Recently, actor Will Smith told the British newspaper The Sun that his 14-year-old son Jaden, star of movies like The Karate Kid and the upcoming Will Smith movie After Earth, was looking into joining the ranks of other celebrity emancipated minors. It’s usually used to declare minors legal adults to either help teenagers escape abusive homes, protect financial assets or, as we’re guessing is the case with Smith, be able to work long hours on movie sets without violating child labor laws. The elder Smith seems cool with this. After all, he’s a guy who used to win Grammys for complaining about his parents.

Protect assets

Here are some other celebrity emancipated minors:

Tiffany. The ‘80s pop star best known for touring malls and covering “I Think We’re Alone Now” butted heads with her mother, Janie Williams, over control of her career during the height of her fame. In 1988, Tiffany even snuck away from home to pursue legal emancipation. Her efforts failed, so she moved in with her grandmother while her earnings were placed in a trust fund her mother couldn’t touch.

Michael Jackson. The King of Pop couldn’t stand his notoriously abusive father, Joe Jackson, and their incredibly mixed-up relationship probably helped fuel much of his bizarre behavior. During an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1993, Michael confessed that his infamous plastic surgeries were inspired by Joe’s nasty comments about his “fat nose.” Jackson successfully won emancipation as a teenager.

Macaulay Culkin. One of the world’s most successful child actors had to put up with one of the most overbearing stage parents in the history of showbiz. While Mac was starring in movies like Home Alone, his dad worked as his manager and earned a nasty reputation around Hollywood for his boozing. After enduring his parents’ vicious custody battle (which was also a custody battle for their son’s earnings) in the mid-‘90s, Mac took both of them to court, and he successfully gained control of his earnings and cut off all contact with his father.

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Name the bestselling solo male musician of all time. Elvis Presley? Bing Crosby? Elton John? Nope. It’s country superstar Garth Brooks, who has sold more than 128 million albums in the U.S., which is especially remarkable because unlike those other guys, he didn’t have a recording career that lasted decades. His first record came out in 1989 and his last one in 2001. Why’d he retire? He wanted to try new things, particularly starring in and making movies.

Brooks is one of the most popular musicians of all time, and if a new lawsuit filed by a former business partner is to be believed, one of the prickliest. Former business partner Lisa Sanderson is taking Brooks to court because his bad behavior and pattern of bridge-burning resulted in a number of movie projects that never saw the light of day, and thus prevented Sanderson from earning a great deal of money.

Here are some of the movies Sanderson alleges she and Brooks worked on that never made it to the big screen:

• Saving Private Ryan. Sanderson and Brooks formed a production company called Red Strokes, which landed a development deal with Disney. That led to Brooks being offered a role in Steven Spielberg’s World War II ensemble film, Saving Private Ryan. Brooks declined because, Sanderson alleges, he didn’t want to share the screen with people he considered lesser stars…such as Tom Hanks and Matt Damon.

• Twister. Spielberg also sent Brooks a script for Twister, which he was producing. Brooks turned that down, too, because he didn’t want to be upstaged by the computer-generated tornadoes.

• The Lamb. Sanderson’s lawsuit describes a bizarre meeting she and Brooks had with Fox executives. Brooks successfully pitched a movie called The Lamb, about a rock star who fakes his own death, which would star Brooks as his “Chris Gaines” pop star alter ego. Brooks also wanted to provide songs, which he said were very personal because he wrote them to deal with the death of his father. After the meeting, Sanderson confronted Brooks…because she knew that his father was alive and well. Brooks said he lied to make the pitch seem more emotional. Ultimately, the movie never happened because Brooks refused to split with Fox any music publishing revenues the movie would generate.

• Alice in Wonderland. Brooks was offered the chance to record a song for Tim Burton’s 2010 live-action version of Alice in Wonderland. Brooks refused to do the song, because, bizarrely, he also wanted to co-write the screenplay.

Because of these incidents, and more, Sanderson claims she and her production company lost out on a small fortune—she’s suing for $425,000 to cover breach of contract and fraud. Stay tuned!

Lauryn Hill was one of the most promising singers of the late ’90s. As part of the Fugees, she sang on a smash hit cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and then in 1998 released her solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Hill wrote and produced most of the album, which sold 19 million copies and won five Grammys, including Best New Artist and Album of the Year.

It looked like Hill would be one of the biggest pop stars of the new millennium…but then almost nothing happened. The only album she’s released since was a live performance in 2002, which was marked by emotional breakdowns and bizarre stage banter. After that she retired from music to raise her five children.

But Hill is in the news again, and it looks like she’ll finally be releasing a follow-up to Miseducation…whether she wants to or not. Late last year, Hill pled guilty to charges that she failed to pay income tax on $1.8 million in royalties earned between 2005 and 2007. She made a $50,000 payment but still owes the federal government more than $500,000. This week, a judge gave her until May 6 to pay off the amount. Where will she get the money? From a brand-new deal with Sony Records—$1 million to record five new songs, and even more if she records a full album.

Will Hill finish the album and/or pay off her bills in time to avoid jail? Not quite. In spite of the deal, and even releasing a song, a judge still sentenced her to three months in prison. Here are some other musicians who forgot to pay their taxes, and their creative solutions.

• Willie Nelson racked up a $16 million unpaid tax bill by 1990. In 1992, he made a $3.6 million dent with the proceeds from his album The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories? He’s since paid off the rest.

• Jerry Lee Lewis eliminated $500,000 of tax debt in 1984 by charging fans $2.75 a minute via a 1-900 number to listen to Lewis tell anecdotes about his childhood.

• In 1979, Chuck Berry was found to owe the IRS $200,000. He served four months in jail and performed 1,000 hours of community service.

Earlier this month, Grammy-nominated singer Michelle Shocked went off on a bizarre diatribe near the end of a San Francisco performance. While her behavior may have, uh, shocked, fans, it’s not a first. Here are some other examples of rock star meltdowns.

Johnny Cash. During a show at the Grand Ole Opry in 1965, the Man in Black got upset about a faulty microphone stand. Reaction: Cash flipped out and used the faulty stand to smash all the footlights on the stage. The Grand Ole Opry banned him from performing there for decades.

Axl Rose. The Guns N’ Roses singer is a little unpredictable in concert. He’s been known to show up several hours late, for example, but the worst event happened at a St. Louis show in 1991 when he caught a fan filming the show. Rose’s response: He threw himself into the crowd, wrestled the camera away from the fan, and then stormed off stage. End of show. The audience responded by rioting. More than 60 people were hospitalized.

Fiona Apple. During a 2012 show in Houston, the singer ranted about getting busted for marijuana possession in Texas’ Hudspeth County a week before. In a strange turn of events, a representative from the county’s sheriff department responded by writing her a public letter in which he advised Apple to “just shut up and sing.”