Rewinding a trailer reel this afternoon with my tea going cold, and I got thinking about work prints — how you can see a film with its clothes not yet on.
Cut to Lincoln Center, house dark, 1991. Beauty and the Beast goes up at the New York Film Festival about seventy per cent finished. So the Beast is a grey pencil outline in one shot, hair and all that blue velvet in the next, and here and there a storyboard sits in for a scene nobody had painted yet. An audience will forgive a lot if the timing's right. They stood up anyway, for a rose and half a cast still in graphite. Every projectionist I know would have given a year to thread that one.
Howard Ashman was working those songs from a sickbed and he'd died that March, months before Lincoln Center, so he never saw a finished print of it. They put a card up for him at the end — something about the man who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul. Listen for how the title song sits on the beat like nobody's in a hurry.
Linda Woolverton wrote that screenplay, which was new for the studio; and the story she was working from has two mothers — Villeneuve's 1740 version runs novella-length with fairy politics and backstory, and Beaumont trimmed it to a schoolroom tale in 1756. I have both; the short one is the loved copy.