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Teen Vogue

Disney High Book Explores What Post- High School Musical Fame Was Like for Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens

Teen Vogue
23 min read

?Disney Channel/Courtesy Everett Collection

The time is apparently ripe for reflection on and from beloved Disney Channel stars of the recent past. As Demi Lovato's Child Star documentary hits Hulu, culture journalist Ashley Spencer's debut nonfiction book Disney High sheds even more light on the Disney ecosystem of the 2000s and 2010s.

If you recall, High School Musical plunged its stars Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Corbin Bleu, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel, and more into the limelight. A new excerpt from Disney High, shared exclusively with Teen Vogue, goes into detail about the era following the success of the first High School Musical movie — from the aftermath of the cast becoming “role models” to the internal discussions after nude photos of Hudgens (reportedly taken when she was a minor) surfaced online without her consent.

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Below, read a chapter of Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire by Ashley Spencer, out Sept. 24, 2024.

Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire

$30.00, Bookshop

Even More High School Musical: Stardom and Sequels

Almost immediately after High School Musical’s January 2006 release, the network hastily cobbled together a massive press tour for the cast. There was no time to coach the kids or ease them into it after the film’s ratings and chart success. They needed to capitalize on the momentum ASAP.

Disney flew the cast to New York to perform on Today. They sat down with Life, Seventeen, Teen Vogue, Teen People, Bop, J-14, and dozens of other outlets. Monique Coleman joined Dancing with the Stars. Hollywood Records—which didn’t have the capacity to sign all of the main actors as solo singers—chose to forge record deals with Corbin Bleu and Vanessa Hudgens, while Ashley Tisdale signed a separate deal with Warner Brothers. (At the following year’s Radio Disney Music Awards, the Hollywood Records executives morosely observed the throngs of fans angling to catch a glimpse of Ashley. “Did we make a mistake?” Bob Cavallo asked Abbey Konowitch. Looking back, “I don’t think we made the wrong decision,” Konowitch said. “But, it was an awkward time.”)

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While Ashley had been on a slow-burn rise to fame with Suite Life, the rest of the cast were thrown into the deep end without a life raft. Unlike the talent who appeared on Disney Channel Original Series, many of the movie actors didn’t receive robust media training—because few journalists had been interested in covering past DCOMs. “We didn’t get media training. Our media training was experience,” Corbin said. “It’s insane how much press we did. I mean, just weeks upon weeks of eight- hour days, ten-hour days, press junkets. It seemed like it never ended.”

(Former Disney Channel PR head Patti McTeague said the High School Musical cast would have been “briefed” prior to doing any media interviews. “The briefings included message points,” she said, “but to encourage authentic interviews, we asked that interviewees provide their own anecdotes and point of view in interviews. It’s an acquired skill.”)

It was impossible for any of the High School Musical stars to leave their homes without being recognized. From the moment they were out in public, they were met with starstruck kids and pushy parents. Beyond just the excitement of meeting a celebrity, it seemed like everyone was eager to assess if they were actually “good kids” whom the children of America should be hoping to emulate. There was constant pressure to be polite, perky, and endlessly accommodating, no matter how rude or uncomfortable an encounter might be.

“I remember developing so much anxiety over it,” Corbin said. “We had become these role models, and especially ‘Disney role models.’ I felt this pressure to have this positive attitude, and I never wanted to create any sort of negativity whatsoever.”

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Their High School Musical contracts, like those for many Disney Channel Original Movies, came with an explicit “morals” section, broadly stipulating that they couldn’t behave in a way that would “degrade” themselves in society, bring “public hatred, contempt, scorn, or ridicule,” or “shock, insult, or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency.” And the baked-in expectation of what representing the Disney brand entailed was a hazy yet omnipresent force.

“It was definitely something that was just expected and not really ever explained,” Lucas Grabeel said. “One of the questions I’ve been asked the most in interviews is, ‘What advice would you give to kids?’ Or ‘What do you want to say to kids looking up to you right now?’ It’s like, how are we great role models from just making a movie? You do realize that we’re just actors who got a job dancing and singing and being super cheesy in this movie that totally blew up.”

From the network’s side, as with all Disney Channel projects, “At the end of the day, it’s a job,” former original programming head Adam Bonnett said. “These kids have a job to do, and part of that job is ensuring that they’re consistent with the values of The Walt Disney Company.”

