by Neal Gabler
The final scenes—Snow White on her bier after taking a bite from the poison apple, the dwarfs placing flowers around her, her being awakened and riding off with the Prince—had been saved for last largely because Walt understood that they were the most difficult in the film. They were the scenes in which the audience would be invited to cry along with the dwarfs, an emotional province that animations had not previously entered, and they would constitute the major test of the film’s effectiveness, though by this time Walt had little doubt they would succeed. “There is going to be a lot of sympathy for these little fellows,” he said at a story conference that July. “We can tear their [the audience’s] hearts out if we want to by putting in a little crying.” Frank Thomas, Fred Moore’s onetime assistant, was given the assignment of animating the dwarfs’ grief from Albert Hurter’s drawings, and he animated it with as little movement as possible—basically held poses with tears crawling down the dwarfs’ cheeks and, as Walt had instructed at a story meeting, “concentrating on Grumpy when he breaks down and starts to cry,” cracking his stoic facade. As with every scene, Walt tinkered with this one before cleanup—“The movement on the dwarfs is too abrupt.” “As it is now there are two sort of hold positions on Grumpy that seem out of character, then suddenly he breaks.” “Stagger the blinks on the animals instead of having them all blink at once.”—and then he was finished. Whether he liked it or not, he had to be finished in order to deliver the film on schedule.
But he didn’t like doing it. When the animators were being rushed in late spring, Dave Hand said that Walt “is actually tearing out his heart okaying some of the stuff which you know he would like to see better,” and then excused him saying, “He is trying to move the picture as best he can.” At one sweatbox session Walt lamented that the dwarfs acted as if they were following directions on an exposure sheet and not “as if they knew in their minds what they were going to do.” At another he bemoaned that the Magic Mirror seemed to be working too hard to say his words. And at another he criticized the Queen for looking as if “she was carrying a big load of laundry,” for moving suddenly without anticipation, and for having eyebrows that were too extreme. He was especially rough on Fred Moore, who had animated the dwarfs, sitting with him in the sweatbox and repeatedly reviewing his scenes, fixating again and again on the size of one of Grumpy’s fingers, which Moore, intentionally or not, had refused to correct, until Walt ordered him to do so. He even grumbled that he found Adriana Caselotti’s singing voice too strident. “When anybody sings, it should be good or he shouldn’t sing at all,” Walt told the staff. And all along he was aware of the real danger that he himself posed to his beloved project even as he was shepherding it: that it would lose spontaneity from the constant revisions. “Watch to keep it from sounding like it had been well-rehearsed,” he warned at the end of one story conference. “We want spontaneous feeling in it.”
In the end, even after all the final touches had been applied, Walt, ever the perfectionist, was disappointed. “We’ve worked hard and spent a lot of money, and by this time we’re a little tired of it,” he confessed to one journalist shortly after its completion. “I’ve seen so much of Snow White that I am conscious only of the places where it could be improved. You see, we’ve learned such a lot since we started this thing! I wish I could yank it back and do it all over again.” Even more than a decade later Walt was sighing over the film’s flaws. “There were some things in ‘Snow White’ that make me crawl when I see them now,” he said. “The bridge on her nose floats all over her face. And the Prince jitters like he’s got palsy.” He was especially perturbed by the latter, so perturbed that Roy even suggested they reanimate the scene to eliminate the shimmying. Walt leaped at the offer, saying it would cost another $250,000 to $300,000. As Roy related it, “I said forget it.” Snow White would be released with the shimmy.
If they had been flying blind in making the feature, they were also flying blind in promoting and distributing it. They had had experience in publicizing shorts; they had no experience in publicizing a feature film. Nevertheless, after the film’s reception at the studio screenings, Walt was confident—almost too confident. He was fond of telling how, before Snow White’s release, many in the industry and the press had disparaged the project and called it “Disney’s Folly, which one paper actually did,” but this was most likely just more self-dramatization of Walt overcoming another purported hurdle, since there seemed, if anything, to be tremendous anticipation of the film almost from its inception. Indeed, at Walt’s May meeting in New York with the RKO publicity staff he encouraged them not to think that the picture would sell itself just because it was a novelty. “I want everybody to be sold on it so they won’t be underestimating or over-estimating the power of the picture to draw on its own,” he apprised Roy of his plan. “I think we will have to do a lot of indirect selling to the press,” by which he meant placing feature stories in papers and magazines.
