kalinowski who did "Leaving Las Vegas," and her cinematographer, Eric Edwards, who worked on "My Own Private Idaho," they added the textures and mood to the place, so that audiences perceive they are actually in Louisiana.