Sunday, December 14, 2014

Snow White on rent control



This part of her 5 hours of interviews opens with the story of how she and her new husband, Gower Champion, found out that the true price will out. In this case, they could rent an apartment in 1947 in NYC under 'wartime emergency' rent controls, but to get the key they had to pony up $1,000 (over $10,000 in 2014 money). We always say that economics is where you find it.

Earlier parts of her interviews explain how, as the daughter of Hollywood's most prestigious dance instructor she'd helped her father train Cyd Charisse, Gwen Verdon, Rita Hayworth and Shirley Temple. Then, her father being friends with (Uncle) Walt Disney, she was chosen to dance the story of Snow White for Disney's illustrators, who afterwards 'traced' her movements to produce the animated classic;


Marge Belcher, as she was born, also 'modeled' a character in Pinocchio and the hippopotamus in Fantasia. That the Disney artists 'traced' her movements wasn't revealed to her--Uncle Walt didn't want that fact known--until decades later when one of those illustrators, upon meeting her in person for the first time, said that he was so glad to finally meet the girl he'd spent so many hours tracing.

2 comments:

  1. Norman Rockwell was a wildly successful and prolific commercial artist around the 1950's. He knew exactly what he wanted to paint, but needed an exact model to work from. He spent days acquiring and arranging scenes with props and live models to make photos, then painted from the photos.

    It seems that there is just too much detail in a realistic scene to paint it from memory. That explains expressionism and abstract art. It represents better the poor level of detail which is really in our brains.

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