Giraffes on Horseback Salad, also called The Surrealist Woman,, by Eric Kohn, at Moviefone; published July 2, 2008; retrieved May 29, 2014; via archive.today was a screenplay written in 1937Salvador Dali biography at the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation; retrieved 15 October 2012 by Salvador Dalí for the Marx Brothers. It was to be a love story between a Spanish aristocrat named "Jimmy" (to be played by Harpo Marx, with whom Dalí was friends) and a "beautiful surrealist woman, whose face is never seen by the audience".Salvador Dali and the Surrealists: Their Lives and Ideas, 21 Activities by Michael Elsohn Ross; published September 1, 2003, by Chicago Review Press (via Google Books) Dalí considered that the central theme of the film would be "the continuous struggle between the imaginative life as depicted in the old myths and the practical and rational life of contemporary society"The Comic World of the Marx Brothers' Movies: "anything Further Father?", by Maurice Charney; published 2007, by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (via Google Books) and hoped that the film score could be written by Cole Porter.The Marx Brothers as Social Critics: Satire and Comic Nihilism in Their Films, by Martin A. Gardner; published August 5, 2009, by McFarland & Company (via Google Books); p. 8)
The film was never produced. Harper's Magazine posits that this was because Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Marx Brothers' studio at the time, considered it to be too surreal: Giraffes on Horseback Salads, from Harper's Magazine, May 1996 (archived at miskatonic.org) proposed scenes included giraffes wearing gas masks on fire,Half Marx for Dalí show, by Ben Walters, at the Guardian; published 5 August 2008; retrieved 29 May 2014 and Harpo Marx using a butterfly net to capture "the eighteen smallest dwarfs in the city". Serena Davies, writing in the Telegraph, said that Groucho Marx felt that the proposed film was not funny. Tate Modern curator Matthew Gale has suggested that Dalí may have considered an actual production to be beside the point."Harpo and Dalí: A Double Act", from The Telegraph, by Serena Davies; published 29 May 2007; retrieved 15 October 2012
For several years, the screenplay to Giraffes was thought to be lost. In 1991-92,Elevator Repair Service: Timeline by Season, at Elevator Repair Service; retrieved May 29, 2014 New York City theater collective Elevator Repair Service produced Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad, combining scenes from an attempted reconstruction of the screenplay (based partially on having "watched every Marx Brothers film they could find") with scenes of Dalí's real-life interactions with Harpo Marx and Susan Fleming.Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad, at Elevator Repair Service; retrieved May 29, 2014 In 1996, a "screenplay" amounting to a few paragraphs was found amid Dalí's personal papers.
In the mid-2010s, with the help of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Josh Frank located an 84-page handwritten notebook in the Centre Pompidou in which Dalí had laid out all of his thoughts and visions for the project. As apparently a full screenplay had never existed, Frank worked with Tim Heidecker to develop one based on the notes. This screenplay was adapted as a graphic novel illustrated by Manuela Pertega, and published together with 40 pages of historical background notes by Quirk Books in March 2019.Homepage for the graphic novelGiraffes on Horseback Salad at ComicVine On July 26, 2019, the official Giraffes on Horseback Salad Soundtrack, with full musical numbers and Marx Brothers comedy routines, was released by Lakeshore Records. It featured music by Quin Arbeitman and Pepe Deluxé, and performances by Frank Ferrante as Groucho Marx, Matt Roper as Chico Marx, Charlotta Kerbs as the Surrealist Woman, and Owen Egerton as the Announcer.
A poster for the abandoned film was produced by designer Fernando Reza in 2019.
See also List of works by Salvador Dalí
References
External links