'Crossroads' starring Britney Spears: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the show that brings you the little known facts and secret history behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your Divas of detail. Yeah, that'll do it. I was gonna do more, but that's fine. My name is Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Heigel. And you know, folks, we don't talk about this enough on this show. I know I'm sort of known as the honorary Boomer of TMI with all the talk about the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and I'm doing a new show on the Rolling Stones. But secretly, now many of you know this, I'm a pop fanatic. I guess you saw a little bit of that in the Barbie Girl episode. One of the great joys of beginning my life as an entertainment journalist and being forced to engage with contemporary pop culture for the first time was that it turned me on to some truly great pop music. And I have this pet theory, Heigel. I'm interested here. We have to say about this that two thousand and seven to twenty fourteen was a golden era for pop. It was a period that I kind of roughly bookend between Rihanna's Umbrella and Taylor Swift's nineteen eighty nine album. You've got Teenage Dream with Katie Perry and it's record tying five number ones. That's up there with Michael Jackson's Thriller. You've got those great early Gaga records. You've got Miley Cyrus and her pre Dead Pets Party in the USA Seven Things I Hate About You era, You've got David Getta, You've got Beyonce's Won two Punch with Sasha Fierce and four which has Got Love on Top, which is my favorite Beyonce song. Rihanna's truly peerless string of singles like Only Girl in the World. In SMM, I've gone into a fugue state and I forget what this episode's about. But what do you think about that theory? I think it's a pop golden era, which of those things doesn't belong. Why did you put David Getta in there? He has this great song with Kelly Rowland Coldwin Love takes Over and it's incredible. I mean, I think your theory holds water.

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Speaker 2: I think to that and fourteen is interesting because to me that's sort of the year when dubstep takes over and like everything starts having like drops and you know, obviously you mentioned Rihanna and the Calvin Harris thing is in there, but yeah, that's when, to me you really start getting the E. D. M influence and everything that wasn't necessarily there before.

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Speaker 1: That's really it's right, that's the year I think around when like the Justin Bieber song that I hate with Skillick's I think sorry for the other one? Yeah, I know one of those, the one sorry is the only Justin Bieber song. I actually like that song. That song or what's it? Ware are you? I hate it so much that I don't even know the title, but yeah, no, I agree with that. And what was that song Omni Cheerleader. I mean, there's they all blended together for me for a while. There's and there's like Marshmallow, there's in Dead Mouse, Like I don't think Dead Mouse had any pop hits, but that all sort of blended into the milannge of like white men standing behind h things, pressing play on a laptop to a bunch of flashing lights that had that Really, I mean, I mostly remember people like flipping out over scrillics. But to get back to your original point, Yes, I think it's interesting. I think it's also.

00:03:14
Speaker 2: It's an interesting timeline because it also sort of it sort of gets out of the teen pop era and into like and this sort of I mean, the Katy Perry stuff is kind of the last gasp of the Swedes domination, right because now we're getting into like auturist female pop with your like Lady Gagas and your Beyonces, where there are these like self contained visual and musical units. I mean not self contained. Beyonce has thirty people credits on the song. But you take my meaning, Uh, there's no Speeds, which is my.

00:03:52
Speaker 1: Only swedeless swedeless existence. Yeah, but yeah, that's no, that's and and it's it's interesting because you start seeing the co writing landscape become a little deluded after twenty fourteen, like the dominance of the aforementioned.

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Speaker 2: Let's just call it the Swedish school, mostly because like, oh you forgot Kesha in there, but mostly because you know, Doctor Luke was canceled and God Lover. I think Taylor Swift really changed a lot of it by being you know, her own writer and then on the strength of that enlisting producers to augment her vision, you know, but yeah, I mean like you then and then God help us, then we get into the Antonov era.

00:04:38
Speaker 1: How much do you hate Jack Antonoff because you frequently get mistaken for him. It's not a bad thing. I was. I was taping up on the other day on Zoom and somebody said, oh my god, you're you're you're Tim the Toolman, Taylor's associate on Tool Time, Richard.

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Speaker 2: Carn Yeah, al, I really, I mean Antonov to me is a perfect storm of like personal unlikability and uh and esthetic choices that Caleb Gammon video where he like he goes down every new song on the new record and is like, that's Jack, that's Jack, that's Jack.

00:05:14
Speaker 1: Within a nano second.

00:05:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it really crystallized everything I hate about his production style. And then the beatles that help cover he put out or what was it Hard.

00:05:23
Speaker 1: Days Night and he's like on a bus for some reason. Yeah. Yeah, the bleachers thing.

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Speaker 2: I mean in the annals of like counterintuitive, let's completely rearrange the song covers.

00:05:35
Speaker 1: It's interesting, but it's not. It's there's nothing. It's a guitar, bass and drums. The only thing is to talk about on a book.

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Speaker 2: Yes, no, I know, I'm saying in the annals of like of taking a cover and reimagining it in a way that will not suggest anything about the original, that is, it has earned its place in there.

00:05:57
Speaker 1: Objectively, it is a piece of shit. Degree, I think the only thing that's I think we're in a post let's cover a song in a weird way, maybe because of movie trailers where you just slow down a happy pop song with like, you know, can of low piano and bass register, single piano notes. Yeah, I mean now I think it's just like, oh, we're just gonna do the song kind of like it was maybe like a slightly different tempo. I don't know. I think that like he did nothing interesting with that song, which is keeping in his theme.

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Speaker 2: I liked the saxophone. Yeah, no, I that was a fools there. That was a rookie mistake of me to bring up the Beatles.

00:06:37
Speaker 1: Anyway. But yes, Britney Spears, Yeah, I love pop. I love Swedish era pop. Really, I mean the honorary Swede pop queen of the music world, could you say that about Britney Spears. I'm getting in a dangerous territory here, but we're I think you could. Yeah yeah, I mean hit Me Baby one More Time.

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Speaker 2: Is shot across the bow of the Swedish Is there a bigger Swedish pop song, like a pop song that was written slash produced by Swedish people. I mean one of the n Sync ones or oh maybe or abba if I guess if you're do in global sales. But yeah no, But I do love Britney Spears and she is back in the news these days for some not great reasons, so we've decided to take a celebratory tact. Unfortunately, we miscalculated a little bit by choosing to look at one of the most maligned pieces of media that she's ever been involved with, her two thousand and two film Crossroads, and one that has disappeared from memory. Unless you have a DVD rip of this or you're watching a pirated copy, it apparently does not exist online.

00:07:46
Speaker 1: Same with Spice World too. I don't know if there was just some kind of weird rights issues with like the nineties record industry, or if it was just this is bad. We were young. Now we have a lot of money, and we're older and have more control over our life and we don't want them out there, So justin forever stalinesque purge of Crossroads and Spice World from digital streaming services, which is a shame because Jordan Putin esque putin esque. There's a new guy, there's a new share of it town. I have to hold on the s of my boomer tendencies. Yeah before my Dictator's vintage please but yes. Crossroads two thousand and two, Britney's one and only starring role, released at the height of her fame, shortly after she dropped her third album, Britney in two thousand and one. I think that's my favorite Britney Spears album. That's the one was Slave for You and Overprotected. That album did a lot better than Crossroads, which is sort of universally accepted as not a tremendous piece of work. But you know, I wouldn't hold Britney accountable for that because it's a weird movie. It's a weird choice, I should say for a teen pop star to make her feet your film debut, because it gets very dark and serious at points. It centers around Britney Spears character Lucy. Lucy Wagner I believe is her name and her childhood friends. They take a cross country road trip to Los Angeles and along the way they tackle issues of teen pregnancy, parental abandonment, fear of getting murdered, burgeoning, sexuality, and they do some karaoke, which is fun. So you have you've never seen this? I know last night you were trying to look it up and you were unable to find it.

