‘A Cinderella Story’ Turns 20: Screenwriter Reveals Britney Spears Was Original Inspiration for Sam

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Hilary Duff was already an icon to ’90s and early 2000s kids because of her titular stint on Disney Channel’s Lizzie McGuire, but it was 2004’s A Cinderella Story that made Duff a bonafide movie star. The film celebrates its 20th anniversary on July 16, 2004.

Duff stars in the film as Sam, a high school student desperate to go to Princeton so she can escape her demanding stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge) and twin stepsisters who are determined to keep her working at the family diner. Sam’s only respite is her online relationship with a mystery student at her school who also dreams of going to Princeton.

When she discovers that her online prince charming is actually the school’s most popular football star, Austin Ames (Chad Michael Murray), Sam realizes that true love may not be as wonderful as she thought. She’s going to need all the help she can get to survive high school bullies and the family hellbent on keeping her down.

The movie instantly clinched a place in the teen rom-com hall of fame and has since inspired five spinoff sequels. It is a classic and unimaginable without Duff at the center, but the film was first inspired by a very different starlet of the time.

Matthew Peyton / Getty Images

“I distinctly remember I was on a train, and I had the cover of Rolling Stone magazine that Britney Spears did—the first one she ever did that was sort of controversial because she was so young and it was very sexualized,” A Cinderella Story screenwriter Leigh Dunlap told TV Insider in a recent interview about the 20th anniversary of the film. “I wrote it with her in mind at the time. By the time we got years down the road, she had moved on to becoming a massive star, and it didn’t matter anymore.”

Dunlap may have had Spears in mind when she first created Sam, but the movie wouldn’t have happened without Duff, proving that the role was meant to be hers. She was originally approached by producers Clifford Werber and Ilyssa Goodman in the late ’90s to create a treatment for a modern take on the classic Cinderella trope. Dunlap, an aspiring and struggling writer at the time, took on the task for free to see where it would go. Every studio in town passed, but a few years later, director Mark Rosman found the script and gave it to Duff. The teen star and her mom fell in love with the project, and a few months later, the film was in production on the Warner Brothers lot in Los Angeles.

“We got the right girl in the end,” Dunlap conceded.

Now, the movie has been seen by millions of people and is consistently rediscovered on streaming platforms and, according to Dunlap, on airplanes. “[Twenty years] sounds like such a long time, but I think in the last month, I’ve gotten a ton of texts from friends on airplanes around the world that the movie is playing on their plane. It feels very contemporary because it’s flying up in the skies around us.”

Warner Brothers / Everett Collection

That means that new people are encountering the legendary scene where Duff’s character Sam marches into the boys’ locker room before the big homecoming game to tell Austin that waiting for him to step up is “like waiting for rain in this drought, useless and disappointing.”  Dunlap revealed that the scene took multiple tries to get right before becoming the showdown fans still quote today.

“We went through so many rewrites of that because we went into production so quickly. They brought in other writers to write on stuff, too. That scene went through many, many forms because it was the big scene of the whole movie. It was something we all worked on a lot,” she explained.

The locker scene is the one everyone remembers from that movie, but a different quote is the one that Dunlap still holds the most fondly in her heart. She favors the inspirational baseball-inspired motto that inspired Sam to finally take a stand against her stepmother. “‘Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.’ That was from Sam’s dad,” Dunlap revealed, elaborating how America’s pastime was a pivotal part of her relationship with her own father.

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“I never played baseball. When I grew up, that just kind of wasn’t an option for girls, but I am a huge baseball fan,” Dunlap told TV Insider. “My dad was a huge sports fan, so that was our touchstone. My son went on to play baseball for a long time, too. So baseball is our [family’s] thing in life.”

The screenwriter hopes that any quote resonates with people, whether they are watching A Cinderella Story for the first time or rediscovering it and the sequels now.

“The idea that it meant something to people and that it hangs around long enough that it keeps getting these different interpretations still excites me,” she said. “When you write something and somebody actually says it means something to them, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. It just means so much. It touches me. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years, and new people are discovering it. Old people are rediscovering it. It’s so cool that somebody is literally sitting on a plane on Delta watching the movie. That is the coolest.”

You can also be one of the people celebrating A Cinderella Story on its 20th anniversary. The film is available to rent on all major streaming platforms, including Prime Video and YouTube.