I Read A Book About Disney Channel, And These Behind-The-Scenes Details About The Making Of The “High School Musical” Left Me So Shocked

Starring Hayden Panettiere, Tiger Cruise is a 2004 Disney Channel Original Movie about a group of families on a navy boat when the September 11 attacks took place. Though it seems unlikely, it was a lighthearted scene in the movie involving a group of kids having an impromptu jam session that inspired an executive producer named Bill Borden to pursue plans for a Disney Channel musical.

In all three movies, Troy's constant battle between sports and musical theater is a central theme. This arc apparently came from an actual conversation between HSM creator and screenwriter Peter Barsocchini and NFL player Lynn Swann in the late 1960s, when the two then-classmates were traveling home from a school basketball game. 

Swann told Barsocchini that he secretly “always wanted to dance ballet,” which, many years later, inspired the story of a high school sports star with a secret passion for the arts. (In the HSM script, Barsocchini switched out ballet for musical theater, as they felt ballet might be too challenging to make appealing to young boys).

Although this was how HSM was initially pitched, Disney Channel bosses suggested that the creators should write original tracks instead because they weren’t willing to spend money on songs Disney didn’t own. 

Ironically, the HSM creators apparently knew so little about writing musicals that they sought help from a book about Broadway.

Barsocchini also named Taylor McKessie after his stepdaughter. 

When HSM was first pitched, Disney Channel's Head Of Original Movies, Michael Healy, instructed Barsocchini to change the setting to a middle school, as he felt younger characters fit better with Disney Channel’s demographic. However, Barsocchini refused and fought to keep the high school setting because he wanted the movie to feel aspirational for younger kids like his daughters.

From its conception, the movie's working title was “High School Musical Project.” When it came to thinking of an official name, the Disney Channel team came up with “pages and pages and pages” of different ideas. However, none worked as well as High School Musical — and that’s what they went with.

Despite working on acclaimed projects in the ‘80s, Kenny had landed himself in “movie jail” after directing several Disney projects that were considered flops. In the 2000s, he was desperate to get himself back into the Hollywood good books and thought that signing for a TV movie would be a good place to start. 

Recalling the first time he read the HSM script, Kenny told the Hollywood Reporter in 2019: “I thought: ‘It’s under the radar, it’ll be invisible, and it’ll give me a chance to warm up and maybe prove myself again.’”

Already an experienced child actor, Corbin was initially put forward to play Ryan Evans. However, the creators found he wasn’t the right fit and instead called him back to read for the part of Chad Danforth. The only issue with this? He did not have the sports experience to look like a convincing basketball star. “It wasn’t until the very first day of basketball practice in Utah where they went, ‘Oh shit. He can’t play,’” Corbin remembered in the book. 

Fortunately, he was willing to put in the work. “There was never a moment that I didn’t have a basketball with me,” he added.

He could act well and, unlike Corbin, could convincingly play basketball. But 17-year-old Zac’s singing skills were lacking a little, which left executives divided on whether or not to cast him. 

However, when he read with Vanessa Hudgens, the pair had “magic” chemistry, and ultimately, Kenny decided that Zac was the one. Although, there were conditions…

It’s widely known that Zac did not do his own singing in HSM1 due to early concerns over his vocal range. Instead, most of Troy’s parts were sung in the first movie by Drew Seeley, who’d also auditioned for the role. 

During his first recording session, Drew sang “Breaking Free” so perfectly that he was asked to tone down his vocals because he sounded too good to be an inexperienced high-schooler. 

For context, Zac did his own signing in the second and third movies and has previously confessed that he was blindsided and upset by the fact that Drew’s vocals were used for the first film.

Though the movies are set at the fictional East High in New Mexico, the actual East High is in Utah. They kept the school name the same to save the time, money, and effort that would go into replacing all the signage while shooting. But what they did have to change was the school’s mascot. 

The actual East High mascot is a Leopard, and the HSM creators were required to change this for the movie so that Disney could have full licensing ownership over any future merchandise. Unfortunately, there was already a pretty large statue of a Leopard cemented in the middle of the school, and so, for it to make sense in the film, the HSM team needed to switch the mascot for a similar-looking animal — which is how they landed on Wildcats.

Zac and Vanessa were the ultimate fairytale couple. They hit it off in auditions and dated throughout the making of all three HSM films until their eventual split in 2010. However, the pair apparently got off to a slightly rough start. 