00:09:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I I had no reason to.

00:09:37
Speaker 1: Well, I watched it in high school because a girl I liked it, and there it is. I said I would go watch it with her. So, but it's a intense movie.

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Speaker 2: It's a weird time capsule. I mean you look at the cast. So we saw Donna, Tarren Manning, dan Aykroyd, Kim Control, justin Long like Cuomo d cameos is he's a bar owner.

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Speaker 1: Uh, it is bizarre. Bowling for soup is in this movie. Dan Ackward was like the official movie dad of the nineties. I really want to pull up. I mean, maybe I'm just thinking to my girl, but I feel like he was the dad in Let's see here. Oh, I guess maybe there were two my girls North. You know, you know what, now I'm looking at this it's not as many as I thought. Strike that, strike that, reverse it. Yeah. Brittany Yourself is described Crossroads by saying, it's quote about this journey that the three of us best friends take, finding ourselves and what we want out of life and getting our friendship back. Friends are all you have at the end of the day and your boyfriend breaks up with you, who do you call? Ghostbusters, Dan Ashwood, your girlfriend, That's who. I just love that message. So that is very sweet. Well, from the surprising scribe, between Brittany's debut to the admirably hands on role she had while working on the script, her adorably humble culinary demands during the shoot, and the surprising role that Robert de Niro had, and rounding out the cast, here is everything you didn't know about Crossroads, starring Britney Spears. Appropriately enough, Crossroads is a group effort from a huge number of talented women. The movie was produced by Anne Carly, who had just left Jive Records, which is famously Britney Spears' record label, to pursue a career in film, and she took a job at Will Smith's production company, will Smith Enterprises, and it was there that she came across the spec script written by a then unknown writer named Shonda Rhymes. Yes, before she gave the world Gray's Anatomy, Scandal, How To Get Away with Murder and Bridgerton, Rhymes got her big break writing Crossroads, which was her first major screenwriting credit. I think she worked on a made for TV movie about the life of Dorothy Dandridge star How To Vary, But this was her first big screen project. Yes, but the specscript was sadly not an early version of Crossroads. It was an adaptation of Sophocle's ancient Greek tragedy Antigony, set in an African American town in the nineteen thirties, and Ann Carly was extremely impressed with the script. She later said, the writing shook me. It was so good, and she tried to get this movie off the ground but to no avail. So then she turned to Shanda and said, what producers have said to writers since time immemorial when things weren't going well, what do you think about Britney Spears.

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Speaker 2: That must have just done that must have just put it a very specific dagger in Shonda Rhime's heart. An adaptation of Antigony set in a pre civil rights Southern Town and someone turns and goes, what do you think about having turned this into a Britney vehicle.

00:12:55
Speaker 1: Given Anne's connection to Britney via Jive Records, it makes sense that she'd want to pursue some sort of project with her. By this point in i'd say two thousand and two thousand and one, Brittany had sent the music industry a light with two number one albums maybe one more time and oops, I did it again, and was in the midst of recording her third album, Britney and and Carly. She'd apparently seen Britney's appearance on SNL and was so impressed that she felt Brittany had a potential for a crossover career. Like Will Smith. I'm surprised she was surprised because she had the whole Mickey Mouse Club background, like she was made for that kind of sketch environment, which, to be fair, is probably where she should have stayed. Sketches and song and dance. And I don't know Brittany. At this point, she hadn't been in any movies other than a cameo as a flight attendant in the two thousand and one comedy long Shot, written by now disgraced boy band Impisario Lou Pearlman. He supposedly wrote it as a vehicle for his acts. I had never heard of this movie. It looks almost like a direct to TVD release, features a score by Laylo Riggan Schiffrin, Mission Impossible theme, and all these other great movie themes. I just well, he seems like a real like I'll do it. Yeah, see sure, I'll do it. Yeah, there's the check coming through. Great the Michael Kane of movie scores. But h yeah. Shanda, apparently, at least out Loud, was not offended by the what about Brittaney suggestion. She was impressed with Britney's stage presence, telling Vice for their incredible Crossroads retrospective called not a hit, not yet a cult classic. I remember being seventeen and going to see Madonna in concert and feeling the same way when I saw Brittany. So Ann, Carly and Sean the Rhimes decided to pursue creating a road movie with Brittany as the star. And when Carly approached her former boss, the founder of Jive Records, Clive Calder, about casting Brittany in a film, he said, Hey, if she wants to do it, I'll pay for it, and he was ultimately pony up some ten million dollars, which is sort of unheard of. I guess maybe he had his eye to a soundtrack deal or something, but yeah, it's kind of nuts to just bankroll that. And then they got a then Nason MTV Films involved, which seems like a kind of a good idea. It's a nice synergy there, and Carly paid them a visit, and as luck would have it, MTV Films were in the midst of trying to develop an idea for Brittany themselves. Kind of genius, kind of terrible, you know, in the words of spinal Tap, that's such a fine line between stupid and clever. It's a musical update of Alice in Wonderlands that would star Britney presumably as Alice, and feature other hot pop acts of the era, including in Sync and I believe Backstreet Boys. Can we fantasy cast this for a moment? Oh yeah, Joey Patona is the caterpillar.

00:15:47
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously I was gonna have the who the tattooed ones. Aj McLean and Chris Fitzpatrick are tweetledee and tweedledumb.

00:15:56
Speaker 1: That's good, obvious, that's good. Okay. I was gonna say Aj McClean is the dormouse because he always seems like, oh, kind of sleepy. Who's the chesser cat? Oh? Lance, it's generous, Justin Timberlake. Oh, there's got to be a bigger role for Justin, is there not? Maybe not?

00:16:19
Speaker 2: There's so much Yeah, but there's so much screen time for the chessure and Justin has actually acted more than anyone else that we've just mentioned.

00:16:26
Speaker 1: So, hm, who would be the Queen of Hearts? Is Christina Aguilera? Is that too easy? Oh?

00:16:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah it is. But it would have been the move or Pink or Pink.

00:16:38
Speaker 1: Irving as Off if Irving Azoff was asking for like twenty mil a picture for Christina at that point, which, yeah, you keep would have. So sadly or mercifully, they decided that he Rode movie with Britney Spears was a better bet than this musical version of Alice in Wonderland, and it was scrapped, which I'm still sad about. Also, I don't know why I find this so funny to get a little more scratch for her movie, and Carly got product placement deals with Pepsi, with whom Brittany famously had a deal, and herbal Essences. We both make appearances in Crossroads.

00:17:14
Speaker 2: Herbal Essence is throwing out that two thousands Bundy my favorite. You know, one of my favorite bands is Rancid and no idea you were going with this.

00:17:23
Speaker 1: Well.

