Duck Soup for Fans of Marx Brothers

After wondering for years why there has never been a movie about the Marx Brothers, fans of the zany comedy team can only hope that a deal recently struck between Universal Pictures and the estates of Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx means that Hollywood is finally about to make a feature-length film about the famous brother act.

The highly anticipated project, which is being readied at actor-producer Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films, will be written and directed by the same team of screenwriters who wrote “Man on the Moon,” the new biopic about the late comedian Andy Kaufman.

“To my knowledge, there has never been a movie about the Marx Brothers,” said Gail Lyon, president of production at Jersey Films, who said previous attempts have been thwarted because of difficulty securing the rights from the brothers’ estates. (“Minnie’s Boys,” a 1970 musical comedy about the early days of the Marx Brothers, has played in theaters around the country.)

“Corralling the rights when there are so many [estates] involved is a tough thing to do,” Lyon said. “But the families are on our side and we have been consulting with them.”

“You couldn’t have the movie in better hands than Jersey Films,” said Bill Marx, one of Harpo’s surviving children.

“As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “somebody’s got to do it. Our only concern has always been that, in terms of depicting the boys, it should be historically accurate.”

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who will write the script and hope to direct the movie, say they want not only to introduce the Marx Brothers to a new generation of moviegoers but also to showcase some of their best-known gags and behind-the-scenes antics.

Both writers said they grew up idolizing the Marx Brothers and their classic films like “Duck Soup,” “Animal Crackers,” “Horse Feathers,” “A Night at the Opera,” “The Cocoanuts” and “Monkey Business”--films that were often shown during the 1970s, when the comedy team enjoyed a revival in fan interest.

“The key moment in my childhood was seeing Groucho at a re-premiere of ‘Animal Crackers’ in Westwood and my dad tricking the ushers into letting us through,” Alexander recalled.

“I think our take on them,” Karaszewski added, “is that we see them really as anarchists, in a sense the punk rockers of comedy, but it was 1917 instead of today.”

The writers explained that they hope to avoid the pitfalls of films like “Chaplin,” which unsuccessfully tried to shoehorn too many events in a person’s life over too many years. Instead, they plan to concentrate on the brothers’ early years in vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood, culminating around the time “A Night at the Opera” debuted in 1935.

“We want to show them as teenagers kicking around dusty haunts during their vaudeville years, then going to New York and playing legitimate theater and then coming to Hollywood and having their biggest success,” Alexander said.

“There will be more than just the Marx Brothers in the film,” Karaszewski added. “You’ll get a sense of how people looked at them, what they felt about them. It also tells the story of the entertainment industry in the 20th century.”

Stories About Off-Screen Antics

To that end, the screenwriters recently began interviewing family members, including Harpo’s 91-year-old widow, Susan Marx.

“We are kind of fussy,” Susan Marx said about the long wait to get a Marx Brothers biopic made. “We had one group that wanted to make a movie, but it wasn’t funny. There didn’t seem to be much point in that, so we turned them down.”

As every Marxophile knows, there are tons of stories about the Marx Brothers off-screen that could easily find their way into a movie script.

For instance, during the filming of “Animal Crackers,” the brothers had to be locked up in cages on the sound stage because whenever the director yelled “Cut!” they would invariably race outside to call their bookies. To be sure, the cages might have been a publicity ploy, because Chico’s cage came with a telephone so he could phone not only his bookie but his various girlfriends.

Another famous story involves then-MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, who was often so busy on various film projects that he left people waiting endlessly for meetings. One day, while discussing “A Night at the Opera” with the Marx Brothers, Thalberg left the room and didn’t return for two hours. So, the boys sent to the commissary for some baked potatoes and roasted them in Thalberg’s fireplace--after stripping off their clothes.

The son of New York City Jewish immigrants, their father, Sam, was a poor, struggling East Side tailor who lived to be 101. Their mother, Minnie Schonberg, was the daughter of a wandering magician and sister of a famous vaudeville team member. Minnie Marx had show business in her blood and, despite the family’s poverty, she managed to save enough to give the boys music lessons, and she organized them into a singing troupe.

During a show in a small Texas town, so the story goes, a mule got loose and people in the audience left their seats to see what the commotion was. When they returned, Groucho was so irritated that he began hurling barbs at the townsfolk, and they roared with laughter: The Marx Brothers comedy act was born.

The Marx Brothers created some of the best-known characters in comedy history.

At the core were Groucho (real name Julius), the one with the twitching eyebrows, flicking cigar and quick-witted irreverence; Chico (Leonard), the one with the fractured English; and Harpo (Arthur), the one who plucked the harp, honked his horn as he chased after pretty women and never spoke a word on screen.

There were also two other brothers--Gummo (Milton), who was a key part of the act on stage but never appeared in their movies, and Zeppo (Herbert), the straight man to his zanier brothers, who dropped out in 1933 and became a big-time talent agent.

Harpo’s son, Bill Marx, said few people realize that the brothers honed their act and perfected their characters for 20 years in vaudeville and five years on Broadway before they reached Hollywood.

“There are people who recall seeing them in those days who say they were 100 times funnier on stage than they ever were in their films,” Marx said. Why? “Because they never missed their mark and didn’t have to be constrained by camera angles.”

The question naturally arises: Why has it taken Hollywood so long to do a biopic on the Marx Brothers?

“There was never a take-charge person,” Bill Marx said, “and we have three estates. . . . We are now trying to come together and form a union where people don’t have to run around and get permission from one estate, but then they don’t get it from another estate.”

A young producer named David Michaels approached representatives of the three estates and broached the idea of a film. With the three estates on board, he took his idea to Universal and Jersey Films.

Family Will Act Only as Consultants

Universal was the perfect choice of a studio, Lyon noted, because decades ago it had acquired the rights to some of the brothers’ classic films: “The Cocoanuts,” “Animal Crackers,” “Monkey Business,” “Horse Feathers” and “Duck Soup.”

Bill Marx said that under the agreement Universal has with Groucho Marx Productions and the estates of Harpo and Chico Marx, the family will act only as consultants and have no creative control over the film.

“Studios don’t want to give approval to families or anybody else,” he said. “If they do that, they feel we could chill some kind of creativity. We understand that. I think, based on the deal we struck with Universal for licensing rights for the brothers, there has been a remarkably fair compromise. It’s everybody’s desire to make this movie.”

Alexander and Karaszewski say their screenplay might take up to a year to develop, but they quip that there are worse ways to spend a year than watching “Horse Feathers” every day.

Michael Shamberg, co-chairman of Jersey Films, said he couldn’t think of better screenwriters to capture the essence and wild antics of the Marx Brothers than Alexander and Karaszewski, who worked with Jersey on “Man in the Moon” and also penned “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and shared writing credit with Rudolph Grey on “Ed Wood.”

One of the main questions in any movie about the Marx Brothers concerns the cast for such a film.

Bill Marx recalled that once, when there was talk about making a movie about Harpo, comedian Robin Williams expressed interest. He could still be a logical choice, although no actor is attached to the current project. Marx said his personal choice to play his father is British comedian Rowan Atkinson (“Bean”).

No matter who is cast, however, Marx believes the actors must have an “inner commitment” to the role just as the real Marx Brothers had to their characters.

“We found out that a lot of people can play Harpo,” he said, “but they couldn’t be Harpo.”