Giraffes on Horseback Salad

''Giraffes on Horseback Salad'', also called ''The Surrealist Woman'',Cinematical Visits MOMA's "Dali: Painting and Film" Exhibit
by Eric Kohn, at Moviefone; published July 2, 2008; retrieved May 29, 2014; via archive.today was a screenplay written in 1937 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". 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 Dali 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, New York City theater collective Elevator Repair Service. 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. On July 26, 2019, the official ''Giraffes on Horseback Salad Soundtrack,'' with full musical numbers and Marx Brother 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, an
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

*

{{Marx Brothers

Film with screenplays by Salvador Dalí
Marx Brothers (film series)
Unproduced screenplays