00:17:24
Speaker 2: The lead singer Rancid, Tim Armstrong, had a side project with Travis Barker called Transplants, and one of their songs was the theme song to the herbal Essences commercials for a campaign which was like such a hilarious confluence of stuff. It has one of my all time favorite lyrics from Tim Armstrong, which is bombs going off in the Sierra Leone dropping more shots than Karl Malone.

00:17:51
Speaker 1: Oh that's good. I do like that anyway. Here's my sidebar. Much like the Beatles, I have to bring up Rancid as much possible. You don't do it anywhere near as much as I do the Beatles and the Bees Boys. I will say to your credit, well, I'll work harder. Yes, that's my note going forward. We've had some notes from the network. He doesn't mention the Bayarry of punk scene enough. I'm trying to work that. It just want it's natural came up organically. So all this meant approaching Brittany and her mother and her I think, then manager I don't know if he still manages her Larry Rudolph, which that cannot have been a fun task, and pitching her the idea of some sort of road movie. And Britney or at least her team, agreed to do it provided that you take a fairly active role in working out the script. And in every report I've read, this seemed to transcends mere script approval, and it's kind of veered into full scale collaboration with Shonda Rhymes or they were just a lot better at Spin back in two thousand and two. I don't want to do a movie that talks down to my peers, Britney said. I talked to Shonda and told her what I wanted the movie to be about and elaborated on it. It was my little project. When you do a movie, I think you have to be really passionate about it. I was having lots of offers, but this is something my heart was into. She would later clarify that she had a lot of input into the characters and what they were going through, but the storyline was mostly Shanda's doing. She also insisted that any profanities be removed from the script, which I find adorable, very fitting. Seana would later say that the experience of meeting Brittany went a long way and inspiring the direction of the film. She elaborated in her interview with Vice. I was much more interested in the young woman that I met than the image that people had of her. She was a person, and I don't think anyone at that time was looking at her as a person because it's such a misogynistic society. The idea that we could betray her as a three dimensional young woman was interesting to me. To have mean girled her and turned into a caricature, it would have been a mistake, but it's a very This makes me wonder if they were almost trying to go to like eminem route and have it be like kind of gritty and kind of like, oh, this is where she came from because the plot of the movie. Hi, give us a quick rundown of the plot of the movie, just to remind everyone how truly dark it was.

00:20:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of insane looking back at it.

00:20:13
Speaker 1: You know.

00:20:14
Speaker 2: The quick thumbnail sketch is that It follows three young women on a road trip with a strange man who may or may not be a murderer, and during the trip, each of them gets a sort of movie of the week trauma forced on them. Lucy, the Britney Spears character, confronts the mother who abandoned her eighteen years ago. Zoe Saldana's character Kit discovers her fiance has not only cheated on her but raped her best friend, Mimi, who is on the trip. Mimi had become pregnant but lost her child while fleeing her rapist.

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Speaker 1: Well pregnant due to the aforementioned the rape. Yes, yeah, good god, yeah, all of it punctuated by delightful perform means of I love rock and roll. Really, I do have to wonder if this was some kind of like, you know, I mean, not only to show her range, but also like, oh maybe people like like I mean, like eight Miles, a thinly disguised version of EM and m maybe they thought like, oh, this is the version of the world that people think Britney came from. Because it was film near her hometown.

00:21:22
Speaker 2: And I mean, I will say that that that the you know, New York magazine had that incredible. Jamie Spears like deep Dive a few months back, and his yeah, his his family tree is like Southern Gothic, so this is like not far off, like his great his grandfather killed his grandmother and his mother committed suicide. Like it really it gets into like Cormick McCarthy territory. I don't think that's exact details, but look it up. It's on It's it's a New York magazine feature. Really incredible reporting, but yeah, I mean it is it is it. It does pressage some of the horrific gut punches that Shonda's work on Graze and Scandal and so forth would would take. But you know, the funnier part of this thought experiment, if anything about all of these things can be deemed funny, is Britney Spears pitching this like just sitting there tapping a ballpoint pen against her teeth, like what if?

00:22:30
Speaker 1: What if? My friend?

00:22:33
Speaker 2: I'm not even gonna finish that sentence, but just imagine her in the writer's room, like diet coke cans scattered all over Lily late night, that empty Chinese delivery containers and they're just cups. Yeah, big whiteboard with a bunch of ideas like incest, question mark crossed out and that. Yeah, and that's the that's the late night scene I'd really like to paint for you.

00:22:55
Speaker 1: Well, this brings us to another question. If if not this this learned Gothic soap opera movie of the Week, very special episode after School Special, h what are some other road movies that Brittany and her team could have remade.

00:23:12
Speaker 2: I'd love to have seen a remake of the classic nineteen seventies drug running movie Vanishing Point, which was memorably, of course, adapted for the audio slave video.

00:23:24
Speaker 1: Show Me How to Live.

00:23:25
Speaker 2: I think that's the movie where a guy has to run a large quantity of crank across the country and spoiler alert, it ends with him ramming his car into a police barricade.

00:23:39
Speaker 1: She really could have made a meal out of that. You had some others. Yeah, I would have gone with Easy Rider, and then you could have gone to Seenia Aguilera as the Dennis Hopper role.

00:23:48
Speaker 2: But they were really like bitter rivals in that movie. They were like bros.

00:23:52
Speaker 1: Right, you know, think of how great that would have been if, like you had the professional rivals try to be, you know, partners in a movie. It would have been you would have he would have had that sizzle, that classic. It's like, he's this once again, anyone listening. I really, I fully intend to pitch the iHeart People show where it's Higgall and I pitching sequels. I forget I had a working title for that show too. I'm not a Titanic episode. We spent like a half hour on on Titanic sequels, pitching Jack Jack Yeah, happy Jack. Yeah, And he is Jack the Ripper. That's the reason he gets on the Titanic is that he's Jack the Ripper and he's that the laws getting too close, they're closing in, and he's fleeing. It's so I like your pitch. I like your pitch for Natural Born Killers with Freddy Pritt's junior as Woody Harrelson. But it really, honestly, it really should have been justin Timberlake if you had justin Timberlake and and Brittany as the as the the who's the annoying chick? Who? I don't like Julie something narrowed down Juliette Lewis Yeah her, oh yeah, yeah, I don't like her scientology. Yeah, I don't like her presence on screen for legal reasons. I just want to say. I didn't say do you not like her because she's a scientologist. I just said the word scientology. Whatever. Moving on, Britney spears and rain Man. Yeah, what would what would she? Two minutes to TRL, two minutes to tr L, two minutes to TRL. Right.

00:25:32
Speaker 2: I would give my right pinky to see Brittany peak fame. Britney pull off a rain Man turn?

00:25:40
Speaker 1: Holy, can we keep that? I really want to guess, do it keep? That's the one you keep? Only if she doesn't. She keeps her accent, So it's like two minutes to trl. Y'all as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, Shonda Rimes admitted to feeling bad for Brittany. She would say, think it really was for me a lesson in fame. I really did get to see what extreme fame was like close up, and how to cope with it, how to protect my casts against it, and how to be prepared for the problems that come when it happens to people in your cast. A lot of people associated with the production reported feeling that way that they set about trying to make the shooting set something of a refuge from Spears, mega fame and the constant media scrutiny that came with it. According to producer and Carly, this was helped by the predominance of women associated with the production. She denied she was trying to make any particular political statement with that.