The High School Musical kids were also making a significant amount of money. Yet there were no Disney financial advisors assigned to educate the talent and their families on how to navigate this influx of wealth, whether it was from the films themselves or the outside deals they were being offered because of their Disney success. There was no guidance on how to save and budget or how to assess what a good deal looked like versus a scam.

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“All of a sudden, coming into good money as a sixteen-year-old, my family was definitely not equipped to know what to do with it,” Corbin said. “My parents did well, but the kind of money that I started making was not something that we had ever experienced before. So many actors, myself included, went to business managers and handed every- thing over—and it’s not the best thing to hand over that kind of control.”

With both the Cheetah Girls and High School Musical franchises in play, the Disney Music Group began to test the waters of doing concert tours with Disney Channel’s made-for-television acts. After the proven success of a 2005 Cheetah Girls Christmas tour, Disney’s Buena Vista Concerts and AEG Live plotted an extensive fifty-plus-date High School Musical: The Concert tour that would take the film’s cast across the United States and South America from the end of 2006 through the spring of 2007. Contracts were drawn up and sent to the six main High School Musical cast members to sign. Everyone agreed, with one exception: Zac Efron. “Zac made the decision not to do the concert tour. He was like, ‘I didn’t sing it, so I’m not doing it,’” Rich Ross said. “That was disappointing.”

Drew Seeley took Zac’s place to sing Troy’s parts on tour, and Kenny Ortega, who had ample experience choreographing and directing tours for Cher, Michael Jackson, and Gloria Estefan, returned to direct the live show. In addition to the songs from the film, Ortega worked to incorporate elements of the cast’s numerous side projects in the setlist: Vanessa and Corbin performed tracks from their Hollywood Records releases. Ashley was given permission to sing three songs off her solo album, even though it was a Warner Brothers project. Monique did a bit of ballroom dancing in a nod to her Dancing with the Stars run. And Lucas served as emcee.

The tour sold out arenas across the country, packing in audiences of screaming kids and their indulgent, or at least tolerant, parents. “I’ve driven Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin, and I’ve never seen fans go crazy like this,” one of the tour bus drivers told the cast. “You guys are like the fucking Beatles.”

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In South America, the shows were bigger, often filling entire stadiums, and the crowds were rowdier. The performers were given military escorts to and from their hotels and the venues. At one airport, an official took their passports and refused to return them unless they took pictures and signed autographs for his children. “That time on the road was the best two months of my life. But it was also some of the darkest moments, as well,” Lucas said. “The scale of everything was just unimaginable. They worked us so hard. I mean, we didn’t really have days off. And you get to these moments of like, what am I doing? I am a monkey performing on a stage.”

They were just getting started.

Within two weeks of High School Musical’s January 2006 premiere, the network had ordered a sequel and approached the cast to sign new single-film contracts, just as they had done with the casts of Zenon, Halloweentown, and any past Disney Channel Original Movie deemed worthy of a sequel. The previous September, Gary Marsh had been promoted to a newly created position, president of entertainment for Disney Channel worldwide, overseeing the development and production of all original programming across the globe under network president Rich Ross. And Marsh took a heavy hand as the High School Musical sequel progressed

Peter Barsocchini returned to write the script, this time inspired by his youth working as a caddy at a country club. The sequel would follow the gang out of East High as they spent the summer at a country club owned by Ryan and Sharpay’s parents and learned a hard lesson in classism. While Ryan and Sharpay vacationed, the rest of the kids would toil away at summer jobs as cooks, lifeguards, and caddies. And since Sharpay had been a breakout character from the first film, she’d be given even more to do this time. The movie’s budget increased from $4.2 million to a previously unheard of $6 million, and the pressure manifested tenfold.

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After the cast finished the US leg of the concert tour, they only had a week off before going back to the studio to record the soundtrack for High School Musical 2. Two weeks later, they were in dance rehearsals and then on location shooting for a month. When they returned to East High to shoot the sequel’s opening scenes in April, classes were in session for the school’s actual students. The local teens would lean out of their classroom doors and squeal when they caught a glimpse of the actors in the hallway. The cozy sanctuary of a set had become a fishbowl.

But production on High School Musical 2 primarily took place at the members-only Entrada resort in St. George, Utah, about four hours south near the Arizona and Nevada borders. The venue, with its red rocks, waterfall pool, and eighteen-hole golf course, made an excellent stand-in for a New Mexico country club. And the main cast members could unwind in their adjoining casitas, which they stayed in at the property’s The Inn at Entrada. In their downtime, they helped each other with laundry, ordered takeout, or occasionally coerced an obliging cast member to prepare a home-cooked meal for everyone. Once or twice, some made the ninety-minute journey south to Las Vegas to party.

