THE COCOANUTS
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OPENING SUMMARY:
1. There has long been a published rumor that the preview version was about 140 minutes long. That rumor is correct.
The rumor that this long version was shown to the public is incorrect.
There continue to be rumors that the release version was 96 minutes, but that 4 minutes have since gone missing.
That rumor is incorrect. The release version of the movie was and remains 93 minutes.
We shall examine all of these claims, at length, below.
2. As far as I know, all surviving copies of The Cocoanuts have the left side cropped off.
Unless and until a more authentic copy miraculously turns up, we just have to live with the left side being lopped off,
which is quite noticeable in most scenes.
3. All video copies of The Cocoanuts are missing the top and bottom of the image.
Nobody seems able to see the difference — except for me.
Yes, the
4. Notes from memory about two variations in Horse Feathers and Duck Soup,
followed by a long, boring, tedious tangent on why my memory is probably (only probably) right.
5. Animal Crackers was frequently shown in the US when it was not legally available, courtesy of pirates. Here is the evidence.
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❧ ❧ ❧ ☙ ☙ ☙
Not long before my ninth birthday, I saw The Cocoanuts on WNEW Channel 5.
It was part of a week-long Easter-holiday series of Marx flicks:
That was my introduction to the Marx Brothers.
It was The Cocoanuts that lodged itself most firmly into my youthful mind.
It was by leaps and bounds my favorite of the bunch.
I simply adored it.
Yes, I know, most people do not like it.
Even most Marx fans dislike it.
Even the film’s director disliked it.
Even the Marx brothers disliked it!
It should go without saying that people who are bored with anarchism and low comedy cannot abide anything with the Marx Brothers,
yet even the film’s defenders admit that the plot is awful and the film is weak, and they are right.
Nonetheless, I am fond of this flick, and it is still easily one of my favorites — and it is still my favorite Marx film.
I have a tendency to be bored to distraction by the popular, and to be drawn instead to the misshapen.
The misshapen is often endearing.
To understand why I am so hot under the collar,
and to understand The Cocoanuts, you need to know about movie history,
and this is not something you will learn even at graduate level at the best university.
Chapter One
What a Film Actually Looks Like, and Why
What a Film Actually Looks Like, and Why
Now, as you all know, this is what a silent film looks like:
Note that the frame takes up most of the width between the sprocket holes.
Note that there is nothing remotely resembling a sound track.
Further, as you all know, this is what an early sound film looks like:
That squiggly line on the left is the sound (RCA Photophone variable-area, if you must know).
You will notice that, though the image is as tall as the silent image, it is not as wide.
The sound obliterates the left site of the image.
You can see the rounded corners of the camera aperture on the right.
On the left, the image is obviously truncated.
There had been attempts to make sound films as far back as about 1895,
synchronized to cylinders or discs, but they were not too successful.
Sound-on-film was tried as early as 1901, but it was a pathetic thing.
So, when a trial version
of the modern standard of sound-on-film was privately introduced in 1921 (yes, 1921, not 1929),
camera operators generally made sure to keep any essential image or action
away from the left side of the frame, else it would be lost
once the soundtrack was plastered on top of it.
So far this is easy, right?
With the knowledge you have gained above, you will know for certain how to identify
the type of film below, I am sure.
Every last one of you guessed, yes?
This is a circa-1970 reprint of a sound film called Laughing Gravy,
step-printed from an original that had shrunken badly.
Tricked you, didn’t I?
So where is the sound, you ask?
This is “The Western Electric System,”
which was the same as the Vitaphone system but minus the trademarked name.
The sound was on a 33⅓ rpm 16" shellac disc
that was played on a turntable which, in turn, was driven by the same motor that was driving the rest of the projector.
(Why this film was printed this way in circa 1970 is beyond me,
as no cinema anywhere in the world could any longer show sound-on-disc .
Maybe this was just a lab test, not meant for public screening?
If so, then why did I discover this fragment in the projection booth of the
Frauenthal Theatre in Muskegon? Baffling.)
Vitaphone, which was trademarked by Warner Bros., was sound-on-disc .
Its rival, Movietone, trademarked by Fox, was variable-density optical sound-on-film.
RCA Photophone was a variation upon Fox Movietone, but with variable-area optical sound-on-film.
Movietone machines could play Photophone, and Photophone machines could play Movietone.
Though they were recorded differently, the playback was perfectly compatible.
Western Electric reproducing equipment was a combination that was compatible with any of those systems.
For Western Electric film production, recording was on disc, but when prints were made,
some were sound-on-disc and others were sound-on-film.
Here is a Western Electric cinema set-up with both optical reproduction and disc reproduction,
with the turntable mechanically ganged to the drive motor:
The above two images are from Robert L. Foreman and Garry Motter’s lovely illustrated web page, “Back Stage at the Fox 1929,” which is a doozy. Please read it. This is the article I was just DYING to read back when I was thirteen, but nobody had ever written such an article until much more recently.
Three film projectors, yes, because films arrived on reels about 10 minutes long,
though projectionists often spliced them together onto reels about 20 minutes long.
With
sound-on-disc, doubling up reels was out of the question,
because there was no way to double up the discs.
So Vitaphone and Western Electric sound-on-disc were shown on reels about 10 minutes long.
As each reel came to an end, the next projector would kick in to show the next reel immediately.
I haven’t the foggiest notion about the makes or models of any of these components.
There is no optical-sound reader, but only an outboard turntable, which I assume carried a Vitaphone nameplate.
Chapter Two
How One Reel Was Switched to Another (in the 1920’s and Before)
How One Reel Was Switched to Another (in the 1920’s and Before)
In the earliest days, when only one projector was in the booth,
many reels ended with a title that was some variation upon “One moment please while the operator changes reels.”
Yes, you really do need to know this before you can understand The Cocoanuts.
 This is from The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916). If you want to see an okay copy, click here, but the Part Title is edited out. If you want to see a copy that still has the Part Title, click here, but it looks awful! |
 No idea which movie this is from. Pretty, isn’t it? |
Come the 1910’s, more and more booths held two or more projectors, and so the convention changed.
Up to about 1924, the cue for a reel change was a title shown on screen:
“END OF PART ONE.”