00:26:53
Speaker 2: Casting stalking hiring choice. She told a reporter, I just hired the best people for this particular job. When the script was finished, Carly brought in her friend Tamer Davis, a young director who is most famous for giving Drew Barrymore her post child star breakthrough. Gun Crazy, Gun Crazy? Anyone checking that a.

00:27:14
Speaker 1: Teenager murders her stepfather, sexually abusive man after he teaches her how to use a gun through a misapplied school penpal assignment. She meets a prisoner, Howard, whom she seduces back into the world of guns. She marries Howard and decides to show him the remains of her stepfather. Howard helps her dispose of the body. After they dispose of the corpse, Howard commits several homicides, although he was provoked in every incident. Huh, what the fuck? Who plays Howard? James la grosse. I don't know. Nope, none of that now.

00:27:48
Speaker 2: Wow, Jesus Christ, all right, Tamer Davis. Davis told Vice they really wanted a female director because this was going to be Britney's first movie, and they really wanted to make sure she was protected and taken care of. Davis was initially hesitant to work with Spears, but she changed her mind after meeting her in Las Vegas. In part she was blown away by spears power as an on stage performer and creative force. I loved watching her be in the center of this circle and there wasn't a guy in there telling her what to do. She was in command of the whole thing. But they made a private connection later when Davis paid her a visit at her hotel suite. I knocked on her hotel room door and she opened it up and she was wearing like a little pink T shirt and little shorts and she was just hilarious. She opened the door and she was like, man, I was hammered last night. I was like, what, You're Britney Spears and you were hammered last night. She was like the funniest, really good girlfriendy type of girl. That quote has taken on an alarming pall In recent years.

00:28:44
Speaker 1: Tamra Davis was married to Mike d From the past, he boys Oh.

00:28:50
Speaker 2: With authenticity as the casting Edict production team assembled Britney's crew of friends, specifically the ones who were not blonde. For example, Melissa joan Hart was considered for the part of Mimi, which was later played by Tarren Manning, but just too blonde. Shonda later said, flew into Shirley Temple.

00:29:11
Speaker 1: It's weirdest celebrity wrinkle I can think of. Well, no, it's not. There's weirder stuff, but it's so specific. Okay, another show that I'm pitching, the iHeart. We're gonna do Stumped the buff of the series, and we're gonna giving our ideas away this verbal copyright. I'm protecting ourselves. It's a recording of it. We can prove the people that we had these ideas on a certain date when we published the episode. Yeah, so we're gonna invite celebrities on who are really into things that are like, you know, Jason Siegel with the Muppets, and Nicholas Cage with Elvis, and maybe Melissa Joanhart with Shirley Temple and we're gonna I'm gonna ask them quiz questions about it, and in between rounds, Heigel's going to interview them and ask him like actual thoughtful questions. He says, it's a great show. I got a lot of great feedback from Stump the Buff if it gets picked up. Yeah, while we're addressing people, me, I guess I'm doing this while I'm addressing people who, uh, who have have reached out to us and said things to us, which is very nice, very than thank you, thank you, thank you. We had somebody who ask, you know, why why do do you bother doing the sensor bleeps. I'll explain when we first started doing this show sales, well, no, that there were a lot of shows where, yeah, that we're kind of geared towards young parents, basically a lot of the Disney episodes and stuff, and we wanted them to be able to listen to these podcasts when they were driving around in the car, driving their kids to and from school and stuff like that. So so that was why it's funnier with bleeps too. So we don't have a we don't have a very funny bleep though, you know what I mean, there's something about the sound quality of our sensor beep. That's not very funny to me.

00:30:52
Speaker 2: We should we should insert it with isolated audio of Paul McCartney going.

00:31:01
Speaker 1: Thank you for that. Yeah anyway.

00:31:05
Speaker 2: Seanda later said it wasn't that it was important to show people from diverse backgrounds. It just felt like the movie should look normal. Most movies didn't look normal. They all looked oddly homogeneous in a way that didn't feel realistic to me. Zoe Saldana and Taren Manning were chosen because they seemed like real girls, other worldly beauty. Zoe Saldana looked like someone you'd find and whatever not going there.

00:31:28
Speaker 1: So beautiful.

00:31:29
Speaker 2: She's literally most famous for playing an alien at this point, and they were like, ah, yeah, she's realistic looking. At the time, they were both fairly unknown. Zoe flew out to an audition on her agent's air miles and she's not even the only future MCU star and Crossroads. It also features a thirteen year old Brie Larsen. Zoe Saldana always had lovely things to say about Brittany, especially in the wake of her troubled period. During a twenty fourteen appearance on Watch What Happens Live. Saldona defended Britney's use of auto tune, saying she was the one big, big celebrity I met when I was starting to work in Hollywood who literally was humble. Brittany thanked her by tweeting, truly the sweetest thanks for the kind words, nothing but great memories of working.

00:32:13
Speaker 1: Will you Crossroads? Part two? Winkie face. She tweets like Prince. She is an amazing user of social media. I love her so much.

00:32:23
Speaker 2: She was on Pacific time, so when I was working the evening shift at Page six, every time she would instagram something wacky, I was handy. Yeah, right down to my desk. So I feel I got very acquainted with Britney's style of posting.

00:32:39
Speaker 1: U turn manning like a nineteen twenty style newspaper editor, printing, like printing out the picture of one of her instagram's, slamming it down on your desk.

00:32:50
Speaker 2: Yeah No, that was basically it, except it was like my two editors slacking me, being like she did it again. Post it was either pasted a nude or like said that she was gonna like gut her sister like a fish.

00:33:04
Speaker 1: No, she never said that, but no, but there was a lot of something.

00:33:08
Speaker 2: There was a lot of yeah, there's been when she's when her you know, emancipation stuff was proceeding, she became very bold and slamming her garbage family, as she well should have. Taren Manning meanwhile, famously came from a not dissimilar upbringing to the Southern gothic plot of this movie. She was raised by a single mother in an Arizona trailer park. She would later say, my mom didn't buy herself a new pair of shoes and a new outfit until I moved out. Literally, when I asked my mom for a dollar, I got one single dollar. Presumably she drew on this upbringing for her character's horrific backstory of becoming pregnant as a teen after getting raped at a party, planning to put the baby up for adoption, and then losing the baby once again. Cannot stress how wild the plot of this movie actually is. Speaking of spears terrible garbage family. The younger version of Britney Spears's character was played by her younger sister, ten year old Jamie Lyndspears, who, in the grand tradition of celebrity naval gazing, is named after both of her parents. Jamie went on to pursue acting on Nickelodeon after this, but her.

00:34:18
Speaker 1: Career was put on pause after all that creator and disgraced Nickelodeon big wig Dan Schneider got her pregnant at the age of sixteen for legal reasons. That's pure speculation. But has he been like, is he officially done? Are people just writing not chance articles about Yeah, I mean, I don't think it would affect him. If he was.

00:34:43
Speaker 2: He's probably got more residual payments than like oil Barons. Doesn't look like anyone legitimately has come after him. The last one that wasn't from like Distractify and Pop Sugar was La Times in August twenty twenty two.

