Chapin. During a scheduled visit in July, approximately midway through the filming process, Mary and James previewed early footage of the film and met the cast. Hailing the sets as "the most incredible" she had ever seen, Mary described Brandy as "a sweet, wonderful young woman ... I love the fact that millions of children are going to hear her sing 'I can be whatever I want to be.' What better message could we send than that?" Towards the end of filming, the producers realized that they did not have enough money to pay for extras and additional costs, and Disney refused to loan any more money to the production. The producers agreed to finance the remainder of the project using their own money, while Goldberg volunteered to donate the rest of her daily salary to completing the production. Release Marketing and premiere Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella was heavily promoted as the centerpiece of the newly revived Wonderful World of Disney; Disney themselves have referred to Cinderella as the "grande dame" of the anthology, while Jefferson Graham of the Chicago Sun-Times touted the film the "crown jewel" of the revival. The same newspaper reported that Cinderella was one of 16 upcoming television films commissioned for the series. One of ABC's promotional advertisements for Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella featured a black-and-white scene from the original 1957 broadcast in which Andrews sings "In My Own Little Corner", which transitions into Brandy singing her more contemporary rendition of the same song, its "funkier orchestration" sounding particularly noticeable opposite Andrews' original. Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella premiered on October 13, 1997 at Mann's Chinese Theatre, which Houston attended with her husband and daughter. The film's impending premiere coincided with the launch of the official Rodgers and Hammerstein website, which streamed segments from the upcoming broadcast via RealVideo from October 27 to November 3, 1997. These segments were again interpolated with excerpts from the 1957 version. A public screening of the film was hosted at the Sony Lincoln Square Theatre in New York on October 27, 1997. Most of the film's cast – Brandy, Houston, Cox, Garber, Desselle and Montalban – was present; Goldberg and Alexander were unable to attend. Broadcast and viewership Houston originally hoped that the film would earn a theatrical release. Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella premiered on November 2, 1997 during The Wonderful World of Disney on ABC, 40 years after the original