But mostly, they worked. And worked. And worked.

The sequel doubled down on the musical campiness of the first film. There’s Sharpay’s glittering, Busby Berkeley-esque poolside ode to consumerism, “Fabulous.” And the subliminally flirty “I Don’t Dance” duet, where Ryan and Chad have a jazzy, tension-filled showdown on a baseball mound that culminates in them, without explanation, wearing each other’s clothes. “Clearly, when you go back and watch it there is so much sexual innuendo in there, and it’s amazing,” Corbin said. “I personally don’t think I was aware of it at the time.”

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But no number more exemplified the agony and ecstasy of teendom than Troy’s literal spiral on a golf course, “Bet On It.” The solo song required Zac to run, twirl, and tumble across a setting-sun–dappled golf course, racing headfirst into the throes of an existential crisis. Because the sequence takes place at dusk, Ortega and the team only had a twenty- to thirty-minute window each evening to film it at golden hour, meaning the “Bet On It” shoot actually took place over two weeks. Every evening, Zac and the crew would stop whatever other scene they were shooting to rush to the golf course and capture a segment of the track before the sun set. Much of the choreography was crafted last minute, based on the environment and lighting they had to work with that day. “Okay, jump on these rocks now!” or “Let’s strut up this hill!” They’d decide on the spot.

“Zac was so trusting and so committed to any idea that Kenny and I would throw at him,” choreographer Chucky Klapow said. “We didn’t feel like it was silly or camp at the time. We felt like it was strong and powerful. It wasn’t until we saw all the chunks cut together at the end that we realized, oh, this is a lot.”

Also a lot: the level of attention being paid to the film throughout the shoot. Disney PR had now deployed a round-the-clock team to take on-set photographs and record behind-the-scenes footage for electronic press kits and interstitials. Reporters visited the set to observe the shoots and interview those involved. Whenever a scene wrapped, they’d grab a performer for interviews before releasing them to take a brief break. “Everyone was so famous so quickly,” dancer Bayli Baker Thompson said. “The set had gotten a lot tighter, people were a little bit more stressed, because now we had this thing to live up to.”

Lucas had torn his meniscus while working on a separate movie project and had pushed through the pain during the High School Musical concert tour. Although there’d been a massage therapist, chiropractor, and nutritionist on the road, the grueling schedule—and on-stage cartwheels—had exacerbated the injury. Now, on set for the sequel, he required a back brace and knee braces, and during one on-set interview he mentioned to a reporter that he was feeling better because he’d taken a Vicodin that day. He was swiftly reprimanded by the film’s producers. “I was like, what? It’s true. I’m in pain. I took a painkiller. I’m not abusing it. My body is fucking falling apart,” Lucas said. “They were like, ‘Publicity- wise, you can’t say that you’re taking Vicodin while you’re shooting a Disney movie.’ I was like, okay, cool, well, no one told me.”

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Prop master Scott Arneman had worked on most Utah-shot Disney Channel productions since 2001’s The Luck of the Irish. The stress and chaos of High School Musical 2 made him stop working with the network for a decade. Because the attention on Disney Channel con- tent now mirrored that of the greater Disney brand, Arneman’s job had become less about choosing the best props for a scene and more about jumping through endless red tape on clearances and approvals. (One lesson learned the hard way: The High School Musical prop team had made a replica of Ashley Tisdale’s actual pink-jewel-encrusted cell phone for Sharpay’s device in the first film. When the company that had accessorized Ashley’s original phone saw the film, Arneman recalled, they sued Disney for using their design without permission.)

And Ortega’s expectations for the film had also reached near impossible heights. He pushed for perfection from everyone working on the sequel, and his flair for dreaming up creative changes on the fly had gone from requesting those changes to demanding they happen at a moment’s notice.

“Kenny was out of control. Now, he had all this authority to just say, ‘We need headsets for this dance number!’ It’s 9:30 at night in St. George, this tiny town, where am I going to get headsets for all these dancers?” Arneman said. “On the first film, he was totally reasonable and fun to work with. But by the second one, it was, ‘I want this! I want that! Make it happen.’ It went from fun to ‘Oh, God, I’m going to cry. I can’t wait till this night is over.’”