00:35:00
Speaker 1: Well in Happier News Bowling for Soup front of the pod Bowling for Soup. The band were featured in Crossroads because they were also associated with Britney's label, Jive Records, but they never actually met her during the production because they were only on the set for two days. On the first day they were too hungover, and on the second day Britney was away sidebar on their name which I went down as I was writing this episode this morning and found myself curious. Their name apparently comes from a Steve Martin comedy routine about a game show called Bowling for Sure, but their parents. They were worried that their grandparents would get mad if they saw a flyer with profanity on it, so they swapped out a few letters, and according to ban lore, the band are bowling to earn soup, not on behalf of soup.

00:35:48
Speaker 2: Hmmm, I assumed it was. Yeah, I don't think I ever thought it was. They were in the pocket of the powerful soup lobby.

00:35:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, yeah, back in the day there was the show was Bowling for Dollars. I think I'm gonna look that up right now. I'm just gonna burn air time. Who gives Yeah, Bowling for Dollars is a television game show on which people could play the sport of bowling to win cash and sometimes prizes based on how well they bowled. I would have cleaned up at this. Each contestant received a dollar for each pin knockdown. That's a bummerh wow, All right here we go, are we? Okay? Oh? I don't remember well? Speaking of which, Kim Katrol.

00:36:34
Speaker 2: Back in the news for her probably extraordinarily highly paid cameo in the second season of and just like that.

00:36:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was. I was trying to figure out, like what the deal is with the feud there because I just kind of missed out on all that. They just hate each other.

00:36:52
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's Sarah Jessica Parker or I don't know who's the pain in the ass there. But obviously I'm team Kim because she's from she was in Big Trouble, Little China.

00:37:02
Speaker 1: She was born in Liverpool, so it's both of our favorite things, beadles of Big Trouble, Little China.

00:37:06
Speaker 2: But yeah, the check they must have cut heard it because there was they hate each other.

00:37:13
Speaker 1: I googled this morning thinking that I could do a quick recap for this episode, just blatant attempt to pad it out. Russian Vogue result has a forty eight slide slide show with a paragraph for each documenting their feud back to the early two thousands. So I just I tapped out of that. But if you're interested Vogue, Apparently, as you covered, we mentioned Kim Katrol because she plays the estranged mother of Britney Spears character. Kim would later say she only took this gig in Crossroads because she wanted to meet Britney, and Britney was also very thrilled when she learned of the casting because she was reportedly a huge Sex in the City fan, and I guess Kim's co stars on Sex and the City were very happy for her because they were also massive Britney fans mutual odmiration society. In fact, there was a rumor in I think the early two thousands, probably around this time, that Brittany was going to make a guest appearance on Sex and the City as Kim Cattrall's niece, but HBO denied the reports. They said that no negotiations had ever taken place. That would have been incredible, though, Kim has claimed that Madonna was initially considered for the role of Brittany's mother in Crossroads, which in a way that makes a lot of sense on like sort of a cultural level, because Brittany obviously cited Madonna as a huge influence. It's tough not to imagine Kim making that up though, to make it seem like she had what it takes to be Madonna's understudy, because I've never seen that's the only reference to that I've ever seen was from a quote from Kim Katrol. So take that with a grain of salt, and now back to my beloved dan Ackroyd. He plays Britney's dad in the movie. I swear I remember him in so many more nineties kids movies as the the genial dad. But I guess just my girl. Uh. He created an absurdly detailed backstory for his character concerned his life in the Navy. He even had a friend draw a navy tattoo in his arm, which can be seen when he's working on the car and the garage. So that's funny. Is that stolen valor? What'd you say? Is that stolen valor? Does that count if you're an actor?

00:39:27
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't count. Okay, just checking our navy tattoos? Does that count of stolen valor? If you weren't in the navy? I'm pretty sure it does.

00:39:37
Speaker 1: What are navy tattoos? I just assumed it was like Popeye.

00:39:42
Speaker 2: It's not like I mean no, because sailor tattoos is like a whole genre of like uninspired tattoos. You know, you've got the swallows, the stars, the anchors.

00:39:52
Speaker 1: But I presume little Pete from Pete and Pete there in Petunia. Yeah, yeah, I presume like he meant like this. I don't even well, who knows, because we can't see this movie, so I don't even know what the faux tattoo is. But your wife's a tattoo artist and you you presumably have at least one one a navy tattoo stuck in there.

00:40:13
Speaker 2: No, uh no, I don't think she's actually ever done any military tattoos. Maybe for moral reasons, but I guess it has to be a like a like a Navy seals or some kind of like actual like insignia logo. Good for dan Akrod, though, I'm glad he was still swinging for the fences and stupid shit like this.

00:40:39
Speaker 1: Yeah. He would later admit that the only reason he took the roles because he also just wanted to meet Britney Spears, So good for him. Brittany, in addition to taking an active role and getting the script together, also took an active role in the casting of her leading man, the character known only as Ben. This entailed kissing a whole lot of guys eager to play her love interest. She would later joke it wasn't fun doing that. The role went to a relative unknown name Anson Mount. That's an incredible name. Another MCU guy. Yeah, he well sort of.

00:41:12
Speaker 2: He played the lead character Black Bolt in the ABC I want to say, a series, The Immortal The Inhumans, which was a weird, fantastic fod Jason, I think they were Jack Kirby invention, very bizarre, sort of one off. I mean, they had a whole series, but just a weird, weird cadre of Marvel Comics characters dating back to the sixties, including a magic bulldog, and Anson Mount played the lead Black Bolt, whose voice is so powerful that he can atomize people with a single word. Therefore, he does not speak for ninety nine percent of the show. And he was in the most recent Doctor Strange movie. So there's another MCU thing for you. I think he was also in Hell on Wheels, which was like a short lived AMC period drama about the expansion of the Midwest or the West.

00:42:09
Speaker 1: You know a lot about anson Mount, my friend, just yeah, for some reason, just a real weird, granular, weird, granular segment of my knowledge. Well, did you know, for all that you know about Anson Mount that he was initially hesitant to take on a role like opposite Britney Spears in Crossroads, and he was eventually persuaded to take the role on Crossroads by his co star in a movie called City by the Sea, Robert de Niro. Robert de Niro was apparently a huge fan of Britney Spears, and he really wanted Anson Mount to take this role, to the point where he even ran lines with him on set for the audition, which means, I mean, I pray there's a tape out there of Robert de Niro doing Britney's lines from Crossroads. It's it's perfect, It's beautiful. The original interview that this is is from The Guardian in two thousand and two with the stunningly stunning headline of not a girl not yet an Oscar winner. Will have a few references to that song in some of the reviews that we're going to quote at the end of this episode, all on kinds, but all kind of funny. Yeah.

00:43:21
Speaker 2: And he was like, he said, I was reading this script for Crossroads between takes on City by the Sea, and Bob came up to me and goes, what are you doing? And so I said, it's this movie and Britney Spears is doing it. I'm not even sure if I'm going to do it. I'm just reading it, and he goes, why not, She's great.