Whatever small doubts they might have harbored over RKO’s prospective publicity efforts, however, the Disneys had a much greater issue with their new distributor—one they almost seemed afraid to broach. As naïve as it may have sounded after their nearly fifteen years in the film business, they had no idea what to charge exhibitors for the film and no idea what RKO’s return to them might be, which they fully realized made them vulnerable to RKO’s machinations. The larger studios typically sold their films in blocks, so their advice wouldn’t have been particularly helpful to a studio with only one feature to sell. What the Disneys needed was an independent producer to guide them, of which there were very few in Hollywood at the time. As it turned out, the knight who rode to their rescue was Walt’s old idol, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin offered to give the Disneys all his “records and experience,” most importantly his ledgers from Modern Times, which permitted Roy to press RKO to “go out and ask Chaplin prices” and to get the same terms in foreign markets as Chaplin had gotten. Thanking Chaplin after Snow White’s release, Walt called it an “invaluable service” and wrote, “Your records have been our Bible—without them, we would have been as sheep in a den of wolves.”
With the finances resolved, the day to which the entire studio had been pointing for years, December 21, 1937, was finally upon them. The last week of November Walt was filmed for a Snow White trailer, and the next week the studio headed en masse to Pomona, an hour’s car ride east of Los Angeles, for the film’s first sneak preview—its first exposure to a non-studio, nonindustry audience. As Ben Sharpsteen remembered it, most of the studio’s employees were not informed, and those who were, the top personnel, arrived at the theater unceremoniously in a bus. The audience was taken totally by surprise, but only a few walked out, which apparently was a rarity for a sneak preview, and the employees left the theater feeling a sense of elation, vindication, and anticipation. With the premiere impending, the animators were so enthusiastic that they picked up posters at the studio and tacked them up all over Los Angeles.
The site of the premiere was the Carthay Circle Theater, a fifteen-hundred-seat Mission Revival–style house on San Vicente Boulevard near the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, and the place where Walt had first shown The Skeleton Dance back in 1929. The Carthay was an ornate palace where searchlights roamed the skies at openings, and the Snow White premiere was a gala event, with grandstands packed with fans and dozens of Hollywood luminaries in attendance—a testament both to the expectations of the film and to Walt Disney’s status, at only thirty-six, as an American icon. In thinking back on that evening, Walt would recall an incident that had occurred on the back platform of the train when he first headed west to Los Angeles. He was making conversation with a man there who asked what Walt did. When Walt said he was in the motion picture business, the man said he knew people in the movies and inquired what end Walt was in. “I make animated cartoons,” Walt told him, which was met with a steely disdain that Walt never forgot and that led him to resolve that someday his cartoons would be afforded the same respect
as live features. Now one was.
“AM CONVINCED ALL OUR FONDEST HOPES WILL BE REALIZED TONIGHT,” Chaplin wired Walt that day, but despite the positive screenings, the encouraging feedback, and Walt’s own brimming confidence, he still felt an inescapable anxiety, especially over how the audience would react to the dwarfs at Snow White’s bier—the old anxiety over whether people could and would be moved by animated characters. Walt entered the theater both euphoric and edgy. “Well, it’s been a lot of fun making it,” Walt told interviewer Buddy Twist to a national radio audience, less than honestly. “And we’re very happy that it’s being given this big premiere here tonight and all these people are turning out to take a good look at it. And I hope they’re not disappointed.” Asked if he was going to be watching the film himself, he quipped, “Yes, and have my wife hold my hand.”
