Starting with snow white

Snow White 
tale because it demonstrates how and why making 
his 
mark was so significant. 
Ames wanted his audience to see his plays, including 
SNOW WHITE AND THE 
SEVEN DWARFS: A Fairy Tale Play Based on the Story of the Brothers Grimm, 
in the 
way that 
he 
saw them. This particularity did not end with his work as a producer and 
director, it was evinced in the very scripts he produced. In my analysis above, I utilize 
White’s/Ames’ 1913 version of the play. I have used this version and 
not 
the earlier 

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(1912) version because the edition produced only one year later does not differ by and 
large from the language of the “Mother Script,” rather it has evolved only to create an 
even more distinct image in a reader’s mind, 
Ames’
image. “For Children: New Books 
and Old Favorites in Holiday Guise,” published in the 
New York Times, 
December 21, 
1913, features White’s/Ames’ 1913 publication as “Another large, handsome book, with 
delightful pictures, […] a fairy tale play based on the story of the Brothers Grimm by 
Jessie Braham White,” with “full-page colored illustrations by Charles B. Falls and music 
by Edmond Rickett” (BR8). The songs of the play, as well as the colored pictures are 
touted throughout. This is an edition that was made to be sold, with an advertisement 
appearing just before the Christmas holiday. Furthermore, the writing within indicates 
White’s/Ames’ marketing of a particular version and vision. Where stage directions and 
descriptions of character actions are meant for the actors in the 1912 version, those more 
finely tuned, almost narrative descriptions of action in the 1913 script allow even a reader 
to view White’s/Ames’ play, in his/her mind’s eye.
Yet the 1912 “Mother Script,” marked “Never to leave the office: Winthrop 
Ames,” and the 1913
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version, stamped throughout as “PROPERTY OF WINTHROP 
AMES,” offer still more from the storyteller. With stage directions, musical directions 
and timing, lighting specifications and cues, and detailed lists of “Properties,” either 
typed or handwritten into the copy, one is capable of seeing Ames’ vision of the play.
However, it is also evident that the producer/director was acutely aware of the fairy tale 
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While for the purposes of textual references, I have used an online version of the 1913 print edition, the 
1913 version that I reference here is a notated version held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New 
York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 

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(and his particular vision of that narrative) as a commodity, a marketable product. While 
the story with stage directions was shared, the nuance of Ames’ theatrical vision of the 
play appears to have belonged to Ames and Ames alone.
There is little doubt of the significance of ownership for Ames, when the title 
page of the “Mother Script” is marked as the office property of Winthrop Ames, “by 
Jessie Braham White” (Ames’ female pseudonym), with Copyright “by Winthrop Ames” 
(1912). While the “Fairy Tale Play” is referenced as having come “From the Story of the 
Brothers Grimm,” 
this
artifact
is clearly 
not
the Grimms’, but Ames’. No mention is 
made of Goerner (from whom the original play came), or Merington (who adapted 
Goerner’s play into English), as Ames had already bought the rights to the play.
Although Merington had for a time pronounced a similar line of ownership, whereupon 
“acting and other rights” were under her control, the ownership over the play shifted 
hands within a couple of years and remained in Ames’ hands until 1937.
That being the case, when Adolf Zukor’s Famous Players Film Company released 
the six-reel American silent film, ‘Snow White,’ at Christmas
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in 1916, it was Ames’ 
adaptation for screen from his play