When the machine operator saw that, he (almost always he) would start the next machine,
and when it was up to speed, he would slide a metal plate to block the light from the old machine
and reveal the picture from the new machine, which began with the next title:
“PART TWO.”
So, when you look at advertisements for movies up through about 1923,
you will understand why many of them specified “A Comedy in Two Parts” or “A Drama in Seven Parts.”
Audiences knew exactly what that meant.
When these films are re-issued, reprinted, and/or released to home video,
the Part Titles are almost always deleted, and, in my opinion, deleting the Part Titles should be a capital offense.
(Modern cue marks do not work for 35mm silent films when shown at speeds other than the modern 24fps.)
Beginning in 1924, MGM came up with a trickier method that made
the change-overs a bit more seamless.
It was a tricky method, yes, and it was clumsy.
The projectionist would receive a cheat sheet.
I have never seen one of these cheat sheets, but I know the gist.
The change-overs occurred during titles, and the cheat sheets would specify a title,
for example, “Don’t close up. I’ll be right back.”
That meant that, as soon as the projectionist saw that title on screen,
he (almost always he) would start the next projector, and when it was up to speed,
he would slide the metal plate to cover the old lens and open the new lens,
as the new reel would begin exactly as the old one ended,
with a title reading, “Don’t close up. I’ll be right back.”
Here’s a good example, from the “cutting continuity” (transcript) of The Cameraman,
filmed and released in 1928:
| NO. | SCENE | COLOR | FEET | DESCRIPTION REEL 1 PAGE 7 |
| 110 | Scene | B&W | 12 | MCU Stagg & Buster — Stagg finishes title — turns to Sally — turns back — Buster ducks to keep from getting hit by tripod. |
| 111 | Scene | B&W | 14 | MLS Stagg comes out gate left — exits thru gate in b.g. Buster stands by rail — Sally at desk — he rubs his head. |
| 112 | Scene | B&W | 10 | MS Buster standing in back of Sally at desk — she gets up — touches him — he turns — she speaks: |
| 113 | Title | B&W | 7 | "You'll have to buy your own camera before they'll give you a trial here." |
| 114 | Scene | B&W | 13 | MS Sally & Buster — he thinks about what she says — starts for camera. |
| 115 | Scene | B&W | 6 | MLS Sally standing at desk — Buster gets camera — opens door — he speaks: |
| 116 | Title | B&W | 20 | "Don't close up! I'll be right back!" |
| 117 | Title | B&W | 3 | END OF PART ONE. |
| NO. | SCENE | COLOR | FEET | DESCRIPTION REEL 2 PAGE 1 |
| 1 | Title | B&W | 3 | PART TWO |
| 2 | Title | B&W | 16 | "Don't close up. I'll be right back." |
| 3 | Scene | B&W | 16 | MLS FULL FIG.SHOT Buster exits out of door with tin-top camera — Sally looks after him. |
| 4 | Scene | B&W | 6 | MLS Buster comes out of swinging doors of office building. |
| 5 | Scene | B&W | 6 | FULL FIG.SHOT MLS Buster in front of office building pacing up and down, exits. |
| 6 | Scene | B&W | 11 | MLS Store window, showing motion picture camera Buster enters scene — looks at window — goes in door. |
| 7 | Scene | B&W | 11 | MLS Store window, showing camera — hand comes in places card on camera, reading $2500. complete — Buster slowly exits from scene. |
Note that the title, “Don’t close up. I’ll be right back,”
consumes 36 feet of film, rather than the usual six or seven.
That was for safety.
A projectionist would show only six or seven feet of it on screen.
I do not know when, or even if, other studios and distributors adopted MGM’s new practice.
It might be telling that I have never seen a post-1923 advertisement that mentioned the number of reels/parts.
Whatever the true case was, I do know that cinema managers liked this new MGM method so much
that they instructed their projectionists never to show the Part Titles ever again,
not even for movies that needed them.
Projectionists consequently started defacing films by making scratches, visible on screen, towards the end of each reel,
the scratches serving as cues so that they could switch reels less noticeably,
but that practice could only have led to important film being skipped at reel changes.
It was that defacement that makes me think that other studios did not, after all, adopt MGM’s new system.
If they had adopted it, there would have been no need to deface the films to make improvised cue marks.
For sound movies, the process was even clumsier.
The cheat sheet would read something like,
“When Gertrude says, ‘Don’t close up. I’ll be right back,’
start the motor. When she slams the door, change to the next reel.”
Because that is not exactly precision timing,
when the door closed, the camera would linger on it for ten seconds or so.
The beginning of the next reel might be a dining hall,
in which absolutely nothing happens for about the first ten seconds.
Another work-around was to duplicate the action of the ending of the old reel
at the beginning of the new reel, courtesy of another take of the same part of a scene.
That inevitably led to duplications at reel changes, which I absolutely love, by the way.
Hooray for those duplications!
This should give you an idea that editing was predetermined in the scripting stage, as indeed it was.
The shooting scripts were timed, and the cast and crew knew exactly where the reel changes would be.
(The longueurs at the beginnings and endings of reels of early talkies,
as well as the action of the end of one reel being duplicated at the beginning
of the next reel, have confused modern-day film historians, who dismissed them as unforgiveable padding or incompetent editing.
I accuse those historians of gross ignorance.
They did not understand that the redundant footage was included as safety only.
Most of it would never reach the screen.)
Ah! Look at this! In Scott Eyman’s
The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930
(NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 157), we have a sample of a cheat sheet for
The Better ’Ole,
a Vitaphone sound-on-disc film that had been shot as a silent, but was released as a sound picture,
with only a single word of dialogue, together with sound effects and synchronized music.
“SM” means START MOTOR, and “CO” means CHANGEOVER.
I have simplified this a tiny bit, eliminating fader settings and so forth.
“CUE,” of course, is what the projectionist needs to watch out for to let him know that
the time to start the motor of the next machine will be coming up very soon.