* * *

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The internal dynamics of the cast were another roller coaster. Zac and Vanessa had been dating since their early declaration of love during the first film’s rehearsals. But there were occasional breakups and on-set fights. “He was the sun and moon to her,” Lucas said. “Poor girl.” Later, during the third film, Vanessa asked Barsocchini if she could use his office. He obliged. “I hear her dragging Zac into this office,” he said, “and then I just hear yelling.” He added, “Do you know how long relationships last at that age? That was a real blessing to hold it together for three movies.”

Ashley and Vanessa had developed a close friendship that was also fiercely competitive. Some days, they would be as tight as sisters. Other days, they didn’t speak. Lucas said he and Monique were “kind of together for a minute,” then went back to being just friends. And the tension that he and Ashley had harbored at the callback auditions basically continued throughout their entire HSM journey. “We were not close. We were not good friends. Let’s be honest, okay?” Ashley has said of her relationship with Lucas. “We hated each other.”

But, most crucially, in the year and a half between filming High School Musical and High School Musical 2, Zac had become a Star with a capital “S.” High School Musical made America fall in love with him, and the opportunities beyond Disney Channel were aplenty. While everyone else had been traveling on the High School Musical concert tour together, Zac had filmed Universal’s movie musical Hairspray with John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Queen Latifah. Universal reportedly paid him a mere $100,000 to play teen idol Link Larkin, but at least they hadn’t done him dirty by subbing in someone else’s singing voice. Zac felt like he was becoming valued by Hollywood at large—if not by Disney. Now, on the High School Musical sequel, he had enough cachet to stand his ground and do all his own singing.

“Personally, I feel no competition with the cast because I’m not going for the same things they are,” he told a New York Times reporter on the set of High School Musical 2. “A lot of them are doing teen music things, and tours, various TV deals and other Disney TV movies and Disney albums. That’s the last thing I want to be doing at the moment.” He added, “I’m setting my sights a little bit higher.”

A division had formed. Zac, while still kind and polite, returned to Utah with his dream of becoming a full-fledged Hollywood star within reach. He was more aloof with the cast and crew and mainly kept to himself or with Vanessa. The principal actors had all been seen as equals while making the first film. Now, Zac had been singled out as the one with the most promise. And the rest of the cast noticed. “It’s hard when you’re going through that and people are getting asked different questions and getting different jobs, when you started basically at the same spot,” Lucas said. “It was a huge adjustment.”

By the time of High School Musical 2’s release in August 2007, Disney Channel knew what they had on their hands. The sequel got a proper red carpet premiere at Disneyland, attended by most of the network’s stars, plus celebrity parents eager to score points with their kids. Cindy Crawford and her brood arrived by helicopter, and even company VIPs Mickey and Minnie Mouse made an appearance.

More than 17.2 million viewers tuned in to the US premiere of High School Musical 2 on August 17, 2007, allowing it to handily beat the series finale of The Sopranos that had drawn 11.9 million viewers on HBO two months earlier. High School Musical 2 was the most-watched basic cable telecast of all time, beating the previous record held by a Monday Night Football game on ESPN in 2006. And with kids eleven and under, who accounted for 6.1 million of its viewers, it was the most-watched TV broadcast of all time.

“Take a bow, Disney Channel entertainment [president] Gary Marsh, Rich Ross and the rest of the exec team that backed the notion of a kid-friendly tuner last year when most of us were going, huh?” Variety wrote at the time. “The kids of today—singing and dancing, Mickey and Judy style? Just goes to prove the industry cliche about zigging when others are zagging.”

Disney Channel had become a domineering force in cable television. It was now available in more than ninety-two million homes and steadily topping the prime-time ratings for all of basic cable. But unlike most television networks, the value in the ratings bonanza for Disney Channel didn’t lie in increased ad revenue. The value was in how those eyeballs on the channel could translate into merchandise and music sales. And because Disney owned the publishing and the masters of all the network’s original songs in their entirety, the profits were massive.

“You’re talking about a seventeen million audience for High School Musical 2,” Disney music executive Mitchell Leib said. “What? Is every kid in America watching the Disney Channel? The answer is yes. And then guess what? Is every kid in America buying a Cheetah Girls soundtrack and a Hannah Montana soundtrack and a High School Musical soundtrack? Yes.”

But not all High School Musical news was good news. In early September 2007, just weeks after High School Musical 2 premiered on Disney Channel, someone leaked private photos of Vanessa Hudgens posing in her underwear and in the nude. Vanessa was eighteen at the time of the online leak, but the amateur photos had reportedly been taken years earlier when they were sent to a former boyfriend.

