As the date of our comprehensive exhibition approaches--in exactly two months!--we at the Museum are increasingly immersed in the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film that marked a major turning point in Walt Disney’s career. Along with Snow White’s legendary place in history, some aspects of its making have become legendary in themselves.
One of these is the night in October 1934 when Walt first introduced his feature-length plans to the studio staff at large. His notion of producing a feature had been well known for some time, and he had held meetings with a small group of writers, working out the basic outline of the story. By October 30 he was ready to unveil it before the entire staff. Assembling them on the sound stage at 7:30 that evening, Walt gave a performance that galvanized his artists with the excitement of the project they were about to undertake: the production of Snow White.
What makes that evening doubly intriguing is that it’s a lost performance: we have no direct record of Walt’s words that night. Soon enough the studio would begin its practice of documenting every story conference in detail with a verbatim transcript, and scores of such transcripts would be generated during the years of work on Snow White. But for that historic evening we have only a cursory page of notes—listing some of the suggestions made by the artists in attendance, but hardly enough to account for a meeting which, we are told, lasted three hours.
One thing is certain: Walt’s talk had a powerful effect on his listeners. In later years, their eyewitness accounts described the profound inspiration they drew from his performance. That night—now lost to history—led to the making of a film whose own place in history is indelible.
J.B. Kaufman is a film historian on staff for the Walt Disney Family Foundation, staff writer/researcher at The Walt Disney Family Museum, and a leading expert on Disney animation and silent film.