ORLANDO, Fla. — “If your CEO salary is 700, 600, 500 times your median worker’s pay, there is nobody on Earth ... Jesus Christ himself isn’t worth 500 times his median worker’s pay.”
Abigail Disney’s response in 2019 to a question about Disney CEO Bob Iger’s compensation during a CNBC interview, ignited a media firestorm almost immediately.
“The next day, I was getting calls,” Disney recalls, “and that’s when I thought, then I better just go directly to the public with why I said what I did.”
From there Disney wrote a series of tweets, and then an op-ed in The Washington Post calling out not only The Walt Disney Company but other organizations that she feels do not compensate their workers fairly. Her message was simple: full-time workers deserve a living wage, where they can afford housing, clothing, food and medicine on a full-time salary.
Though these efforts reached plenty of people, Disney knew instinctively that she needed a bigger platform to have any kind of long-lasting impact.
“My co-director and I looked at each other and said, ‘Well, we’re communicators. We make movies. Let’s make a movie about this’.”
Work on what would become “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales” began later in 2019, with Disney and her co-director setting out to work on a project that would chronicle the lives of Disney cast members struggling to pay rent and provide for their families while contextualizing their stories within the larger labor movement by using The Walt Disney Company as a case study.
Disney explains in the film that one of the big reasons she targeted Disney in her film (aside from her familial connection) is that she views the company as “ground zero” for wealth inequality, and she believes that a substantial change at Disney could spur progress at other businesses.
“It feels like there is an important shift.” Disney says about the growing awareness surrounding labor issues, adding distrust of businesses “is probably the only idea in this country that has unanimous support, except among the people who are benefiting from the problem. So it’s really important that we talk about this as much as possible.”
Disney doesn’t shy away from the fact that her last name gives her a big platform in the movie, acknowledging in the opening moments of the film that being the granddaughter of Roy Disney has given her immense privilege. However, she says she feels as if making the documentary and shining a spotlight on wage inequality is part of her life’s purpose.
“I think I was put on the earth to use all the things at my disposal to make good things happen, and fight for people who can’t always be powerful enough to fight for themselves,” she said.
Three years, hundreds of interviews and a pandemic later, “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, to universal praise from critics, scoring a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
However, though it is nice to have validation from critics and other filmmakers, Disney says her ultimate goal is to get this movie in front of the eyes of working people, especially in Orlando.
“Everybody who works at a job for not enough pay needs to come and see the film,” she says. “Disney, Universal, SeaWorld workers. … I know they’re all experiencing the same thing. And they’re all feeling the same level of powerlessness, but they’re not powerless. And I want them to come and get dangerous ideas.”
“The American Dream and other Fairy Tales” will be screened from Sept. 16-22 at Enzian, 1300 South Orlando Ave., Maitland, Florida. Abigail Disney will be in attendance at screenings Sept. 16 and 17 along with some of the Disney cast members featured in the film, to take questions from audiences as part of a special talkback session following the movie. More information about screenings and tickets can be found at Enzian’s website.
Getting this opportunity to reach out to other theme park workers is very important for Disney, who wants audiences to come away inspired.
“It takes incredible courage for workers to speak up. Incredible courage for them to come together and fight things. I want people to know that when [they] come together and speak up... big shifts, things that feel impossible before, start to happen.”
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