Don’t Make the Redhead Mad!

"Anger is more useful than despair.”

                           — Arnold S. in Terminator 3 

“If you had to wear a T-shirt with a warning label, what would it say?”

I read that post and thought, hah that’s easy! “Don’t make the redhead mad!”

I’m a nice girl most of the time — I was raised to be. It took a lot for me to get angry and express my displeasure. But I had to learn it or risk being a life-long tuna (food for sharks). My experience working with Disney taught me that!

Disney has been in the news often lately, with the feud with DeSantis in Florida and Abigail Disney, one of Walt’s heirs protests about how rich they are and how poorly they pay their people who work in the parks.

Back in the 70s, when I was a young and struggling singer-actress, I was hired to work at Disneyland in a musical show called “Fun With Music.”

There were six of us in the cast, four women and two men. Although we were all told that it was a new experimental show so we were all being paid the same minimum union rate of $50 per day, it did later turn out that they paid the two men more than the four women. Sigh. 

We did five shows a day, five days a week for nine months. What a grind! I felt like I was working on a factory assembly line — I was bored out of my skull after about a month.

Several months into the run, a memo was sent to all the cast members that Disney was going to make a film of the show. They were going to do it on a work day after we had done our five shows, and for this extra show we were going to be paid our “per show rate”. 

What?! Our “per show rate”?? We did 5 shows a day for $50. That meant our “per show rate” was a measly $10.

Now, as a Screen Actors Guild member, I had done films before and so had others in the cast. We knew what the day would be like: we would have to wait — perhaps hours — while the technicians came in to set up the cameras, lights, and sound equipment. We would work with the director on blocking and camera angles. 

Then we would film it and do take after take — because there was a plane that flew overhead, or a fly buzzed the microphone, or someone flubbed a line, etc.

We figured that the filming could last ‘til the wee hours of the morning. For $10??

I said no. 

I went to the assistant who passed out the memos and said, “I’m not doing the film. Get my understudy to do it.”

The assistant looked at me in horrified surprise. “You have to!” he exclaimed.

I said, “Really? Show me in my contract where it says I have to do a film.” (It was an AGVA (American Guild of Variety Artists) contract — stage only.) 

He was speechless. No one ever said no to Disney! I smiled sweetly and went home.

The next morning when I arrived at the theatre, a phone call came in. One of the production people answered and said, “Chellie Campbell, Fred Duffy wants to see you in his office right now!”

There were shocked exclamations of surprise and fear. Fred was the big time — Vice President overseeing all the entertainment productions in the park. Everyone thought I was about to be fired.

Well, so be it, I thought. I can always get another job. I’m not going to be treated badly just to stay here. I got on the go cart they sent for me and then walked into Fred’s big palatial office.

“Hi, Fred!” I said cheerfully.

“Hi, Chellie,” he smiled.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“I hear that you don’t want to do our film”, he replied.

I looked at him quizzically and frowned. “Well, you heard incorrectly, Fred,” I answered. “I would love to do your film!”

He looked at me intently. “Then I don’t understand why we have a problem.”

I looked at him intently back. “I don’t want to do the film for $10.”

“$10?” he asked.

I said, “Yes, the memo states we will be paid our “per show rate” We do 5 shows a day for $50 so that’s only $10 extra we get to spend hours waiting for set ups, doing extra takes, etc. I just don’t think that’s fair.”

Now Fred understands — he’s in a negotiation! He smiled. 

“Okay, what do you want?”

“I want our hourly rehearsal pay rate of $10 per hour for every hour I have to work overtime after my full day.”

He sat back in his chair and thought about that for a minute. 

“Does that sound unreasonable to you, Fred?” I asked with wide eyes.

He had the grace to laugh. “No, Chellie, I think we can make that agreement. I will take care of it.”

“For all the cast, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” he promised.

But then, stirred by my example, one of the other cast members called the Screen Actors Guild, since we discovered we were all SAG members, too. When he explained our situation to the Guild, the SAG rep called Fred and told him that he would have to pay us all SAG minimum wage, which was $400 for the day.

They cancelled the film. 

They had budgeted $60 for talent and weren’t going to pay $2,400. And that was that.

When you stand up for yourself, you don’t always get the outcome you want. But it was still a win! I definitely felt empowered by taking a stand to not work for less than I believed I was worth.

That was my last job for Disney. Soon afterwards, I fell into a job that promoted me to Office Manager and put me in charge of finance . . . and the rest was history. Every experience became a useful story for my books and workshops.

I love how it has all worked out!

Chellie Campbell, Financial Stress Reduction Expert, is the author of bestselling books The Wealthy Spirit, Zero to Zillionaire, and From Worry to Wealthy: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Success Without the Stress. She has been treating Money Disorders like Spending Bulimia and Income Anorexia in her Financial Stress Reduction® Workshops for over 25 years and is still speaking, writing, and teaching workshops—now as Zoom classes and The Wealthy Spirit Group on Facebook—with participants from all over the world. Website: www.chellie.com.