The Marx Brothers
Marxology - The Making of Duck Soup

Mikael Uhlin's Marxology @ marx-brothers.org

Horse Feathers was Paramount's biggest hit of 1932 and after a wildly successful preview, the studio announced on 2 August that they should rush out another film with the Marx Brothers while they were hot. Already at this early stage, the story (provisionally entitled Oo La La) was set in a mythical kingdom. On 11 August 11, The Los Angeles Times reported that production should commence in five weeks with Ernst Lubitsch directing. But this was a turbulent period in the Marx Brothers career. A reorganization of Paramount Pictures brought fears that money due the Marxes would never be paid and the contractual dispute culminated in the team threatening to go it alone as Marx Bros., Inc. Their first independant film was to be Of Thee I Sing, the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, with Norman McLeod leaving Paramount to direct. During the winter of 1932-33, Groucho and Chico was also working with Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, a radio series written by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman and there was at one time talk of casting them in their radio characters for the new film. It was 4 October before Arthur Sheekman, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby began writing the screenplay for the next Paramount film, which was now called Firecrackers. Herman Mankiewicz was to supervise production, beginning in January. By December 1932 Firecrackers had become Cracked Ice. It has been claimed that Grover Jones also contributed to the first draft by Kalmar and Ruby. In The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, Glenn Mitchell says that "the first script's content is difficult to determine".

On 18 January 1933 Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar and Grover Jones submitted to Paramount their Second Temporary Script for Cracked Ice (98 pages), and Paramount announced that filming would begin on 15 February. According to Wesolowski, the script reveals that the basic story line of what would become Duck Soup had been set. In February Paramount announced that the title had been changed to Grasshoppers ("because animal stories are so popular"), and that filming was set back to 20 February. On 11 May 1933, the Marx Brothers' beloved father Sam "Frenchie" Marx died in Los Angeles of a heart attack, and shortly afterwards, the dispute with Paramount was settled. The New York Post reported on 17 May that the Marxes would make a new comedy for Paramount, called Duck Soup. Leo McCarey would direct the film. Three days later The New York Sun reported that Duck Soup would start filming in June. Duck Soup's script was completed on 11 July. It was clearly a continuation of Kalmar-Ruby's Firecrackers/Cracked Ice-drafts but contained more elements. Michael Barson shows that fifteen routines from the Flywheel-radio show were transplanted into the script, with Perrin and Sheekman receiving an "additional dialogue"-credit. Lost along the way was a scripted romance between Zeppo and Raquel Torres and with it a Kalmar-Ruby love song called Keep On Doin' What You're Doin', used instead for the following year's Wheeler & Woolsey comedy Hips, Hips Hooray. Director Leo McCarey had worked with Laurel & Hardy at Hal Roach's studio, and he contributed more ingredients of Duck Soup, including the title (which had been used for a Laurel & Hardy two-reeler released in 1927) and the very Laurel & Hardy-like sequence in which Harpo and Chico stage a break-in at Mrs Teadale's house. Another McCarey contribution, the mirror routine, (according to Variety invented by the old stage act the Schwartz Brothers) had been used by Charlie Chaplin in 1916's The Floorwalker and by Max Linder in Seven Year's Bad Luck (1921).

In February 2000, I was contacted by fellow Marxonian Kevin Kusinitz. He wrote about an orginal typewritten copy of the first treatment for Duck Soup, which he had bought at auction several years ago for $ 25. The scanned pages of this treatment is presented on this site. This interesting item features the original title, Firecrackers, crossed out and replaced by Cracked Ice, which, in turn, is crossed out and replaced by Duck Soup. It seems to me that this is the obscure first draft of Cracked Ice (or, as it says, Firecrackers. This is suggested not only by the changes of the title but also by the dates in the treatment, the number of pages (27 as opposed to 98 in the second draft) and also a comparision with excerpts from this draft, as presented in Simon Louvish's book Monkey Business. Marie Sunny has sent me the external link www.geocities.com/emruf/ds.html, which presents the second temporary script from January 1933 entitled Cracked Ice. In both versions, Groucho is named Rufus T. Firestone, but in the second draft the names Trentino and Sylvania are established, as opposed to Frankenstein and Amnesia in this supposed first version. Zeppo is Groucho's son, but that was changed very late in production, as is evident from the first radio trailer (The Paramount Movie Parade). Those radio trailers are mostly made up of alternate takes with additional lines of dialog that did not appear in the movie. The movie trailer also contains some alternate takes or angles, for example when Harpo marches in with the guards and throws his stick in the air which causes the chandelier to fall down on him.