Wade Sampson reminds us that today is the seventieth anniversary of the opening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the movie that changed animation (and maybe more than that) forever. It debuted on December 21, 1937 at the Fox Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. Like most of you, I first saw the film after seeing several of Mr. Disney's later (and probably, better) animated features so I didn't appreciate how revolutionary Snow White was at the time of its debut; not until the early seventies when I attended a screening hosted by, of all people, Chuck Jones.
He seemed like an odd choice since Jones had not worked on Snow White. (His total experience at Disney was many years after it was made…a few months spent working on Sleeping Beauty.) This wisdom of his selection as speaker became apparent when he delivered a little talk after the film — a talk that could have been titled, "What Walt Disney Could Do That We At Warner Brothers Could Not." Much of it had to do with slow, subtle character animation and a wider, muted color pallette. He cited moments in Snow White that could never have been done in one of his seven-minute Looney Tunes extavaganzas. The budgets at Warner's did not allow an animator to spend as much time on a sequence as Walt allowed his crew…and the need to tell a story in seven minutes necessitated much swifter, broader action.
Anyway, I wish I had a recording of Chuck's speech because it contained a lot of fascinating observations — with admitted jealousy, a great creator of animation was discussing a cartoon from the standpoint of an onlooker. I came away with a new appreciation of the film.
Wade mentions the Carthay Circle in his article. It was a great place that in the fifties and sixties, alternated between housing live shows and movies. My parents must have taken me to a half-dozen films there. Situated in what was largely a residential area, it had impossible parking, which was probably what caused it to close. In fact, it became rather well-known as a theater to avoid because it had 1,500 seats and about a tenth as many places to leave your vehicle. Still, if you got there, it seemed worth the ordeal. It was a palace and just being in it was an experience, regardless of what was showing. (I seem to recall seeing Around the World in 80 Days there. I was four and a half when that movie was first released, but perhaps what we saw there was a reissue.) The place was intermittently open and closed in the late sixties and then finally demolished around 1969
In fact, they not only razed the theater but they plowed through many of the surrounding streets. The name "Carthay Circle" referred to an area with several circular avenues with the theater at the approximate center. The city decided to straighten things out so they connected this to that and that to this and now you can drive through that area and watch some streets change names inexplicably from block to block…but there's no trace of the Carthay Circle Theater or even of the circular topography in which it was situated. Kind of a shame.