But the nervousness that had slowly accreted from the years of imagining, scrutinizing, retelling, fiddling, mobilizing, and pushing, and from the huge debt of over a million dollars that the studio had incurred in the process, quickly dissipated. “I believe everyone in that first Snow White audience could have predicted the enormous success of the film,” wrote the normally dyspeptic animator Bill Peet. “They were carried away by the picture from the very beginning, and as it went along everyone was bubbling over with enthusiasm and frequently bursting into spontaneous applause.” Ken O’Connor, an art director on the film, said of the audience, “They even applauded the background and layouts when no animation was on the screen.” O’Connor was sitting near the actor John Barrymore, who began “bouncing up and down in his seat he was so excited” when the shot of the Queen’s castle came on screen with the Queen poling her boat through the fog.
But the “highlight,” as Ward Kimball put it, was the bier scene. “Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were sitting close, and when Snow White was poisoned, stretched out on that slab, they started blowing their noses. I could hear it—crying—that was the big surprise. We worried about the serious stuff and whether they would feel for this girl, and when they did, I knew it was in the bag.” Everyone in the theater seemed to be crying and dabbing at his or her eyes. And at the end the audience exploded into what one attendee called a “thunderous ovation.” Even the animators seemed to be in awe of the achievement. “I don’t know how we did it,” Grim Natwick told an interviewer years later. “I don’t think anyone really does.”
“I have made a wager that the picture will set up grosses nearing the record mark and I expect to buy an Argentine pony with the money I shall win,” producer Hunt Stromberg wrote Walt after the premiere. Expressing their “profound admiration,” Harman and Ising wired Walt, “OUR PRIDE IN THE PRODUCTION IS SCARCELY LESS THAN YOURS MUST BE AND WE ARE GRATEFUL TO YOU FOR FULFILLING AN AMBITION WHICH MANY OF US HAVE LONG HELD FOR OUR INDUSTRY.” Producer Nat Levine compared it to the first sound film and said that in attending the premiere, “I could not help but feel that I was in the midst of motion picture history.” Director Cecil B. DeMille sent a telegram saying, “I WISH I COULD MAKE PICTURES LIKE SNOW WHITE.” And even Joe Rosenberg, who had seemed so grudging at the September screening, wrote Walt, “It’s probably too soon to talk ‘Box office’ but regardless of the latter I shall always say it’s a truly great job which you and your gang have done—and a lot of people will be happier for it.”
The reviewers were no less ecstatic. Writing in The New York Times after Snow White debuted at the Radio City Music Hall, New York’s premiere movie theater, Frank Nugent gushed, “Let your fears be quieted at once: Mr. Disney and his amazing technical crew have outdone themselves. The picture more than matches expectations. It is a classic, as important cinematically as ‘The Birth of a Nation’ or the birth of Mickey Mouse.” Time, which featured Walt in a color cover photo playing with models of the dwarfs at his desk, immediately declared it “an authentic masterpiece, to be shown in theaters and beloved by new generations long after the current crop of Hollywood stars, writers and directors are sleeping where no Prince’s kiss can wake them.” Otis Ferguson in The New Republic went even further, anointing it “among the genuine artistic achievements of this country,” and columnist Westbrook Pegler would call it the “happiest event since Armistice.” Critic Gilbert Seldes, long a Disney admirer and advocate, was given a private screening and left saying “he thought Metro Goldwyn might just as well close their studios as long as you produce feature pictures.” Even the Communist Daily Worker praised the film, seeing the dwarfs as a “miniature communist society” and the vultures that attack the Queen as “Trotskyites.”