Here goes:
| Reel 1 |
CUE Explosion in Dugout. SM Just after smoke clears away. CO On Fade out of Dugout. |
| Reel 2 |
CUE last Title “Major Russett” etc. SM Next scene. CO As Major counts on fingers. |
| Reel 3 |
CUE last Title “That sure ’ad a kick.” SM As “Old Bill” goes toward two men. CO As “Old Bill” exits thru door. |
| Reel 4 |
CUE last Title “I just captured a spy.” SM When “Old Bill” pushes soldier in fountain. CO As “Old Bill” walks out of scene. |
| Reel 5 |
CUE Girl comes on stage. SM On title “Daughter.” CO As Father embraces girl and she looks up at him. |
| Reel 6 |
CUE As two soldiers shake hands. SM Two soldiers walk downstairs. CO Two soldiers in theatre. |
| Reel 7 |
CUE Soldiers pull horse’s head off. SM As headless horse starts toward gate. CO As headless horse passes through gate. |
| Reel 8 |
CUE last Title “Du Verdammter Esel.” SM As “Old Bill” closes door. CO On close up of man behind prison bars. |
| Reel 9 |
CUE Soldier falls down ladder with “Old Bill.” SM as soldiers put “Old Bill” on table. CO when “Old Bill” kicks man against wall. |
| Reel 10 |
END Title “The End.” |
As you can easily determine, there is nothing exact about this, and the Vitaphone people knew this full well.
They knew that change-overs could vary by several seconds from one showing to the next.
On page 156 of Eyman’s book, we see Rule Number 6:
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In making changeovers on orchestral accompaniment to feature pictures,
always wait for last note of music from the old record before moving the
fader over to pick up the music from the new one, regardless of which machine
the picture is coming from. That is, there will usually be a short interval
during which the music comes from one machine and the picture from
the other.
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In 1930, MGM started using a duet of little circles or serrated dots in the upper-right corner of the image.
The first one flashed 8⅓ seconds before the reel ran out,
and then a second cue dot flashed one second before the reel ran out.
Supposedly.
I’ve seen far too many prints in which the cue dots were spaced further apart or closer together,
and sometimes with the second cue placed just a few frames before the end of the reel (such as in films from Poland).
An example of a cue dot. Actually, this looks to me like a circle originally, with a dot laid over it later.
This screen grab comes from a review by DVD Beaver, which refers to this as a “blip,”
when, in fact, this is not a blip at all.
The cues were seen in the original cinema release, and so they should never be painted out.
They should be painted out only if they are not a part of the original presentation.
Also, it seems to me that this image is cropped.
In my experience, cue dots are well within the frame, not partly outside of it.
By about 1936, all the other studios followed suit.
If this interests you, someone collected a bunch of cue dots and plopped them into a little video on
YouTube.
Here’s an even more enjoyable compilation.
Those cue circles were considerably more precise, but not perfect by any means.
Once those little cue dots came into vogue, the sliding metal bar was junked
and a second shutter, or actually a dowser, called a “zipper,” was installed in each projection head.
The zipper was operated by a button (in the western half of the USA) or by a foot pedal (in the eastern half of the USA),
and it was much faster and cleaner.
Almost nobody in the audience could ever detect a change from one reel to the next anymore.
A projectionist at the Strand in Ocean City, NJ, makes an unnoticeable
The Peerless Magnarc carbon-arc lamphouses are circa 1930’s or 1940’s, the Simplex XL picture heads are circa 1948, and the Simplex
Those are 2,000' reels on those machines, which hold about 20 minutes of film each.
Another nice video — nicer, I think — is here,
and it even shows a moment of the projectionist inspecting a reel!
How much I wish I could show you a YouTube video of a projectionist performing the correlative process
for silent movies in the 1910’s or 1920’s or for
Nonetheless, I did find this next blurry/murky video on YouTube:
Interesting, but not what I was looking for.
At least you can witness a moment of the cutting of a wax disc.
Note how the titles are deliberately
If you’re desperate for more, here is Don Malkames demonstrating his collection for a SMPTE convention.
Still, though, not what I’m looking for. Darn!
Bored yet? Don’t be bored.
If you like movies, this gets interesting.
Chapter Three
That Horrible Term, “Aspect Ratio,” Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
That Horrible Term, “Aspect Ratio,” Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
Let’s get back to the shape of the silent image versus the sound image.
Prior to the days of laserdiscs, nobody had ever heard the term “aspect ratio.”
Projectionists had never heard it.
Most cinematographers had probably never heard it.
I am certain most movie directors had never heard it.
I knew the term, because aspect ratio got my blood boiling.
It was a misnomer, too. Ratio is not the same as size.
I have had arguments with too many college graduates about that, and they were uniformly convinced that I was wrong,
and so I just gave up.
Nonetheless, I still need to explain: Ratio is not the same as size!
Four miles by three miles is the same ratio as four inches by three inches.
Same proportions, but different sizes.
Even cinemas that used the correct “aspect ratio” were using the wrong size, and hence cropping the images.
So almost every movie was cropped at almost every cinema,
because no cinema anywhere, at least none that I knew of,
had the technical capability of showing films at the correct “aspect ratio” —
or the correct size or the correct anything else, for that matter.
That was a harsh statement, and people told me off for saying it, but it was true.
Once laserdiscs began to be manufactured in something they claimed (usually wrongly)
was the “original aspect ratio,” movie geeks in their forties and fifties and sixties
who could never get jobs and who spent their time in mommy’s basement playing with their monster toys went wild over the term.
They appropriated the phrase, even though they didn’t understand it.
So, if you must know, the official aspect ratio of the image on the left is 1:1.33,
and the official aspect ratio of the image on the right is 1:1.18.
If you are a movie geek, you will puff up your chest with pride as you announce those numbers
to all your family and friends to impress them with your encyclopædic knowledge.
Approx. “aspect ratio” 1:1.33 |
Approx. “aspect ratio” 1:1.18 |
In reality, nothing was so exact.
There was slop factor built in.
The image on the left may as well have been shot with a camera aperture as narrow as .970" or as wide as 1.000".
It could have been shot with a camera aperture as tall as .750" or as squat as .720".
It could be projected with an aperture as wide as .940" or as narrow as .900".
It could be projected with an aperture as tall as .705" or as squat as .679".
Those were the parameters.
Anything that fell within those parameters was considered okay.
The usual size in projection was .6796"×.90625", or very close to that.
(Projection always shaved the tiniest bit off of all four sides as protection against film shrinkage,
and also to mask the “frameline flashes,” the splice marks made at the lab or at the exchange.)
