Fork Films
For dissident heiress Abigail Disney, inequality is, well, goofy. And for the many underpaid Disney employees, we learn in her new documentary The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, the Magic Kingdom is more miserable than magical.
The film, which premieres September 16 in Orlando, Florida (near Disney World) and opens in theaters in selected cities on September 23, is an excoriating critique of the ruling class and the predatory profiteering of contemporary capitalism, as filtered through the quintessentially all-American lens of her family business, the Walt Disney Company. That’s part of what gives this extraordinary expose weight: it was co-made by the granddaughter and grandniece, respectively, of Roy and Walt Disney—creators of Mickey Mouse and an animated film legacy that has morphed into a multinational corporate empire of live action movies, retail items, and theme parks around the globe.
In the eighty-seven-minute documentary that she co-produced and directed with Kathleen Hughes, Abigail blows the whistle on Disney’s enrichment of its CEO at the expense of impoverishing workers at the so-called “happiest place on Earth,” criticizing the chief executive’s $66 million salary. “In other words, a [Disneyland] custodian would have to work for 2,000 years to make what Bob Iger makes in one,” Abigail acidly notes. At one point, Michael Eisner—who worked for Disney from 1984 to 2005—was the world’s highest paid CEO.
Fork Films
Stylistically, animation in the documentary looks more like Monty Python than Pinocchio.
The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales follows four Disneyland staffers as they struggle mightily to make ends meet in pricey Orange County, California, on their $15-an-hour wages. Before and during the pandemic (which unleashed mass layoffs at Disney theme parks) the workers were forced to rely on food banks and government services to survive, even as Iger, his 2020 CEO successor Bob Chapek, and other corporate bigwigs have raked in the kingdom’s treasure.
To weave her motion picture tapestry, Abigail—who, in addition to inheriting part of the family fortune, has Walt’s storytelling panache—intercuts the trials and tribulations of the quartet of beleaguered Anaheim, California, theme park employees with her own fond memories growing up as a real-life Disney princess. Throughout the film, we see her home movies, archival footage, news clips, and animations, plus interviews with thinkers who critique the Disney Company. Stylistically, however, the documentary’s cartoons look more like Monty Python than Pinocchio or Snow White.
The interviewees in The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, who all appear to be questioned by Abigail herself, include experts on Disney and economic disparities, including Peter Dreier, Occidental College professor and co-author of Working for the Mouse: Inequality at Disneyland; film historian Neal Gabler, who wrote Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination; Heather McGhee, CUNY labor professor and author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together; Kurt Anderson, author of Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History; and Harvard’s Rebecca Henderson author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World On Fire.
The publisher and editor-in-chief of Voice of OC, Norberto Santana, Jr., and Anaheim city council member Jose Moreno expose sweetheart deals that the city of Anaheim has cut with the Disney Company and more. In addition, Abigail’s sister, Susan Disney Lord, also provides commentary and context that is skillfully interwoven with the John Steinbeck-like hard luck stories of the four Disneyland proletarians.
But this personal essay of a film goes beyond Disneyland, with the Magic Kingdom serving as a microcosm of capitalism run amok, unleashed by the laissez faire fetishism of future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr., economist Milton Friedman and novelist Ayn Rand, smoothing the way for the trickle-down economics of President Ronald Reagan’s unregulated free enterprise exaltation of profit above all else. The triumphant free marketeer is shown at the bell podium of the New York Stock Exchange in 1985—Reagan was, in fact, the first sitting President to ever visit the NYSE.
Abigail denounces this greed-is-good ethos as “The asshole-ification of America.” The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales boldly exposes and tackles the ruling class for its hyper-exploitation of the working class. McGhee asserts that “Stolen land, stolen people, and stolen labor is what our economy is based on.” Abigail steps up as an activist, penning op-eds and appearing on media outlets such as CNBC, where a host incredulously asks: “So, you want higher taxes?”
The “patriotic millionaire” even takes her campaign for economic fairness to Congress, where Abigail testifies before the House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship, and Capital Markets—where we glimpse Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters. We learn in the film that the Disney Company secretly lobbied the Committee before Abigail’s appearance, during which her policy proposals were denounced by Republicans as “socialism” and “communistic.” (Mickey McCarthyism, anyone?)
Abigail denounces the greed-is-good ethos as “The asshole-ification of America.”
Since 2008 Abigail—president and CEO of Fork Films, which produced this documentary—has been using her fortune and storytelling know-how to make left-leaning features and documentaries. These include 2019’s American Woman, a dramatization starring Sarah Gadon as that other famous female class traitor, a fictionalized Patty Hearst. The 2012 and 2020 documentaries The Invisible War, which scored two Emmy Awards, and On the Record took on the thorny topic of sexual harassment and abuse in, respectively, the military and the music industry. (An avowed feminist, in The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales Abigail has a ring shaped like a clitoris that, she says, “I wear at the most patriarchal places.”)
Co-director Kathleen Hughes also worked with Abigail in 2015 on The Armor of Light, a film about guns and abortion which won an Emmy. Hughes has received two other Emmys, including one for the PBS/Bill Moyers investigation into the news media’s coverage of the Bush Administration’s rationale for the Iraq invasion in 2008’s Buying the War.
Their current film also touches on the topic of racism through what The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales dubs “white fear.” Movie historian Gabler argues that Disneyland sought to “discharge reality” and create a Caucasian-dominated “berm” to protect whites from the Civil Rights movement—or, in other words, a fairy tale of the American way. The documentary features clips of an Aunt Jemima character at Disneyland, and also of stereotypically-depicted Indigenous people at the theme park’s Frontierland attraction.
“We’ve let the search for daily bread and other things completely overwhelm what our ancestors called our ‘souls,’ ” Rebecca Henderson muses onscreen. Abigail describes bearing the Disney name as “like having a weird superpower you didn’t ask for” and admits that in “my privileged life, I felt complicit.” But by using the advantages, platforms, skills, and “superpowers” bestowed upon her by the family she was born into, Abigail has built a new filmmaking tradition—one that holds her family accountable in the larger scheme of late capitalism.
Abigail Disney has betrayed Mickey Mouse and the ruling class, perhaps tying with Jane Fonda as America’s most famous active activist class traitor. With this latest film, the heiress is again biting the hand—or rather the claw—that has fed her to help change things for those low-wage Disneyland employees, and other workers, forced to partake of food banks and food stamps in order to keep the fairy tale alive.
The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales’ theatrical release starts September 16 at Orlando, near Disneyworld. For more info on other screenings and the film see: https://americandreamdoc.com/.