These critical verdicts would be enthusiastically endorsed by audience reaction, and Snow White would become firmly entrenched as one of the most popular films ever made. Observers differed, however, as to why people loved the film. At the time of its release, many critics attributed its appeal to escapism from the turmoil of the world, just as they had done with Mickey Mouse. Frank Nugent, revisiting the film in The New York Times in January 1938, wrote, “Wars are being fought as the picture unreels; crimes are being committed; hatreds are being whetted; riots are being brewed. But the world fades away when Mr. Disney begins weaving his spell and enchantment takes hold.” Others cited the awesome power of the sheer technical achievement: the collaboration of the nearly six hundred employees who drew, inked, and painted the quarter-million drawings in what totaled two hundred years’ worth of man-hours. While no animated cartoon had ever looked like Snow White, and certainly none had packed its emotional wallop, it was also true that in none would the investment of time, energy, and devotion be so palpable. In some respects it was the cinematic equivalent of a Gothic cathedral—only in this case all the man-hours were expended in service to one man’s vision rather than God’s glory.
Beyond both the political traumas of the 1930s and the novelty of the film’s technical achievement, Snow White also had more subliminal but no less powerful appeals. The jealousy of the Queen toward Snow White’s youth and nubile attractiveness provided a sexual subtext—the battle between one generation’s fading sexuality and the succeeding generation’s sexual awakening, the latter of which is literally rendered when Snow White receives her resurrecting kiss from the Prince. Seen this way, Snow White and the dwarfs enact a kind of pubescent ritual of unacknowledged yearnings, a practice round of maturity, until the Prince arrives to consummate her passion and bring her to adulthood. Though most viewers and especially younger ones obviously wouldn’t have recognized these elements overtly, the sexuality was also a metaphor for something they most likely would have understood. As the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim described the fundamental theme of all fairy tales, Snow White is about assuming one’s place in the natural order, essentially about growing up, accepting responsibility, as Snow White does for the dwarfs and the dwarfs do for Snow White, and taking over.* The story is not only Walt Disney’s expression of his own assumption of power, with the dwarfs representing his shorts and the Prince representing the larger ambitions of the feature cartoon itself, but an expression of the assumption of power for everyone who has grown up or intends to, and it would become the matrix for all of Disney’s great animations in which a child overcomes the hurdles and treacheries of the adult world and then finds his authority within it.
In this idea of gaining control, the theme of the film and its technical virtuosity merged. Whatever else Snow White does, this most deliberated-upon movie in the history of film conveys a sense of control, a sense of a fully fabricated world. For Depression audiences specifically as well as for the audiences who would see the film in succeeding decades, Snow White’s effect, then, was not so much in its escapism, as critics at the time of its release reported, as in its suggestion of vicarious power—for children over their own lives and for adults over the real world that often seemed beyond their control. As much as viewers may have resonated with the personal story encoded within Snow White—the story of Walt Disney’s assumption of power, which translated into the assumption of power for everyone�
�they also resonated with its wondrous sense of absolute discipline. In creating a world of his own from scratch, Walt Disney demonstrated, more fully and forcefully than ever before in his work, man’s potential mastery, which had always been the inherent metaphor of animation. This was real strength.
And at least as far as animation was concerned, it ushered in a new era. After Snow White, one could not really go back to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. One had to move forward. As Walt told a visitor who had come to the studio not long after the feature’s release, “We became aware that the days of the animated cartoon, as we had known it, were over.” Now everything would be different.
Photo Insert 2
The Hyperion studio in spring 1931. It had mushroomed from the single building at the right off the sidewalk to an active production facility, though it was located in the largely barren hinterlands of Glendale. The neon sign proclaimed it the home of Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony sound cartoons.
The Disney crew in front of the studio, circa 1929: (rear from left) Les Clark, Jack King, Ben Sharpsteen, Jack Cutting, Burt Gillett, Ub Iwerks, Win Smith, Wilfred Jackson, Bill Cottrell, and Floyd Gottfredson; front—Dick Lundy, Charlie Byrne, Carlos Manríquez, Norm Ferguson, Merle Gilson, Chuck Couch, Carl Stalling, Johnny Cannon, and Walt in one of his trademark floppy hats.
The “sweatbox,” aptly named closet at Hyperion where Walt examined the animation roughs on the Movieola. This was a grueling experience for those awaiting Walt’s verdict, which was the only verdict at the studio that mattered.