The image on the right could have been projected with an aperture as wide as .839"
or as narrow as .790", but in the 1920’s and early 1930’s,
the aperture would likely have been about .800" wide, give or take.
(If you need more details, here ya go,
but don’t get too obsessed with those details, please. They count for a lot less than you might think, really.
Yes, .6796"×.825" will work perfectly well for any early optical-sound movie, regardless of studio or any instructions to the contrary.)
Nowadays, assuming it is handled by a properly equipped cinema and is run by a projectionist who has a clue
(i.e., not a chance), it would more likely be projected with an aperture about .825" wide by about .6796" tall.
You do the arithmetic.
Chapter Four
How The Cocoanuts Was Cropped
How The Cocoanuts Was Cropped
Okay, now, at last, we’re ready.
Let us take a look at the main titles as they appear on the new Blu-ray.
The above seems pretty complete.
Notice how it is slanted.
Most common thing in the world.
Credits for almost all movies are slanted.
I don’t know why.
They just are.
Even in movies from the 1980’s and 1990’s.
This was more than merely common. It was general practice.
Note that this is not slanted — or, at least, barely slanted.
Here is what I bet happened.
The technicians who transferred the movie to HiDef for the DCP release in 2016
rotated this cast credit to straighten it.
In doing so, they had to shave off all four sides,
else there would be black wedges in the corners.
That slight shaving of the sides makes the framing a bit too tight,
but to open it up more would, as I say, probably result in a slanted image.
They made a choice: full image with a slant, or a slightly reduced image that’s straight.
They chose to straighten it and lose the edges.
Note also that the right side of the image of the cast credit is a tiny bit blurry and that it has lost density.
This is probably not taken from the OCN (original camera negative),
but from a duplicate negative derived from a print that was beginning to rot.
That defect is not noticeable right away.
It becomes noticeable as the movie progresses.
If you want to measure the width and the height, you will see that the aspect ratio is about 1:1.19,
which is proportionally about what it would have been in 1929, but, like I say,
it is zoomed in to the center a little bit too much.
Curiously, the DVD shows a smidgen more of the left, bottom, and right of the image. Take a look:
Yet this is not how the movie was shot.
Not at all.
This movie was “The Western Electric System,” which used the full silent aperture
on the film with synchronized 33⅓ rpm 16" shellac discs.
When this film was originally shown, this credit was off-center, to the right.
There was more of the background pattern on the left side of the image,
but no essential information.
(Scroll back up and look at the title on The Birthplace of the Sound Motion Picture.
That, too, is off-center to the right. In both cases, that’s for a reason.)
I just did a crude and hasty painting job to show you kinda sorta
what it would have looked like in 1929 at a cinema set up for sound-on-disc .
The credit originally would have looked something vaguely like this:
So, you are probably thinking that the film was composed for the left side to be cropped off.
After all, many movies, from The Beginning of The Talkie Era (15 April 1923)
right through to The End of The Age of Film
(17 December 2010)
were indeed composed for the left side to be lopped off.
Yet we are being fooled once again.
The credits (and the insert of “Hotel de Cocoanut”) were made by the Title Department,
which was under a set of instructions different from the instructions handed to the camera operators.
In any case, the main credits make it definitive that the height was not to be cropped.
Any cropping of the height would cut into essential text.
Now, once the opening credits are done, we cut to the movie proper, but something unforgiveable happens.
Watch:
Ours is not to reason why.
Ours is to suffer.
We see that the size and shape of the image have changed.
The “aspect ratio” is now about 1:1.34, which is wrong.
The opening credits were pretty much right.
So why was not the entire video formatted the same way the opening credits were formatted?
I did not see the DCP, but I would be willing to bet a thousand dollars that the DCP was correct.
(After all, the DCP’s for Animal Crackers and Monkey Business were correct, with the full height.)
I can only assume that the Blu-ray was ported over from the DCP master.
So why was there a change? Why? Why? Why? Why didn’t they leave it alone?
This is the sort of arbitrary change that makes me burst into tears, bang my head against the wall, and lose all my enthusiasm for watching movies.
NOTE ADDED 1 JANUARY 2023:
I’m rather glad that nobody took me up on my wager.
I would have lost.
I just saw the DCP, and it is exactly like the Blu-ray in every way.
I could detect something on the big screen that I would never have detected on the Blu-ray ,
and now I understand why the techies chose to crop the image.
It was a compromise.
I wish they had made the opposite compromise, but oh well.
The compromise is explained below. Keep reading.
You don’t see anything wrong, do you?
That’s because you’re not peering into the magician’s bag of tricks.
Let me reveal the trick to you.
Here is that same image again, but I hereby show you the secret: It is only a partial image.
I have painted in blue where the rest of the image originally was.
The left side is gone because, well, the left side is gone.
Any copies of the film that still retained the left side were probably destroyed back in the 1930’s.
Showbiz. What is it I say about showbiz?
If the original camera negative still exists, or if a full-frame sound-on-disc print still exists,
then the left side could be seen again,
if anyone at the lab thinks it’s worth the bother.
If those elements have vanished, then there would have been absolutely NOTHING
the video technicians could possibly have done to bring back to us the left side of the image.
I am not the only one complaining:
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peerpee, “The Marx Brothers” message #94, Criterion Forum.org,
26 December 2016:
Does anybody know why Universal have opted to present THE COCOANUTS (1929), ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930), and MONKEY BUSINESS (1931) in 1.33:1
instead of their OAR of 1.20:1?
The opening credits are windowboxed 1.20:1 but afterwards, it pops to 1.33:1 and everything looks tight/cropped at the bottom of the frame.
It’s a bit of a shame — and if it were done solely as a misguided attempt to fit them into 1.33:1, it’s a tragic decision.
Drucker, “The Marx Brothers” message #99, Criterion Forum.org,
10 January 2017:
Just out of curiosity — how is the audio?
Fear of scrubbed/noiseless audio and the wrong aspect ratio for the films that should be 1.19
are why I haven’t picked these up yet, but it sounds like the set is otherwise great.
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This cropping has a regrettable history that reaches all the way back to 1929.
You see, beginning probably in 1929, there was another change.
