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    Cast Member Confidential:
    Cast Member Confidential:
    Cast Member Confidential:
    Ebook336 pages6 hours

    Cast Member Confidential:

    By Chris Mitchell

    3/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This is the story that Disney would never tell you.

    What do you do when everything in your life falls apart? If you're Chris Mitchell, you run away from home--all the way to Disney World, a place where no one ever dies--and employees, known as Cast Members, aren't allowed to frown. Mitchell shares the behind-the-scenes story of his year in the Mouse's army. From his own personal Disneyfication, to what really happens in the hidden tunnels beneath the Magic Kingdom and what not to eat at the Mousketeria, it was a year filled with more adventure--and surprises--than he could ever have "imagineered."

    Funny and moving, Mitchell tracks his ascent through the backstage social hierarchy in which princesses rule, and his escapades in the "Ghetto" where Cast Members live and anything goes. Along the way, he unmasks the misfits and drop-outs, lifers and nomads who leave their demons at the stage door as they preserve the magic that draws millions to this famed fantasyland--the same magic that Mitchell seeks and ultimately finds in the last place he ever expected.

    Chris Mitchell is an action sports photographer and journalist who grew up in Los Angeles. He was a senior at UCLA when he started his first magazine, an inline skating publication, and sold it to Sports & Fitness Publishing. Within a few years, he was working on five magazines within The Surfer Group. He continues to work closely with a number of publications and websites, as well as event and TV production companies like ESPN, ASA Entertainment and Lifelounge. He is a recognized expert in action sports, and as such, has stunt coordinated dozens of productions, including Batman and Robin, Brink! and Airborne. He is also the Chairman of the International Inline Stunt Federation for the advancement of extreme skating as a healthy and safe activity. After spending a year working as a photographer at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, he moved back to Los Angeles, where he currently lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCitadel Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9780806533681
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    Reviews for Cast Member Confidential:

    3/5

    44 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I've read a number of these "backstage memoirs" of Disney cast members, and I found this one to be one of the better ones. The story is personal, not a collection of interviews and anecdotes, and well told. The writing is more evocative and descriptive as well. This is truly a personal memoir, subject to all the quirks and biases of the author.The backstage antics of the cast members, after reading a few of these, weren't shocking to me, but might be if this is your first book of this sort.What struck me was the fact that after a year of working at Walt Disney World, and a pile of shocks and setbacks, the author still found a fair chunk of magic for himself and affection for the place. I also enjoyed the fact that the author fancied himself sort of a counter-cultural individual, having been a skate-punk of sorts, and still was able to embrace and enjoy the positive aspects of his Disney World tenure.Recommended if you are interested in these sorts of books.
    • 2/5
      I read this book hoping to find out all of Disney's secrets, but it was pretty much an aging skater punk's memoir of how he ran away to work at DisneyWorld to avoid the reality of his mother's cancer. It was still oddly engaging. Hard to know if I believe some of the seedy stories he tells about Disney but they were entertaining none the less.
    • 3/5
      A gossipy account of the author's experience working at Disney World's Animal Kingdom. The book is a little heavier on after hours behavior of cast members and a little lighter on on-the-job adventures and things gone wrong than I expected, but it is still a fun, light read. For a stronger emphasis on backstage stories at a Disney park, I would recommend Mouse Tales by David Koenig.
    • 2/5
      I was slightly misled about this book – and I take the blame. Everything I chose to read about this book (the blurbs, etc.) made me think this would be a book about backstage Disney (in this case, Disney World) in the vein of Koenig’s Mouse Tales books. (As I look back at what is written about this book, I realize I read it with certain blinders on. Again, the misleading was my own fault.) I dove into the book and found myself learning about the life of the author. Then the book went on with a mixture of backstage experiences and the life of the author. Immediately, that means the book did not meet my expectations. And, if you are going into this book primarily for the backstage revelations, then you will probably be similarly disappointed. The events in here might be shocking to those (and I’ll bet there’s a whole slew of them) who naively believe that the world behind Disney World is a happy continuation of the park, but for the rest of us these are stories which confirm what we already knew.So, let’s back up and re-evaluate this book on its own approach. What we have here is actually an autobiography/essay combined with revelations about Disney. The author sets a decent arc for the story – disillusionment, cynicism to Disney, go beyond the cynicism and believe in the Disney pixie dust, and then get another dose of reality and return to real life. Not a bad arc. But, it is in the telling that the story falls apart, and I left this book not that thrilled with the story, not that thrilled with the author, and feeling as though the author’s cynicism infected the entire story. (This is a tough to say. It appears the author has really put it all out there. But, as an author, that is the chance you take; that your skill may not be up to the challenge.)And, I think my final complaint, the thing that really set me off this book, is the feeling the author is not really being genuine with me. In the introduction he says, “The events in this memoir really occurred. The incidents that happened to me, I describe as accurately as possible.” Good. If you are going to do this kind of “tell-all”, you have to be true to what happened. However, in the preceding sentence he states, “In some instances, I have combined characteristics of people I met and created composite character.” Later he states, “I have ascribed folkloric episodes to actual (or composite) persons for ease of storytelling.” And there we have the crux of the problem. As a reader, how am I to tell when something has been changed to help the “story”? This only matters if, in the reading, I start to suspect that the truth has been stretched. And that suspicion reared its ugly head right away, when I read the author’s description of his first day at Disney World. Can this much really happen to one person in one day? And how were so many details so specifically remembered? We are asked to believe the author is telling us exactly what happens, he then qualifies it, and then the content of the story makes us question what we see.Throw in a few literary devices that just don’t work (three of the “folkloric” stories are placed in the text as if they were separate Penthouse letters - and I use that analogy advisedly) and the final result is disappointing. And that disappointment exists whether you are expecting a behind-the-scenes picture of Disney World or you are looking for an engaging, first-person narrative.
    • 4/5
      It's like a coming of age story for adults. An almost-30-something man runs clear across the country after his life falls apart back home and joins the Disney family. There are some good inside stories on what goes on at the park (shocking). Turns out he finds that even in the happiest place on earth, you can't run away from who you are or what you're meant to be
    • 5/5
      Cast Member Confidential: A Disneyfied Memoirby Chris MitchellDisney Trash. 4 ½ stars out of 5. Whenever you can read a fun and trashy book regarding the Mouse, sex, drugs, naked Disney characters, lots of fetish fur, NASCAR, and Guerilla Philanthropy, how can you not like this book? True, it did take me a while to get used to the narrator’s sarcastic voice, which did bother me for the first hour or two of reading, until the story became more interesting than the voice. The down side: this is ‘memoir’ which signals to the reader that somewhere, there is some lesson that the narrator will confront and make some kind of decision. But really, nothing bad really happens to the narrator. Sure there is cancer, which the narrator is running from, of course, but as a tool, this memoir is less about dealing with the tragedies of life than Disney’s rules to maintain a certain experience for children. This is less memoir and more exposé. A memoir is about a person experiencing a change of life and benefiting from the shared change. This is not what happens here: In Cast Member Confidential, we learn how Ariel the Mermaid is a lying slut, outside of her fins and that gay orgies are the standard and not exception. Overall? Entertaining. Take this book with you on your next Disney cruise. It’ll make you look at Winnie the Pooh in an entirely different way.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this book. It gave the feeling that you were actually going through the craziness of the Disney experience with the author. He didn't hold anything back, laying it all out there about trying to escape from the reality of his mother's cancer. A great view of life behind the curtain of Disney.
    • 3/5
      While I enjoyed the down and dirty look behind the escapades of Disney cast members, I found the author to be self-indulgent and almost unlikeable. This made me question how much of this was true versus him being a jerk. After awhile the stories started to sound similar. I found the rules Disney had for costumed characters the most interesting part of the book, as well as how there were castes within the casts.

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    Cast Member Confidential: - Chris Mitchell

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