Quickie: calling movieclip methods

ok, am i going incredibly nuts or what? I have a movieclip on the stage that has an instance name of ‘rightClip’ which has a method called dial(numIn). I would have thought I could run this method from the root timeline by saying

rightClip.dial("354651681");

But evidentally not, as that doesn’t work… what will? the method works fine if called from within the movie clip as just plain dial(“38463581”); but obviously that means i can’t control it from the root and can’t have two of them running with different parameters.