Some executives at the Hollywood movie studios found the squarish image of sound-on-film off-putting.
They wanted a return to the 4×3 shape to which they had been so accustomed.
To use the bizarre movie lingo, they wanted to go back to the “1:1.33 aspect ratio.”
To make that return, they did something awful.
You’re thinking to yourselves,
“No, they couldn’t possibly have done what I’m thinking.
Impossible. They must have done something different.”
Take a deep breath, try to relax, and then witness what they did:
That is what soon came to be known as the “Academy aperture.”
Ugh.
The top image shows a bilateral sawtooth variable-area soundtrack, by the way,
and the one at the bottom shows a variable-density soundtrack,
if that interests you.
Yeah, that’s what they did.
To keep the same shape, they made the image smaller.
(The same “aspect ratio,” more or less, but a radically different size.)
Cinemas used shorter lenses to enlarge the image,
and then the smaller film image could still fill the old screen that was designed for silent and sound-on-disc movies.
(To get the image centered properly, early sound projectors had either base shifters or, more elegantly, lens shifters.)
As you know, businesses like to settle on a single standard and allow no deviation.
So pretty soon, all cinemas were cropping films,
and that is why Hollywood usually — usually — shot smaller images or
composed larger images for cropping. Usually.
Projectors no longer came with base shifters or lens shifters.
Management came by and confiscated the longer lenses and larger apertures.
That is why when Charlie Chaplin re-issued his silent The Gold Rush
with new music and narration in 1942, the predictable happened:
| 1925 Version Screen captures from the WB “Charlie Chaplin Collection” (PAL system) |
1942 Version Screen captures from the WB “Charlie Chaplin Collection” (PAL system) |
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The images on the left look nice. The images on the right are hideous, aren’t they?
Please note: The images on the left and the images on the right are THE SAME ASPECT RATIO!!!!!!
That does NOT mean that they are identical.
“Original Aspect Ratio” does NOT mean that you are seeing the entire image.
“Aspect ratio” is a SHAPE, it is NOT a size.
The SHAPE of the images on the left is 1 unit high by 1.33 units wide, or extremely close to that.
The SHAPE of the images on the right is 1 unit high by 1.33 units wide, or extremely close to that.
Can you see that they are the same SHAPE, but that one is complete and that the other is severely butchered?
Please? Can you see that? Please?
So, when you buy a DVD or a Blu-ray that proudly announces that it is in “The Original Aspect Ratio of 1:1.33,”
do not assume that you are getting the full image.
Chances are that you are not getting anything even close to the full image.
I have tried to explain this to people until I turned blue in the face, but nobody understands.
Gawd do I hate that term “aspect ratio.”
I would love not to use it.
I would love to have a Constitutional amendment that bans its utterance,
but, because everyone else uses the term, the only way I can bash it is to repeat it, which makes my skin crawl.
Horrible.
The “original aspect ratio” of The Cocoanuts was pretty close to 1:1.33,
because the size of the image on the film was pretty close to .730" tall by .970" wide, give or take.
The “aspect ratio” of the image on the Blu-ray is announced as “Hi-Resolution Full-Frame 1.33:1,”
and that is supposed to lull you into thinking that the “Full-Frame” was transferred to the disc.
NO!!!!!!!!
What was transferred to the disc was about .600" of the height and about .800" of the width, give or take.
Think back to third-grade arithmetic.
Divide .970" by .730" and you will get something close to 1.33.
Divide .800" by .600" and you will get something close to 1.33.
Proportionally, they’re about the same. The SHAPE is about the same, but the SIZE is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.
I do not understand why people have such difficulty comprehending this. I really don’t.
DVD’s and Blu-rays, on the back of the box, should ideally provide you the exact measurements, to the ten-thousandth of an inch.
They should justify that by showing a few film frames, edge to edge, including sprocket holes and frame lines, and put that side by side with a screen grab from the transfer.
Instead, they just tell you what SHAPE the image is, as though that matters.
(That gets complicated with films that were composed for cropping, but, hey, tough!)
Now let’s get back to The Cocoanuts.
Many cinemas installed sound-on-film machinery, rather than sound-on-disc machinery,
and so, from the very beginning, there were sound-on-film copies of The Cocoanuts
that were missing the left side.
Because many cinemas objected to the new squarish format for sound-on-film movies,
they enlarged the projected image and lopped off the top and bottom.
If we were to crop the opening credits of The Cocoanuts the way many cinemas cropped them in 1929,
this is what would happen:
| Full Height (often called the Movietone or Photophone format) |
Standard Crop (often called the Academy format) |
|
 |
|
 |
Got it?
So, with that knowledge now inside your heads, let us examine a couple of frame grabs from the new Blu-ray ,
and see if you think this is what the images were intended to look like.
The blue borders indicate where the image is missing.
The left side is almost certainly lost, unless by some supernatural miracle you open your closet one day
and find an original 1929 sound-on-disc print inside.
The only surviving copies were, I assume, sound-on-film prints, in which the left side had been sacrificed to make way for the optical soundtrack.
The top and bottom were inexplicably cropped off for the Blu-ray.
Yes, I am being selective.
I could just as easily have shown screen grabs that seemed centered and well-composed,
as well as other screen grabs that were misframed in the camera to crop off the right side of the image,
but, nonetheless, these selected screen grabs represent the bulk of the film, by far,
and they illustrate that something is definitely wrong.
In nearly a half-century of trying, I have learned that it is impossible to explain any of the above to anybody who works in the movie business.
That, really, is the purpose of this web page: to illustrate my arguments visually and at length, since verbal explanations do no good.
Showing projectionists and other technicians their results on screen and then showing them the actual film,
to demonstrate that they are not getting everything on screen, does no good.
In one ear and out the other.
So, maybe, maybe, maybe someone will pay attention this time.
Or maybe not. Probably not.
This is one of the reasons I almost never watch movies anymore:
They are almost never presented properly.
I cannot bear to spend $10 or $20 or $100 on a ticket only to be confronted with 80% of the image,
or 60% of the image, or less, and hear sound improperly processed, and witness silent films run at wrong speeds,
or hear a live silent-movie score that sounds like a whale being murdered by a jackhammer,
and get distracted by uneven illumination and uneven focus and so forth.
