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What a $154 Disneyland Ticket Snub Showed the Most Powerful Woman in Television
‘Don’t you have enough?’ an ABC executive asked the legendary writer-producer-showrunner Shonda Rhimes
It might sound petty.
The legendary writer-producer-showrunner Shonda Rhimes was making tens of millions, and her prime-time shows — Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder — were blockbuster successes, reviving the fortunes of her parent network, ABC. Sure, Rhimes was tiring of the constant battles with her employer, according to a new interview in The Hollywood Reporter. But it was a small snub from an executive over a $154 Disneyland day pass that was the last straw.
As Lacey Rose writes in THR, Rhimes was entitled to two Disneyland passes as a perk of her employment. She had asked for an additional pass for her sister, who wanted to take her children and their nanny to the park for a day while Rhimes was working:
After some unwanted back-and-forth — “We never do this,” she was told more than once — Rhimes was issued an additional pass. But when her daughters arrived in Anaheim, only one of the passes worked. Rhimes lobbed a call to a high-ranking executive at the company. Surely, he would get this sorted.
