Marge Champion on Live Action Model - Interview
Disney Releases Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on Blu-Ray
Oct 6, 2009
In 1934, 14-year-old dancer Marjorie Belcher was hired by Disney to act as the live-action reference for the title character in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It appears she did a good job: she was brought back to the studios to do the same work for the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio and the dancing hippopotamus in Fantasia.
In 1946, she married dance partner/husband Gower Champion and developed their popular 'story dance' partnership, second in Hollywood only to the Astaire-Rogers pairing. That lasted until 1973, when she and Gower divorced. In 1975, she won an Emmy for her choreography for the TV special Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.
In 1977, she married Boris Sagal (father of Futurama voice actress Katey Sagal) and assisted him with his TV mini-series: 1979's Ike and 1981's Masada.
Still dancing at age 90, Marge Champion recently chatted with Suite 101 about her work on Snow White.
S101: How did you end up working for Disney Studios?
Champion: “My father was a well-known dancing master in Los Angeles. In April of 1934, a scout from Disney came to my dad’s studio and picked 3 of us out of the class to use as a live-action model. We were interviewed, then I didn’t hear anything until September when I had just entered Hollywood High. I was told to get over to the studio and get measured for a costume. My dad drove me, since I had just turned 14 in September – I’m just 90 now!
The week before I left California, I went to Disney to do some interviews for the Blu-Ray bonus section. I was taken to the archives, and they still had the top of the dress that I wore for the film. When they opened it up, it had two lines of hooks and eyes: someone else had worn it before I was fitted into it. I think they had somebody ahead of me who didn’t work out.
“Also, in the first storyboards they showed me, Snow White looked more like Betty Boop than she turned out to be in the film, with round eyes and a tiny waist. Of course, at 14, I still had a fair amount of baby fat but they loosened Snow White’s waistline, changed the shape of her eyes and she became more like me than I had ever anticipated.”
S101: What do you do as a live-action reference?
“It developed over a period of time. They showed me storyboards, since the writers had mostly written the story. For instance, when Snow White is running through the forest, they hooked up a clothesline and they had a lot of ropes hanging from it and I had to pretend this was the forest. They told me to act as if I was extremely frightened because that’s when the Huntsman had said he couldn’t kill me, but I had to run away. Really, it was improvisation.
“When it came to a song or dialogue, some of the animators became the dwarves, especially when I was shooing them all off to work. They would almost get down on their hands and knees.
“My favourite moment, which is shown on this new Blu-Ray edition, I danced with Ollie Johnston, the tallest of the animators. I was supposed to be dancing with 2 dwarves in one sequence – one of them was standing on the other one’s shoulders under a big coat.
“There are all kinds of things in the Blu-Ray bonus section that I hadn’t even seen in the previous releases. It’s so clean and so bright and it looks maybe even better than the original production.”
S101: Who else did you interact with?
“Ham Luske directed many sections, he was in charge of capturing the movements that they wanted. They had pre-recorded Adriana Caselotti’s voice for Snow White, and I had to sing to her playback. I had to learn her lyrics and if she was talking to the dwarves, I had to lip-synch for them to animate over.”
S101: Did you work with any other live-action reference models?
“Oh sure! Louis Hightower, who played the Prince. Paul Godkin: a wonderful dancer, he played the witch. We became really good friends; he was a pupil of my father’s and helped found the American Ballet Theatre. He had this very prominent nose, and that’s why Disney chose him to be the Wicked Witch. He had a hilarious sense of humour.
“Sneezy was played by Billy Gilbert, a comedian whose whole schtick was all kinds of sneezes. They brought him in for a day.
“They would use us to get the kind of thing that they couldn’t get out of their own images. The animators often worked with mirrors next to the lit drawing boards so they could test expressions with their own faces. If it was approved, they would hand it to the colourists and the background people.Since there were no women animators at that time, they couldn’t do girlish type animation.”
S101: You were married to one of Disney's animators, Art Babbitt–
“Very briefly, less than a year. But he remained a very good friend for the rest of his life. But, from that short marriage, I knew more about animation than most other people because he had the same table that he had at the studio at home. After supper, he would work quite late into the night.
“I saw how they flipped through the rotoscoping: they photographed every frame and they had to transfer that into rotoscope so the animators could decided if they wanted to jump 3 frames or whatever they needed. When you’ve got 7 little guys and a girl in these scenes, along with the animals and birds flying around, you really need quite a bit of support.”
(In Part #2 of this interview, Marjorie Champion talks more about working on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and her memories of Disney)
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