I just up and leave as soon as the curtain opens,
realizing that I’ve been swindled once again.
I don’t say a word, because I know that if I do, the manager will call the cops.
I don’t complain, because there’s no point.
I just walk away, silently, and try to forget about the experience.
If I watch a movie on video, especially if it is of a film I have personally handled in 35mm,
I usually eject the tape or disc after half a minute, because the transfer is all wrong.
That’s why I won’t watch the other four movies on the Marx Brothers Blu-ray set.
I glanced at Animal Crackers and saw that the top and bottom were lopped off, even though they were there on the DCP that I saw at a cinema in 2016.
Enough. I don’t need to see any more.
I do not work in the movie business, partly because it’s a nasty business and most people involved in it are downright mean,
but also because I have no patience to talk to walls.
A professional film restorationist, well-respected, and respected by me,
told me about ten years ago, after a nighttime screening of Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000,
that I would be a perfect fit in a career as a film restorationist — except that I would hate it.
He could tell that I would pour my heart and soul into any project, and that I would be meticulous,
but explained that the bosses would deny me access to needed source materials, and would refuse to let me include long-lost pieces,
and would disallow adequate clean-up, and would shorten the schedule so much that quality work would be impossible.
So, in the end, I would not have a restoration of which I could be proud,
but, instead, I would have a travesty to which I would be ashamed to associate my name.
He himself had lived through that narrative too many times, and so had all his colleagues.
That is why he told me that, despite the perfect fit, I was right not to go into that career.
Now, I have been on this planet long enough to know that approximately zero people will believe even a single claim I have made and illustrated above.
Everybody’s an expert, and experts adamantly reject any knowledge they do not already possess.
So, that just goes to show that I am most definitely NOT an expert,
because I just LOVE discovering things that I don’t already know, and because I love to be proved wrong.
Ain’t nobody gonna prove me wrong about my above claims, though.
Those are all rock-solid.
But nobody will believe me.
It’s a lonely place to be.
So why do I try?
Because maybe, just maybe, there’s another non-expert on this planet
who is in a position to correct these mistakes and who will, by some miracle, actually pay attention to me
and take what I say to heart —
and FIX things!
Chapter Five
Production History
Production History
To examine this even more, it is now time to do some history.
You know, your favorite topic in school.
The topic that was never taught, except in name only.
First of all, it helps to know a little bit about the real-estate scam known as the
“Florida land boom of 1925.”
Shortly before The Cocoanuts tried out in Boston in October 1925, the bubble had already begun to burst.
Just over a decade after the shambles, John Kenneth Ballinger wrote
“Boomerang: A Story of the 1925 Florida Land Boom As It Set the Stage for Today,” a series of articles in The Miami Herald,
which he collected into a book, Miami Millions:
The Dance of the Dollars in the Great Florida Land Boom of 1925 (Miami, Florida: The Franklin Press, 1936).
Too expensive to buy. Just read the online version.
Kaufman/Berlin’s musical play, written expressly for the Marx brothers, was written quickly and it was topical.
Here are the announcements of the original stage version.
Note what the reviews mentioned about the “size and splendor...”
“...broad and spacious...”
“...decorated with the most exquisite taste...”
“...splendidly decked out with costumes of such brilliance that the eye fairly waters...”
“...a restful, colorful type of architecture and decoration...”
“...beautiful settings, futuristic costumes in the most exotic tropical colors....”
When converting this elaborate stage production to film, it was unfortunate that this was done in February 1929,
when the production of talking motion pictures was still rather clumsy.
That was a minor fault, though, for the performances still shone through.
It was truly unfortunate, though, that the budget would not allow for Technicolor.
Worst of all, it is most unfortunate that nearly every bit of dazzling imagery,
which was all indeed filmed, was edited out and destroyed at the orders of the Paramount/Publix executives.
It would be a good idea now to learn about Adolph Zukor, the head of Paramount Pictures, but his story has never been told, at least not until recently.
I see that a little bit of my unpublished research has trickled up to Wikipedia, without credit, of course.
(My research may well never be published. The source materials are thousands of miles away.
After the treatment I got there, I can’t imagine ever returning to that part of the world even for a visit.
That’s how and why so many history books never get written, you know.)
Click on the picture below.
Joe Adamson, in his book Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo (paperback edition, NY: Pocket Books, March 1976, p. 445),
refers us to “Walter Wanger” (rhymes with “ranger,” “stranger,” “danger,” “manger,” “Granger”),
in Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein, The Real Tinsel
(NY: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 96–97):
When moving to sound, we looked for additional attractions. Bill
Morris, who was the head of the Morris Agency, asked me, “Why don’t
you do The Cocoanuts? I can give you a whole package.” (I don’t know if
he really said “package.” That word was yet to be used.) He said, “It’s
down at the Casino Theatre. You can have the Marx Brothers and the
book, and the whole thing for
“All right, I’ll check with Mr. Zukor about it,” I agreed.
Mr. Zukor was dying for attractions, and I advised him that Cocoanuts
and the Marx Brothers might be a great attraction for talking pictures
at $75,000.
“Seventy-five thousand dollars!” he shouted. “Who said that? Bill
Morris? Get him over here. I’ll spit in his eye.” That used to be one of
his favorite expressions. After a while, Zeppo came over with Bill Morris,
Jr. Zeppo walked over to Mr. Zukor.
“Mr. Zukor,” he said, “this is one of the greatest moments of my
life. I’ve always wanted to meet you. You are the one showman in the
world. When I think of what you did for Mary Pickford, of what you’ve
done for pictures, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to meet you.”
He went on like that for ten minutes, and the old man started to
melt. When he got all through, Zukor wanted to know, “So what’s the
trouble between Walter and you?”
“Mr. Zukor,” Zeppo answered, “all our lives we’ve worked to perfect
this one show. This is our first show on Broadway. It’s a big hit. All our
jokes are in it, everything we’ve ever done. We’re willing to make a picture
for you, give you all our material, all our services, and all those
marvelous gags — the whole thing for one hundred thousand dollars.”
One hundred thousand dollars was never mentioned. I sat there
and gasped. Zukor turned to me:”
“Walter, what’s wrong with that?”
And that’s how the deal was made....”
|
There are several problems with the above account.