00:43:36
Speaker 1: So I showed him the script and he read Britney's lines to my ben and then he added, it wasn't the kissing scene. Well that's good because Anson also did the tried and true prank on the set of Crossroads of eating garlic clothes before a kissing scene with Brittany, who I guess was too polite to ever actually like say anything about it, which is adorable. Leonardo DiCaprio did that too during a Titanic I guess and Kate Winslet's contract for Titanic. It was like, please don't like smoke, eat garlic, and there's like one other thing before or drink coffee before kissing scenes, and he would make a point to do all three, which led to Kate Winslet dubbing him stinky Leo. What a little last one? Yeah, I know, yeah, one of the many reasons she referred to him a stinky Leo. If I recall, well, HI will get us out of here. With the imprimature of Robert de Niro, Filming for Crossroads began and took six months It could have been done quicker, but Britney was in the middle of recording her third album simultaneously, including I'm a Slave for You, Overprotected and her incredible cover of I Love rock and Roll It's this thing on Oh you didn't see it? Never mind you get it? I don't get it.

00:44:50
Speaker 2: Didn't doesn't her cover like flatten out the sort of like weird timing, like mixed not not mixed meter, but the weird syncopations that that song has.

00:44:58
Speaker 1: I don't think so oh.

00:45:01
Speaker 2: I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't care. I don't care. I'm not I'm not investigating that.

00:45:05
Speaker 1: Cut that uh.

00:45:08
Speaker 2: The song I'm not Yet I'm not a girl, not yet a woman was originally in Tech God.

00:45:12
Speaker 1: That is so fucking creepy. Who wrote that? I think Max Martin sweets. What do we talk about in our ab episode Max mart lyricist Rommi Rami Yakub and Dido Armstrong. Oh wait what Yeah, she's one of the credited writers of that. Wait, I didn't know. Dido's name is Florian Cloud, dubonny Velle, O'Malley Armstrong. No wonder she went with Dido. There's nothing in there that is that slightly resembles Dido.

00:45:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, Rami Yakub is also Swedish Palestinian, born to Palestinian parents, but Swedish.

00:45:55
Speaker 1: Florian is a german Man's name. That's just mean to give your child a whole lot of odd They were all so embarrassing, she said, I thought it was cruel to call me Didoh and then expect me to just deal with it. The name Dido derives from the legendary Queen of Carthage. It's just a childhood name, I guess. Anyway, that has been your Dido segment of this episode.

00:46:18
Speaker 2: That song was originally intended to be on the movie soundtrack, and in fact was the working title of the movie, Not a Girl. Also in the discarded bin was what Friends Are For. It's just also really funny to me. I can't believe I'm finally getting to this now, but that this movie shares a title with the Ralph Macchio guitar movie Crossroads.

00:46:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so incredible. Have you seen that movie. I've never seen it, but I kept accidentally stumbling on it when I was researching this God it whips dude.

00:46:47
Speaker 2: There's a scene the guitar duel I implore everyone to at least just go and check out the guitar duel at the end, where Steve Vai plays the Devil's guitarist and Ralph Machio wins by playing Pagnini's fifth caprice I believe, which is one of the like most played classical guitar chopbusters, and then he finishes by playing a note that is not technically possible to play on fred board. I think it is Eric Johnson or Ry Cooter who actually overdubs that guitar solo.

00:47:21
Speaker 1: I mean, this movie is basically the plot of the Devil Went Down to Georgia. It's the Devil one down to Georgia meets meets meets the karate Kid.

00:47:29
Speaker 2: And it is directed by Walter Hill of The Warriors and forty eight Hours.

00:47:37
Speaker 1: Who Yeah.

00:47:38
Speaker 2: Music by Ry Cooter. The guy who played the classical guitar on it was William Kennon Geyser no idea harmonica by genuine bluesman Sonny Terry. Fascinating film. Fascinating film actually written by an itinerant blues musician named John Fusco.

00:48:03
Speaker 1: Why aren't we covering that crossroads? You to do another crossroads? Sidebar I don't more so than than you just did. No, that's that's all you get. Fascinating film Crossroads. Everyone should go and check it out. It's pretty great. Wow. But the font on both titles are almost identical. This one that's really weird. Yeah.

00:48:23
Speaker 2: This guy was a student at Tish School of the Arts, where he got a uh uh uh.

00:48:28
Speaker 1: He won a writing competition. This in his script was sold to Columbia while he was still a student. How does that make you feel bad? Real bad, just real bad, just just not good.

00:48:46
Speaker 2: Ralph Machio, not highway, not many other people in this based on the legend of Robert Johnson.

00:48:54
Speaker 1: But where do you where do you want in a film? I'm like unable to be like on mic right now because this is so weird.

00:49:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, Ralph Macchio learned how to play He learned how to play some guitar and in a hilarious image of Ralph Macchio's life at the time, he was also filming Karate Kid Part two. So he would take guitar lessons from a guy named Arlen Roth and then then he would go and after two hours of guitar lessons, then he would go and work on his karate for Karate Kid Part two, which is essentially what I wish my life was still like. But yeah, really incredible. They were gonna so they were gonna have if no one watches this movie, which I can't, really good conscience suggest that you should. You should at least go in YouTube the duel scene because they were going to actually have Raikooter on screen and instead, realizing that he wasn't exactly the most cinematic guy, they were gonna either have Keith Richards, Frank Zappa, or Stevie ray Vaughn. And then eventually they got uh Steve VI in here because eighties guitar shred was a really big thing. And funnily enough, Steve VII got his first start playing with Zappa. I think he unprompted sent him like a transcription of one of the hardest, like wild weirdest compositions of Zappa, and Zappa was like, I'm going to meet this kid, and funnily I mean, now this is in a total digression, but did you ever hear the story of Steve VI's audition with Zappa? Oh, he's told it a few times, but he uh went to go audition and this is after he's done the transcription of this thing, and and uh, you know, he gets in with Zappa and and Frank's like, all right, play this, and he plays this guitar figure, and Zappa is a ripping guitarist, so like it's just really as Steve says something, he says something like, and it's this you know, bizarre, ridiculous thing like in his own idiosyncratic style. And I listened to it, and I go okay, and then okay, now play it in seven. Okay I played in seven. He goes, now play it in seven eight reggae, and he just keeps putting new wrinkles onto this original figure. And eventually and Steve I's like, you know, and this goes on for like fifteen or twenty twenty five minutes, and it gets to the point where it's this absurd thing that should never be played by anyone ever and is physically impossible. And I said, Frank, I can't, like I cannot, I can no longer play this the way that you are trying to get me to do so, and Frank says, well, I hear Linda Ronstad is looking for a guitarist.

00:51:45
Speaker 1: Friend of the pod Dora, Well like that story well that's so good. Yeah, what a what a what a dick. But he would apparently do that. He had all these things, He had all these things with his band where he would like signal on stage. I'm not a big Frank Zappa guy, but I know some of them. I've listened.

00:52:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, he would do these signals on stage that were like, okay, now this for this next transition, We're going into a reggae feel or like a Latin feel, and they would just have to shift on the fly. I mean, being in that band was like it was like being in James Brown's band, just a nightmare of high wire musicianship.

00:52:23
Speaker 1: Was that documentary that came out a few years ago? Any good? You know? I didn't. I didn't watch it. I forget the two and I fell asleep. But I don't someone was my fault.

00:52:32
Speaker 2: Or there's someone's someone's quote I always see on Twitter that goes around whenever whenever Zappa comes up, which is there's nothing wrong with a little Frank Zappa, but there's a lot wrong with a lot of Frank Zappa.

