LAUNCHING SNOW WHITE
Development on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began in early 1934, and in June 1934, Walt Disney announced the production of his first feature… One evening that same year, Disney acted out the entire story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to his staff… Both his brother and business partner Roy Disney and his wife Lillian attempted to talk him out of it…[1]
Walt’s solo performance of the story for his staff has assumed legendary proportions. The studio treated them to dinner and afterward they assembled on one of the sound stages to watch Walt’s presentation. According to new staffer Ken Anderson (1909-1993)…
“We were spellbound… He would become the Queen. He would become the dwarfs. He was an incredible actor, a born mime.”[2]
But why Snow White? Where did this idea come from?
Walt had first entertained an early suggestion from “America’s Sweetheart” silent screen star Mary Pickford (1892-1979) that he cast her as Alice in a Wonderland of animated characters. However, Paramount quashed that pitch with the release in 1933 of its own Alice in Wonderland, star-studded with such celebrities as W.C Fields (1880-1946) as Humpty Dumpty, Cary Grant (1904-1986) as the Mock Turtle and Gary Cooper (1901-1961) as the White Knight. Another of Walt’s concepts for his first animated feature was Washington Irving’s (1783-1859) Rip Van Winkle: he had conferred with wildly popular American comedian Will Rogers (1879 -1935) to star opposite animated versions of the other characters. Paramount put the kibosh on that idea as well: it owned the rights to Irving’s tale and would not yield them to Disney.
Nevertheless, a third possibility remained lodged in Disney’s memory as he himself explains:
I saw Marguerite Clark [1883-1940] in [Snow White] in Kansas City one time when I was a newsboy… It was probably one of my first big feature pictures I’d ever seen… I thought it was a perfect story. I had the sympathetic dwarfs, you see? I had the heavy; I had the prince and the girl, the romance. I just thought it was a perfect story.[3]
Disney’s eventual animated feature contains many scenes that closely duplicate that silent 1916 film. It is interesting to note that if Paramount hadn’t blocked Walt’s initial two ideas Disney’s first animated feature would have showcased live-action celebrities opposite drawn characters rather than the all-animated Snow White that actually got produced. A decade later Disney released the feature Song of the South, the first of numerous live action/animation combos that culminated in the Studios’ blockbuster Mary Poppins in 1964.
Pickford’s husband, Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) had even discussed the possibility of collaborating on Gulliver’s Travels… In May 1933…Walt settled on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the Studio’s first feature-length film, and work on the project commenced the following year.[4]
[1] Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film) from Wikipedia
[2] Kaufman, J.B.: The Fairest One of All, The Walt Disney Foundation Press, San Francisco, CA, 2012, p. 33.
[3] Smith, Dave: The Quotable Walt Disney, Disney Editions, NY, p.143.
[4] Bohn, James: Music in Disney’s Animated Features, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2017, p. 56.