This is what inevitably happens when someone tells a story forty years later, without referring to the original documentation.
I’ll Say She Is, the Marxes’ first Broadway show, played at the
Casino; The Cocoanuts was their second Broadway show, and it never played at any theatre anywhere called the Casino; it had played at the
Lyric.
The meeting that Walter described could not have taken place earlier than
the very end of 1928,
when Paramount had refitted its Astoria studio for sound.
The Cocoanuts was no longer playing by then.
Its final performance was 4 February 1928 in San Francisco, California.
Those are details that probably anybody would misremember after forty years,
especially if that person had not seen the show.
The conversation he recalled is probably quite accurate, though.
He was there, he witnessed it, and it had an emotional impact.
He would probably remember that conversation fairly accurately.
What puzzles me, though, is why Sam Harris, the producer of the stage show,
would have deputized Zeppo to cut the deal.
Why would he not have chosen his regular agents to do that?
Please note Wanger’s claim that Zukor paid $100,000 for the rights to film the show.
That claim will soon evaporate, as we shall see.
What is the truth?
Unless we find the contracts, the ledger sheets, the bank statements, the auditors’ reports, the payroll books, the tax reports, we shall never know.
When did the above meeting take place?
I would hazard a guess that it took place on Wednesday, 2 January 1929, or maybe Thursday the 3rd.
You see, if we examine the following two news clips,
we can ascertain that they derived from a press release issued by Paramount Pictures/Publix on Friday, 4 January 1929,
for publication beginning the following day.
Paramount’s studio was at
34-12 36th Street, Astoria, NY,
which was by now readied to make talkies with Broadway stars.
Why did I never before think to do an image search on that studio?
Gene Zonarich created a fan site for
Katharine (or Katherine?) Edwina Francis, née Gibbs,
better known as Kay Francis, who played the villainess in The Cocoanuts.
He thought to do an image search! He found a gem:
Photoplay, February 1922
Sheesh! That’s not the half of it! Here’s the same building from another angle:
George Simon Kaufman,
the credited author of the original stage play, was retained as an “adviser.”
Kaufman’s coauthor, Morrie Ryskind, who had not been credited on the stage play, is credited in the movie.
A few years later, when
Kaufman was pressured to work with the Marx brothers on another movie, he reminisced:
• The
script of the 8 December 1925 opening at the Lyric on Broadway is available in a book compiled by
Donald Oliver, By George (St. Martin’s Press, 1979).
The script was continually adjusted and rewritten, and where to find the earlier editions or the more mature editions, I do not know.
(The famous viaduct/why-a-duck scene is not included, as that was a later refinement.)
• Director Doug Wager and choreographer Baayork Lee
(who staged a revival in 1988), mentioned that the
Library of Congress
has Kaufman’s typescript for the first act.
I would hazard a guess that this is earlier than the
• Some version of the
stage script in manuscript form appears to be at the
Morgan Library & Museum, Pierpont Morgan Library, in New York City.
• According to Wager and Lee,
a script for the stage show is included in the
Sam H. Harris Papers at the
Princeton University Library. As you know,
Sam H. Harris was the producer of the Broadway show.
• According
to Wikipedia,
a photocopy of Princeton’s copy is at the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts,
together with
sheet music based on Irving Berlin’s score.
• Some version of the
script of the stage show is available from Samuel French,
together with some of Irving Berlin’s score.
It seems to be cobbled together from several different drafts that were written over a year or so.
It includes material from the 1926 rewrite, but it also includes material that was rejected in the autumn of 1925 during rehearsals.
It is missing a number of songs, and it incorporates lines from other Marx brothers movies.
The music is not the full orchestration, unfortunately, nor does it contain all the songs.
The music, too, seems to be a reconstruction based mostly on old recordings and old sheet music,
and, sometimes, Irving’s piano sketches, which are now held at the Library of Congress.
It was Irving’s assistants who put those sketches to paper, since Irving could not read a note of music.
The music is now
| 1. | “Florida by the Sea” (1925) — Bob, Jamison & the Company (this is combined with The Guests [1925]) |
| 2. | “The Bellhops” (1925) — The Bellboys |
| 3. | “What [sic] a Family Reputation” (1925) — Bob, Polly & the Company |
| 4. | “Lucky Boy” (1925) — Jamison, Bob & the Boys |
| 5. | “What’s There about Me?” (1925) — Schlemmer & the Girls |
| 6. | “A Little Bungalow” (1925) — Bob & Polly |
| 7. | “Florida by the Sea (Reprise)” (1925) — Jamison & the Company |
| 8. | “The Monkey-Doodle-Doo” (1925) — Bob, Polly & the Company |
| 9. | Auction Underscore (192?) — The Company |
| 10. | “Finelettto” (reprise of “Lucky Boy”) (1925) — The Company |
| 11. | Act Two Entr’acte (1925) — The Company |
| 12. | “Five o’Clock Tea” (1925) — The Company |
| 13. | “Everyone in the World Is Doing the Charleston” (1926) — Penelope & the Company |
| 14. | “Always” — Bob & Polly |
| 15. | “Tango Melody” (1925) — Penelope, Schlemmer & the Company |
| 16. | Party Fanfares (192?) — Penelope, Schlemmer & the Company |
| 17. | “Piano Specialty” (1925) — Willie |
| 18. | “The Tale of a Shirt” (1925) — Hennessey & the Company |
| 19. | “Act 2 Finale (Bungalow Reprise)” (1925) — The Company |
| 20. | Bows (192?) — The Company |
The
above is rather problematic:
| • | “Florida by the Sea” (1925): Shortly after the première, this was moved from the opening down to the middle of the show. Puzzlingly, this is mixed in with “The Guests,” which soon after the première became the opening number. I do not know who moved “Florida by the Sea” back to the opening, or who combined these two songs, or when, or why. |
| • | “Why Do You Want to Know Why?” (1926) is missing. |
| • | “What’s There about Me?” (1925) is mysteriously reinstated, even though it was dropped during rehearsals.