00:52:50
Speaker 1: That's really good. Yeah. Anyway, this concludes your sidebar on Crossroads The Other the other Crossroads I'm just so glad that we went from Britney Spears to Frank Zappa and I didn't even know what was happening. It happened so quick. That is the TMI promise. You're not going to get that. You're not going to get that with I don't even know what other shows would be doing this, blank Check, the blank Check Podcast, those rubes. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Wow.

00:53:35
Speaker 2: The hospital scenes and cross Roads are filmed at the North Hollywood Medical Center, the same setting as the TV show Scrubs, where they also filmed episodes of The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, The Office, and Charmed, among many other things. Sadly demolished in twenty eleven, and a fire. How does this work when you accidentally set a fire while you're trying to demolish something.

00:54:02
Speaker 1: Tearing it down. It burned down, some bitch.

00:54:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's an ocean violation, whatever it is. No, they were welders were working at the site and some I guess molten welding materials went down, fell down an elevator shaft and set fire to all the elevator, shafty racks stuff, yeah whatever, and started a fire. And I guess you don't want to have your building on fire when you're demolishing it.

00:54:28
Speaker 1: Maybe you do.

00:54:29
Speaker 2: Who's to say I'm not a professional building demolisher.

00:54:34
Speaker 1: Not yet. Most of the film was shot in Hammond, Louisiana, not far from Britney's hometown of Kentwood. The citizens of Hammond were reportedly not told that filming was happening, which led to surreal instances of randomly spotting the then biggest pop star on the planet just out and about. There's a great story of how.

00:54:51
Speaker 2: The leads were being filmed in their nineteen seventy three Buick Skylark convertible great car when a stray dog jumped out in front of them. Arren Manning jumped out to retrieve it. The camera truck did not stop, so suddenly Britney Spears, Zoe Saldana, Taron Manning and Anson Mount are cruising the back roads of Louisiana with a stray dog, friend of the pod stray Louisiana Dog. Naturally, people start to gather and there is no security, and at this point word of mouth had spread news of the production, the set was swarmed with fans, and the movie's insurance bond company was so concerned about paparazzi that they would keep changing the working title of the film on shooting permits to keep photographers off the track of filming locations. Funnily enough, Britney Spears wears a sweatshirt for Southern University throughout the film and on the poster. Costumer Wendy Scheckter found the shirt at an LA thrift store, explaining Britney's character, Lucy is a college oriented girl. Casting call went out for a college oriented girl.

00:55:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, what does that mean? We're talking about how Britney developed all the characters. I guess that's the best they got. She's college oriented. Also, Southern University, we'll get into that. But what's Northern University? What's West Coast University? They're university is just named for mass Yeah, Florabama University, Salt Life University. That's a great shirt.

00:56:30
Speaker 2: Southern University, though, is a predominantly African American school in Baton Rouge, making it unlikely that the college oriented Lucy would have attended regardless of her orientation towards college, but.

00:56:43
Speaker 1: The school enjoyed the publicity. Chancellor Edward Jackson approved of the shirt's usage and said that they were tickled pink. The fact that we're African American makes little difference. The school's bookstore saw sales of Southern University clothing items jump drastically as a result of this free publicity. Hilaire Britney, by all accounts, was a delight on the set and nowhere near the diva that she then had every right to be, though her contract stipulated trailers, personal trainers. Producer and Carly says the team is very understanding of Crossroads small budget. Brittany reportedly only had two requests while she was on set. I'm sorry, I almost gagged tuna lunchables and ed mam Ma, I need to make sure that that's a thing and not like I don't think tuna lunchables are a thing. Is like canned tuna fish Comma lunchables and edamme, I don't think there was a prepackaged tuna fish lunchables. You're right, well there is, but it's not Lunchable's brand. It's like star kissed to go. Okay, Now I got to google tuna lunchables Britney Spears, which I really don't want to have to do, but I'm gonna yeah, Okay, that's what I'm saying. Tuna lunchibles, that's not a thing. I mean in the Vice article that interviewed Sean the Rhimes and the director. Look, I'm going to the lunchables wiki. Okay, not an option. Ever, there were no tuna lunchibles produced thirty different kinds of meal, variety combinations. Surely there's gotta be no you're supposed to say, don't call me Shirley. Uh, we gotta update your references. I mean, I talked about Stalin earlier instead of putin what do you expect? I'm telling you, dude, there's no damn tweet out that.

00:58:34
Speaker 2: That's a syntax air that they did not fact check. I'm calling it out now.

00:58:39
Speaker 1: Recently decimated by layoffs Vice News, I hope all of you have found jobs. But this is sloppy journalism. The quote should have been tuna comma, lunchables comma and edamame. This is the This is why copy editors were a thing for decades. They put it on the deck of a post, and they also put it on their social posts too. Britney Spears loves tuna, lunchibles and more secrets from the making of Crossroads. Well, whoever was working advice in March of twenty sixteen, you really fell asleep on the fucking job, guys. I'm sorry. How simple would it have been to visit the lunchables wiki? That took me thirty seconds?

00:59:19
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, I weep for the state of journalism seven years ago.

00:59:24
Speaker 1: And also now you're hearing it here first, folks, Britney's diet on the set of Crossroads was tuna, probably star kissed, possibly chicken of the sea. We don't know. They bungled that as.

00:59:41
Speaker 2: A follow up question, comma lunchables. We don't know what kind of lunchables. I'm gonna go ahead and say ham and cheese or possibly pizza comma and at a mammee.

00:59:55
Speaker 1: Where were we? Oh? Yeah. She also had production pick her up a half hour early each day so she could go to Starbucks and get coffee. Producer An Carly offered to have the coffee waiting for her on set when she arrived, and Brittany said, I don't mind. I actually liked going in and getting to decide. Oh, that's heartbreaking. That's really sad.

01:00:18
Speaker 2: Britney spent much of a free time on the set hanging out with her then boyfriend Justin Timberlake, a frequent visitor to the set, and by all accounts, their love was genuine and adorable. During rehearsals, director Tamer Davis as Brittany to doodle in her notebook as though she were lucy. She wrote Britney and Justin over and over again and covered the book in butterflies and hearts. It was just the most beautiful relationship seeing the two of them together and how lovey they were. Davis said, they were just so close and she was just such a supporter of his. He worked just as hard as her. It was like she would be doing rehearsals and he would be doing rehearsals. They really knew that life together. Tamer Davis still owns that notebook, thus fulfilling our it belongs in a museum quotient for the episode.

01:01:01
Speaker 1: There was also a point in Crossroads when the three leading ladies sing bye Bye bye, which is cute because it's a Justin Timberlake song. Well it's not just nipple liked song, it's an instangc song. Crossroads opened on February fifteenth, two thousand and two, and made fourteen million dollars that weekend, recouping more than its twelve million dollar budget. There was, however, a minor controversy when Britney supposedly snubbed fans waiting to see her at the London premiere. She apparently blew right by him. Her management claimed that it was only because of a safety issue that she didn't stop and hang out. In total, Crossroads earned its budget back five times over, bringing in sixty one million dollars. So that's that's good. You know, we love that for her, I could say, right, like, this thing still on, But it wasn't all sunny days and frappuccinos and pepsi for dear sweet Brittany.

01:01:54
Speaker 2: Despite this, it wasn't all star kissed in pizza lunchibles. You can really take the South out of that. You can't take the South out of the girl.

