The Seventeen Preliminary Scripts of "A Day at the Races"

Abstract

At some point in the production of A Night at the Opera it entered Irving Thalberg's head what an overwhelming undertaking a sequel was going to be. The natural first choice for a scriptwriter was George S. Kaufman again, but he pointed out that there was at M-G-M, already on salary, a man with some Marx brothers experience who came at a lower weekly rate than Pulitzer Prize winners were wont to command. So George Oppenheimer (a man who had an impressive background at Williams College and Harvard and a great future as New York drama critic and theater correspondent for the London press-a man, in other words, who had been somewhere and was going somewhere but right now was only a screenwriter) was put to work conceiving of a new story involving the Marx brothers in a sanitarium situation, with the stipulation that it include some stabs at the medical profession. For this assignment, Oppenheimer recalls being teamed with an unspecified staff writer left over from silent films, but the two of them very quickly got nowhere. Recalling the kind of assistance Robert Pirosh and George Seaton had come up with for A Night at the Opera, Groucho sought them out again. He found them at Republic Pictures. Honored as they were, Pirosh and Seaton had to admit to being somewhat intimidated by the business of doing a follow-up to a Kaufman-Ryskind act. Not to help matters any, they got an advance screening of A Night at the Opera when it was finished, and that, no matter how exhilarating it proved to others, only served to depress them. The harder they laughed, the more discouraged they became. The film became so much of a hit, in fact, that it left them with a legacy of rules to follow: start with a Groucho scene, set up a relationship between Chico and Allan Jones, touch off a Groucho-Chico confrontation, throw in a crazy scene with all three Marx brothers, take time out for a musical interlude, do the bedroom routine, have them thrown out of somewhere, get them