Starting with snow white

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
(“The Little 
Girl/Little Mother” 110)
.
Where Ames had excelled in the theatre, “Zukor had pioneered 
the adaptation of full-length stageplays to the screen, touting the motto, “Famous Players 
in Famous Plays” (“Snow White (1916)”). Still, it was Ames who wrote the film version, 
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Merritt notes how “The Famous Players Film Company had established a practice of recognizing 
Christmas through special releases,” such as this version of 
Snow White
(“Marguerite Clark” 9). She 
further highlights how “Disney began his own tradition of Christmas releases on December 21, 1937, [with 
this self-same tale,] the premiere of 
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
” (“Marguerite Clark” 9). 

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104
“true to its theatrical origins,” recalling even within the new form his own precursory 
version and control over the tale (“Snow White (1916)”).
Losing 
Snow White
: The Adaptive Challenges of a New Platform 
By means of ownership and control over the commodity, Ames’ vision persisted 
and was, in some ways, amplified by virtue of the new context of film and its medium of 
production, the cinematic screen. Although Merritt argues that through this adaptation, 
“the 1916 filmmakers completely transformed the Ames play,” she likewise points out 
how “‘magic’ transformations could be embellished” and images that could easily be 
described on stage, could instead be 
shown
on screen (“Marguerite Clark” 11). Thus, the 
vision is not necessarily transformed, only the means to produce that defined vision.
Using visual images, or what could be shown on screen, indeed had the propensity to 
make a lasting imprint. For example, Smoodin examines how “[this] film made a deep 
impression on Disney when he saw it at a special matinée showing for newsboys in 
Kansas City” (
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
21). Merritt, further examining this 
same production, likewise gestures toward the audience appeal. The Kansas City 
Convention Hall, where Disney viewed the film “seated 12,000. However, about 16,000 
newsboys actually crowded into the hall, many sitting two to a seat. As J. Searle Dawley 
commented in his diary, this was the largest audience in history for a single film 
showing” (“Marguerite Clark” 17). It was later “estimated that altogether, 75,000 people 
saw 
Snow White 
screenings in the Convention Hall” (“Marguerite Clark” 17). Where 
Ames tale had lost its songs and many of its dances, it had gained wider audience 
engagement via the cinematic form (“Marguerite Clark 11). 

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This new technological mode of “storytelling” offered opportunities to confine the 
audience’s vision toward a singular view of the narrative’s presentation (scene by scene); 
however, there were also drawbacks to filmic representations in the early twentieth 
century, namely the lack of a human voice or spoken language. With only titles, 
projecting the most essential bits of narrative language to guide the viewer, the 
opportunity for a catch and release of the language, vision, and storytelling essence of a 
particular author are, in some sense, lost. Although Grajeda finds that orchestral music 
which served to supplement the scenes, images, and titles that appeared before a viewer’s 
eyes making the “silent cinema […] anything but silent” the loss of spoken language and 
vocal inflection meant that Ames’ storytelling or writerly voice was also absent or only 
vaguely resonant (142). Losing not only songs and dances, but further, language itself, 
gestured toward Ames’ gradual loss of