01:02:05
Speaker 1: Despite the strong numbers of the box office, Crossroads received a critical drubbing. What can you receive a drubbing for something that's not critical? Like, you know, I feel like I only hear it, great question, what's the what is the drulogy? Of drubbing dressing down. I was going to look up the meaning of yikes earlier too, but I didn't, But now I feel interesting. Drub early seventeenth century, probably from the Arabic daraba to beat. The first recorded uses in English are by travelers in the Near East, specifically referring to physical punishment. Semi related yikes is likely derived from yikes, a hunting call used to urge hounds after a fox from the mid seventeen hundreds. Someone's gonna win pub trivia because of that, because they heard it on here. You have anyone if one gotten a trivia question right in pub TV because something to learned on here, please tweet at us.

01:03:06
Speaker 2: That would really that would make me so happy once again. I'm at Alex underscore high goal. Jordan is Jordan run talk? Are you n t A g H?

01:03:15
Speaker 1: We are reachable and eager to talk. You spelled? You can spell my name right? Oh my god, that's interesting. Everyone wants to add an extra you in there. Are you n t A U g H? Thank you?

01:03:27
Speaker 2: Oh like Lucy when when Charlie pulls when she when she pulls the football out, that's like, ah.

01:03:35
Speaker 1: Right, that's my archaic pop culture reference. God, we just weren't made for these times and thank you, Yes, Yes, Son of a Bitch. Uh. Crossrows was mostly criticized for Britney's acting, which I think is unfair, and was frequently compared to Mariah Carey's movie from the year before, Glitter's nominated for eight Razzies, Crossroads was. It has a three point six rating on IMDb out of over forty one thousand votes, and it also has a fifteen percent score on Rotten Tomatoes based on one hundred and five reviews. I went through and read them all prior to taping, and they're pretty savage. Richard Roper is quoted as saying she's not yet an actress, not quite a singer. Oh. John McEwan wrote, spears technique indicates she's a graduate of the Brady Bunch Acting Academy. Oh. James Sandford of the Kalamazoo Gazette says Crossroads comes off like a rejected ABC after school special, freshened up by the dunce of a screenwriting one oh one class. Provokes a handful of unting, provokes a handful of unintentional howlers, and numerous yawns. You read the last two Ian MATTGANI wrote a bus our piece of work with premise and dialogue at the level of kids television and plot threads as morose as teen pregnancy, rape and suspected murder. That's accurate. Yeah, I mean that's what's so weird about it is that like and not unfair. Yeah.

01:05:14
Speaker 2: Why Britney's management team would allow her to make such a depressing movie is beyond me. The story is about miserable people who lead miserable lives.

01:05:22
Speaker 1: Oh that's me. Uh, that was Mike mcgrandanagan. Mike McGranahan, Mike mcgranagan from Aisle Seat. Again not incorrect, but in any event, we've never cared about reviews on this show, and we're sure as hell I'm not going to start now. As executive producer for MTV Films, David Gale says, girls really liked it. If you want a teenage girl at that time, the movie was really relatable in a fantasyish kind of way. Was driving across the country in a yellow what was a Dodge Plymouth sixty three Buick Skylark Buick Skylock Yes, yes, yes, uh, with a expected murderer, Your tea, your best friend who's been raped, your other one who has given up for adoption. You're a good lord? How was that relatable? Who would say that? Also, we didn't talk about the karaoke scene, you know we didn't. Yeah, I don't know if there's a lot there is. There are a lot of there there. I know you love rock and roll, so that's uh, yeah, it goes down when Britney's character and her friends are at a karaoke bar. Brittany said, they asked me to sing karaoke in the movie Crossroads, and I've actually sung I love rock and roll in a lot of clubs that I've been to. So that's that's authentic again, So much of this movie is authentic. Authenticity really the watchword of this film. I mean, I do wonder if they were shooting for some kind of like eight mile like thing where it's like this is this is taken from Britney's life, and then midway through the movie maybe when they were shooting it's like, oh, maybe we should try to like back off on this because she's got a lot of young fans. But they were stuck with a script that was already pretty gritty, so they just like try to water it down just a little bit, and then you got this weird mishmash of tones. Well none of the than.

01:07:07
Speaker 2: Miley Cyrus mentioned that this scene was hugely formative for her. She told Variety you should have seen my face when Britney covered I Love Rock and Rolling Crossroads. I melted down. That scene was the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all in one room. I actually lost my mind. That was world's colliding beyond what I could have ever dreamed of.

01:07:30
Speaker 1: Interestingly incredibly poetic words from Miley Cyrus. Isn't she like really tight with Jan Jet? Yeah?

01:07:37
Speaker 2: Actually one of my most my the coolest thing to my mind that that Miley ever did was invite Laura Jean Grace of Against Me and Joan Jet into her backyard to cover The Replacements Androgynous, which is like a really beautiful song from Let It Be The Replacements album, really like very sensitively portrayed, uh weird little character sketch about non binary people. But yeah, I Jon Jet, Jone Jet and Miley are like our friends.

01:08:12
Speaker 1: Is it a cool? And? Uh like normy seeming pop figures have like really good, really deep, really weird taste in music case. I love that makes me so happy.

01:08:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, I or at least use their large s to You know, if if a Miley Cyrus fan googled against me and started listening to that as a result of that, that's that's great, that's a net positive. Joan later told NME, the British music outlet, I've never even heard Britney's version. I mean I've heard about it, but I never understood that whole idea. People you, I mean, people usually cover a song that says something about them.

01:08:46
Speaker 1: But I doubt she loves rock and roll. Oh maybe she like, maybe she likes songs. Wow. I mean, I've interviewed Jone Jet and she doesn't seem to have a mean bone in her body. I genuinely think she was like reaching around for like some honest but kind thing to say that she got. Maybe she liked songs. Doesn't Taylor Swift love like Mega Death or something. There's some metal band that she loves. Maybe it's Iron Maiden, Wow? Who among us? Well, back to Crossroads, the producer An Carly, who kind of kicked the whole thing off, said that she contrasted Crossroads with less earnest movies like Mean Girls and Clueless. She said, Crossroads wasn't snarky. There's no snarkiness whatsoever. We weren't ashamed to be corny. Corny would maybe have been somebody else's judgment of it, but we weren't afraid to be heartfelt. We didn't need to be smarter than anybody else. Young women, they're surrounded by judgment and snarkiness, so it was important for us to show the ups and downs of real relationships. And for years there were rumors of a potential sequel, and and Carly has said, we've actually talked about it a little bit in a weird way. There's a lot of people involved in the really busy though, who knows. I think it could be a lot of fun, but everyone's in different places, from Taren to Zoe to Britney to Shonda. Shonda Rhimes, who now has a billion dollar TV empire to worry about. Has I kind of diplomatically backed off from the whole idea in the nicest way possible. She said, Oh, it's twenty something years later. I don't know about Crossroads too and what that would be, but I would work with that group of people again absolutely, So that's nice. And Brittany made a reference to the movie in a video for a twenty eleven song I want to Go When the camera moves past the theater Marquee that reads Crossroads to cross Harder and a lame sequel joke. Isn't a good place to end on. I don't know what is damn it, folks. Thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Eigel and I'm Jordan Ron Todg. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtalg and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.