From their earliest chemistry reads, Vanessa was smitten with her costar, but Zac had a girlfriend and, therefore, had been rejecting her advances. This apparently caused tension behind the scenes during early rehearsals, and Zac sought advice from Chucky Klapow, the film’s choreographer, worrying that if he kept turning Vanessa down, it might ruin their onscreen chemistry. 

In the book, Klapow recalled advising Zac to end things with his girlfriend and pursue a relationship with Vanessa — and the rest is history.

Rich Ross visited the HSM set in Utah to watch Zac and Vanessa shoot one of the movie’s opening scenes, in which Troy and Gabriella sing together for the first time at a ski lodge on New Year’s Eve. Standing beside Vanessa’s parents, Ross remembered that he “literally burst out crying.” 

“And I’m not a crier,” he said, recalling that he’d witnessed something “perfect” in that moment. “It was them finding each other and us finding our footing.”

Today, Bob Iger is the CEO of The Walt Disney Company. However, in 2005, he was the president and chief operating officer — and seemingly one of the first people to sense that Disney Channel might have a hit on its hands with HSM. 

After seeing early clips of the movie, Iger felt that it had outsized its potential and approved plans to up the movie’s marketing budget so that more viewers would know about it. That certainly paid off!

Instead, cast and crew members were simply invited to a private screening on the Disney lot, where they dined out on cake and ice cream.

Because HSM wasn’t expected to be the cultural phenomenon that it was, the Disney Channel team had not pre-planned a full-scale press tour for the movie — let alone media training for its stars. 

After the film premiered, the actors did interviews with outlets like Teen Vogue and Seventeen and even performed on the Today show. However — with the exception of Ashley, who’d already made a name for herself on The Suite Life — none of them received proper media training, which, by today’s standards, is pretty wild. 

According to Disney Channel’s former PR head, the stars were simply “briefed” with “message points” before each interview and were encouraged to tell anecdotes from the set.

With much higher stakes on the second movie, Disney PR sent a round-the-clock team to the shoot to record BTS footage and keep a close eye on the stars — especially while reporters visited the set. 

Lucas tore his meniscus while working on a different movie, and the injury only got worse during the making of HSM2, resulting in him needing a back and knee brace, as well as pain relief medication. In one on-set interview, Lucas mentioned to a reporter that he took a Vicodin and recalled being subsequently scolded by a producer who told him, “You can’t say that you’re taking Vicodin while you’re shooting a Disney movie.”

Scott Arneman, a prop master, said that working on HSM2 was so stressful that he stopped working with Disney for a decade. The stakes on the second movie were much higher, and in turn, Kenny had bigger expectations from everyone involved. 

“Kenny was out of control,” Scott alleged in the book. “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.’”

By the time the third movie was in production, Zac and Vanessa had been together for three years, and cracks in the relationship were apparently beginning to form. 

Barsocchini recalled Vanessa once asking if she could use his office to speak to Zac. “Then I just hear yelling,” he said, adding that it was a “real blessing” that they managed to hold their off-screen romance together for all three movies.

After initially thinking it was “the worst script” he’d ever read, Lucas reluctantly auditioned to play Troy before the casting directors decided he was a better for Ryan. This is where he was paired with Ashely, who took it upon herself to give him notes on his performance. Lucas recalled being enraged by the fact that Ashley “had the balls to walk up to another actor and tell them what to do in an audition.” As a result, he said he was “seething because of how much [he] disliked her.” 

Ultimately, their mismatched personalities perfectly served Ryan and Sharpay’s sibling dynamic — and the roles were promptly theirs. And though Ashley told MTV in 2017 that they actually “hated each other” during filming, the former costars have since become good friends.

Being that he was on his way to becoming a fully fledged A-lister, Zac was reportedly able to negotiate a $3 million contract for the third movie in 2008. This was allegedly more than any of his costars were paid and “worth more than fifty times the average” paycheck for a lead actor in a Disney Channel Original Movie.

Because Halloween-themed Disney Channel Originals had been some of the network’s most popular releases, bosses thought it made sense to give HSM3 the supernatural treatment, too. However, this idea was quickly vetoed by the HSM team, who thought the suggestion was “outrageous.” 

Executive producer Bill Borden recalled that the “insane” premise involved “magic books and time travel.” But that wasn’t the only scrapped idea for the third movie…

This is fairly self-explanatory. In 2008, 3-D movies were all the rage, and Kenny apparently thought about capitalizing on the trend by shooting the third and final HSM installment in 3-D. As we now know, this did not happen — and aren’t we all grateful?