Rich Ross was in Australia on a business trip when he awoke to the story splashed on the front page of a local newspaper. “I knew then that, clearly, it was going to be everywhere,” he said.

Back in Burbank, Vanessa came to Anne Sweeney’s office in tears.

“That was one of the most heartbreaking moments I remember,” said Sweeney, who was then the president of the Disney/ABC Television Group. “It was not an interrogation. It was more of an, Oh, God, how could this happen to this kid? How in the world does someone get access to a child? And the word to underscore was ‘child.’ She was just a kid.”

The public distribution of the images, which happened without Vanessa’s involvement or consent, amounted to child pornography. Disney lawyers swooped in, highlighting that Vanessa was underage when the photos were taken and threatening severe legal action to any outlets that posted the images. “I remember feeling so angry at whoever it was who was out there exploiting her,” Sweeney said.

But the novelty of celebrity hacks and the persistent idea that Disney stars should be infallible role models meant that a frenzy of judgment and shaming of Vanessa ensued. “It was at a moment in time where celebrities were starting to realize that what they thought was private wasn’t necessarily staying that way,” Ross said.

For many pundits and commenters, the blame lay more on Vanessa for taking the photos than on the person who betrayed her and leaked them. “She’s damaged,” one L.A. mom told Reuters. “She’s got this teeny- bop audience, young preteens and younger, who are admiring her and thinking she’s this wonderful, pure innocent person.” And the public messaging from Disney Channel did little to change these victim-blaming perceptions.

“I want to apologize to my fans, whose support and trust means the world to me,” Vanessa wrote in a curated statement days after the leak. “I am embarrassed over this situation and regret having ever taken these photos.”

Tabloid rumors swirled that Disney was planning to axe Vanessa from the third High School Musical film, for which cast negotiations were ongoing. But Disney stressed that they were still in talks with all of the main cast. “Vanessa has apologized for what was obviously a lapse in judgment,” then–Disney Channel PR head Patti McTeague said in a statement. “We hope she’s learned a valuable lesson.”

Despite the scolding tone of that statement, those on the ground say that behind the scenes, the matter seemed to be handled with a more compassionate hand by the network brass. “What I heard in the hallways wasn’t, ‘This is a property. We don’t want to fuck it up,’” High School Musical writer Peter Barsocchini said. “There was an attitude from people like, ‘She’s just a kid. Give her a fucking break.’”

Looking back, the network executives reiterated to me that they never considered removing Vanessa from the film or punishing her in any way. “We made the decision that Vanessa was part of the family, and she was going to stay part of the family,” Ross said. The stated “lesson” they imparted on Vanessa, Sweeney said, was, “Protect yourself. Protect your privacy. Protect your being.”

“From a Disney perspective, it wasn’t, ‘You’re a bad girl. You shouldn’t have done this,’” Sweeney reflected sixteen years later. “It was, ‘You’re a young woman. Be careful out there.’ I know the media ran with it like this scolding, but she was surrounded by a lot of women in corporate jobs who didn’t want to see anything bad happen to her.”

Women, while not as prevalent at the executive level as men, played crucial roles in Disney Channel’s ascent. (Exhibit A: executive vice president of production Susette Hsiung, who oversaw the projects’ budgets and was described by one male producer as “a tough motherfucker” who was “in many ways, the heart and muscle and brain of keeping the operation going.”)

By this point, Sweeney was overseeing all of Disney’s television properties, including ESPN and ABC. And she was long familiar with the sexism that permeated the media landscape. When Paramount chief Sherry Lansing had stepped down three years prior, Sweeney took on the mantle of “the most powerful woman in Hollywood.”

Yet, when Sweeney joined the other Disney executives to pose for photos with the cast at the High School Musical 2 premiere, a tabloid identified her as “Zac Efron’s mom,” assuming she must have been accompanying him to the event. “The sexism was rampant. It was constant. And I didn’t take the time to think about it very much, or react to it,” she said. “I just kind of parked it.”

The Vanessa incident highlighted to Sweeney and the rest of the executives that the nature of celebrity—especially what was expected of young female celebrities—was rapidly changing with the dominance of the internet and the rise of social media. It was clear there was more that needed to be done to protect and train Disney Channel’s stars, but it would take until 2009, after the High School Musical franchise had ended, for institutionalized action to take place.

Excerpted from DISNEY HIGH: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire by Ashley Spencer ? 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.


Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue


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