‘SNOW WHITE’: A DISNEY GIANT DWARFS OTHER SUMMER FILMS

It is both heartening and depressing to note that in the midst of the summer of ‘87, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” is at or near the top of the box-office chart.

It is heartening because it proves to any sensible reader of trends that there is a hugely lucrative market for quality family movies. It’s depressing because Hollywood had to dig 50 years into its past to find one.

While accountants at both the studios and the theaters lick their chops over the figures on the overall summer box-office chart, the numbers that tell the most honest story of Hollywood’s ‘80s are the 4s behind “Superman” and “Jaws,” the 2s behind “Revenge of the Nerds” and “Beverly Hills Cop,” and the future multiples behind “Dragnet” and “RoboCop.”

Movies today are like sunflowers. If they are strong enough to turn toward the sun, their seeds fall on the ground (we’ll skip the details on pollination) and zwip!, an exact replica sprouts up next season.

Lucky for us, sequelmania hadn’t become a Hollywood obsession 50 years ago. We would have seen “Snow White and the Temple of Doom,” “Snow White Goes to Hawaii” and “Snow White the Revenge” decades ago. (To say nothing for the Dwarf spinoffs: “Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Meet the Seven Dwarfs,” “The Seven Dwarfs Meet the Seven Samurai,” “Seven Brides for Seven Dwarfs”.)

As it turns out, Walt Disney Studios’ idea of sequels is reissues. A novel and noble formula: Make pictures so well that they can be brought back time and again for fresh theatrical releases.

This is the seventh reissue of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and the math is as instructive as it is impressive. Since 1937, when it was first released, “Snow White” has grossed more than $300 million worldwide, against an original $1.5-million investment.

The $300 million figure is not adjusted for inflation, thankfully. If it were, we’d be in figures that most of us cannot comprehend.

The current run of “Snow White” took in nearly $20 million during its first 10 days and broke a batch of Disney records in the process. “Snow White 7” outperformed “Outrageous Fortune” for the studio’s opening weekend record and “Splash” for its overall single weekend record.

For movie trivia buffs, “Snow White” could be a game winner if this question ever comes up: When “Gone With the Wind” set the box-office record in 1939, which movie did it surpass?

At the end of the dual rave review for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” on the syndicated “Siskel & Ebert & the Movies,” critic Roger Ebert chastised Walt Disney Productions for releasing a version that had been “cropped at the top and the bottom” to accommodate today’s wide-screen format.

When “Snow White” was made in the mid-’30s, the standard projection format was 1:33/1, meaning that the screen and the image were just slightly wider than they were high. Today, the standard is 1:88/1, or nearly twice as wide as high.

Theaters can show films in the original square-shaped format--both the square and wide-screen images are shot on 35-millimeter film--but they need special masks to do so.

Ebert said that by conforming their prints to standard 1:85 projection, Disney had sacrificed 25% of the original animation work to sections of images cropped from the tops and bottoms. As an example, he mentioned a scene where a bird flies off the top of the screen toward a nest that you can’t see because it’s been cropped.

Ebert’s harsh remarks were interesting for two reasons. One is that he was attacking the very company that syndicates his show. The other is that there was no nest in the original version, either.

The following week, Ebert corrected his misstatement about the nest but repeated his criticism that Disney had caved in to theatrical interests by altering the format of “Snow White” and still maintained that 25% of the film was lost.

In a follow-up letter to Ebert, Disney Motion Picture President Jeffrey Katzenberg strongly denied that the studio had sacrificed the quality of “Snow White” animation for the convenience of exhibitors. Katzenberg explained that rather than buck the wide-screen standard and have individual projectionists make a mess of the 1:33 prints, he had Disney technicians go through the film scene by scene and reposition the images to fit the 1:85 format.

It took five months to reprocess “Snow White”--501 individual scenes were shifted--and when the work was done, Katzenberg said, a new negative was manufactured from the 1937 original.

In effect, Disney did a reverse pan and scan on the movie. Normal panning and scanning is a process in which technicians reformat wide-screen films for the nearly square format of television. The Disney process took “Snow White” from square to wide.

There is no question that original work is lost in either case, and with “Snow White,” there was an alternative. Instead of reformatting it for the wide screen, the studio could have simply taken the original 1:33 negative, put a black matte over both sides and make regular 1:85 prints.

You would still see the original image in the center of the screen and the projectionists--many of whom can’t chew gum and read Mickey Spillane at the same time--couldn’t possibly mess it up.

However you feel about the reformatting of “Snow White,” both Ebert and Disney deserve credit for the way this exchange was aired. When Ebert and his adversary/partner Gene Siskel jumped from the Tribune Co. to Disney for TV syndication, industry eyebrows rose up and out of the frame, too.

The potential conflict of interest was obvious to everyone, but of greatest concern to Disney’s competitors. Would Siskel and Ebert use as sharp a skewer on Disney films as they would for all others?

To people who know the fiercely independent--and fiercely competitive--Chicago critics there was never a question about their ability to ignore a contractual alliance with Disney. And in fact, Disney executives may have felt that the fire was being unfairly held to their feet. Early in the maiden Disney-syndicated season, Siskel and Ebert torched a couple of their movies--”Outrageous Fortune” and “Tin Men”--that most critics liked.

For the purpose of this column, it’s thumbs-up all around. Siskel and Ebert’s reviews are still the liveliest and most insightful of any movie critics appearing on television--by far--and Disney is still putting out the best in family movies. Even if the movies are scrounged up from the studio vault.

WHOOPS: In a recent column on the importance of pay-per-view broadcasting of first-run movies on television, I repeated an industry forecast that by 1997, annual pay-per-view revenue would be around $2 billion and that the Writers Guild of America’s share of that, at the current contract rate, would be more than $2 million.

That’s true, but to paraphrase a line from “Absence of Malice,” it’s not accurate. A follow-up call to industry analyst Steven Rosenberg provides a much more lucrative picture.

Rosenberg estimates that by 1997, pay-per-view (a system that allows viewers to select a specific broadcast of a movie and pay extra for it) will bring in about $2.7 billion. Of that, he said, the producers will receive an estimated $848 million. If the writers are still getting 1.2% of the producers’ pay-per-view income, their share would be more than $10 million.