Here’s the deal:
The Marx Brothers were nuts. Salvador Dalí was insane. Thus, if we follow the if/then rationale of high school geometry we can conclude that if the Marx Brothers were nuts, and if Salvador Dalí was insane, then a pairing of these two forces would create a perfect storm of batshit crazy.
Giraffes on Horseback Salad, or The Surrealist Woman, was an attempt to create just that.
The prospective film, which never got beyond the scripting/planning stages, would have been a joint effort by the comedians and the artist. Dalí, a fan of the brothers, wrote a surrealistic script for the team and presented it
to them in 1937. Reasons for the film remaining in the seventh circle of Development Hell vary, but it’s possible that MGM, the brothers’ employer, felt the project was “too surreal,” i.e. unmarketable, or simply that Groucho Marx found the film unfunny.
Believed to be lost, the script was eventually found among Dalí’s personal papers in the ’90s, but has not been released publicly. There is, however, an article from Harper’s that details the (fittingly bizarre) plot points of the film.
More than likely, this would have been terrible. Salvador Dalí was a master at his craft, but does that mean he could write a script or construct a joke? Probably not. His most famous foray into cinema, Un Chien Andalou, is hardly what one would call coherent or a laugh riot. However, there remains a slim chance that this collaboration could have produced a wild and inventive film, and I need to get in contact with Quinn Mallory so that we can slide into the parallel dimension where this exists.
But seriously, one morning I shot Salvador Dalí in my pajamas – how he got in my pajamas is a matter for the courts.