Prior to the |
| • | “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1926) is missing. |
| • | “The Monkey-Doodle-Doo” (1926) is sung now by Polly and Bob, rather than by Eddie. |
| • | “Everyone in the World Is Doing the Charleston” (1926) is from the rewrite. |
| • | “We Should Care” (1925) is missing. It is replaced by “Always.” |
| • | “Ting-a-Ling the Bells’ll Ring” (1926) is missing. |
| • | “Always” was not written for The Cocoanuts and was never in The Cocoanuts. Irving Berlin had written it as a gift to his fiancée, Ellin Mackay, but had not yet published it. When he got the job to score The Cocoanuts, he offered “Always,” but George Kaufman rejected it. Why it was inserted into the Samuel French version or by whom, I do not know, but this must have been a recent alteration. Why the executors of the estates would allow this change, I cannot imagine. Kaufman, after rejecting the song, made a reference to it in the 8 December 1925 script when he had Groucho say, “Mr. Leander Honeywhistle our silver-throated tenor will now render that popular ballad, ‘I Love You Always.’” Hennessy put a stop to the singing of the ballad before a note of it could be sung. |
| • | “Minstrel Days” (1925) is missing. |
• The British Library, St. Pancras,
claims to have the “musical score,” but in fact merely has seven pieces of Irving Berlin’s sheet music.
• The Irving Berlin Collection
at the
Library of
Congress also has fragments of the musical score: piano sketches, manuscripts, fair copies, but certainly not the full orchestrations.
It seems to be missing the opening number, “The Guests,” though that is perhaps included with “The Bell Hop.”
(There are more details below, under “The deletions.”)
This collection also contains a couple of scripts:
|
CALL NUMBERS
ML31.B48
(LC Class No.): Irving Berlin Collection. The Library of Congress has: |
||
| CONTAINER | FOLDER | CONTENTS |
| BOX 91–92 | 92/1 | Show Music The cocoanuts Stage, 1925; film, 1929 Scores and parts Carbon copy of typed script; [60] p. In tan folder (On cover: The Cocoanuts, Act I) Carbon copy of typed script; [25] p. In tan folder (On cover: The Cocoanuts, Act II, scene I) |
|
CALL NUMBERS
ML31.B48
(LC Class No.): Irving Berlin Collection. The Library of Congress has: |
||
| CONTAINER | FOLDER | CONTENTS |
| BOX 91–92 | 92/2 | Show Music The cocoanuts Stage, 1925; film, 1929 Scores and parts Carbon copy of typed script; [130] p. In yellow folder, 2 paper fasteners |
|
CALL NUMBERS
ML31.B48
(LC Class No.): Irving Berlin Collection. The Library of Congress has: |
||
| CONTAINER | FOLDER | CONTENTS |
| BOX 91–92 | 92/2 | Show Music The cocoanuts Stage, 1925; film, 1929 Scores and parts Carbon copy of typed script; [55, 34] p. In tan folders |
• Also at the New York Public Library
are the Morrie Ryskind Papers (at the New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts),
where you will find “Section III,
• Wager and Lee also mentioned that the
New York State Archives in Albany has the film script.
Now, when I go to the site and do a search on “Cocoanuts,”
I get a catalogue listing that specifies that all this material is actually housed at the
American Museum of the Moving Image,
• At the Philadelphia Area Archives Research Portal (PAARP) there is something catalogued as
“Kaufman, G. S. and Irving Berlin, ‘The Cocoanuts’,
dates not examined, portion of 1 box.”
For the life of me, I cannot locate the full orchestral score for even a single song!
It would appear that the original orchestral score for The Cocoanuts,
in common with the orchestral scores for nearly all American musicals,
was
tossed into the dumpster at the end of the show’s run.
As Miles Kreuger repeatedly says: In its heyday, nobody but nobody took the American Musical Theatre seriously as an art form.
Apparently, I see, not even the creators of the American Musical Theatre understood that they were artists
or that their work was art or important in any way other than in terms of short-term revenue.
They considered their own creations as nothing more than disposable commodities to be junked as soon as the money stopped pouring in.
I have difficulty comprehending this.
How many drafts were there of the movie script? Heaven only knows!
There was more than one. There is always more than one,
and it is inevitable that drafts differ from one another drastically.
I’m certain that differently colored replacement pages were constantly being distributed to cast and crew as filming continued.
It would be great to get everything, but how?
Gary Johnson, posting on Nitrateville,
explains that Broadway shows were necessarily changed when transformed into movies:
|
Broadway shows generally ran 3 plus hours with an intermission. And the stars never opened their own shows.
They sat in the wings playing pinochle while a few dozen musical numbers warmed up the audience waiting for their appearance.
A Hollywood production usually ran 90 mins. and after a quick opening number they wanted their stars on the screen pronto!
There was always a lot of ‘book’ editing of a Broadway show when transferring it to film
and in this case who better to have his part cut down to nothing than Zeppo?
|
Walter Wanger was in charge of production, though he was not credited.
He oversaw the assigned producer, Monta Bell, about whom I know next to nothing.
I see that Monta Bell wrote and directed Man, Woman and Sin, which was a pretty good movie, quite impressive.
I saw Jim Card’s beautiful 16mm print of it — twice, I think — and now I am surprised to learn that it is unavailable due to legal issues.
You can see a horrid-looking clip here.
A quick Google search reveals some photos of Mr. Bell:
The movie was planned and filmed quickly.
The two directors, of course, were
not hired until after plans were already underway, which was typical of Hollywood movies,
in which the director was, contractually, pretty much the least important person on a crew
(unlike Europe, where the director was, contractually, the most important person on a crew).
Paramount signed French filmmaker and comedy connoisseur
Robert Florey to a three-year contract on Tuesday, 8 January 1929,
and his first assignment was The Cocoanuts.
Florey had not seen the Marx brothers on stage, and so he was taken to Animal Crackers, which he did not find to his taste.
He was not looking forward to The Cocoanuts, but an assignment is an assignment.
This was announced immediately, on Wednesday, 9 January 1929:
 Robert Florey showing Charlie Chaplin Cinémagazine vol. 2, no. 24, Friday, 16 June 1922, during the shooting of The Pilgrim. Florey, of course, served on the editorial board of the magazine. |
 Robert Florey |
Florey’s short film, The Life of a Hollywood Extra, was his calling card.
It was produced for a mere $97, which in 2020 dollars would be about $1,500.
Hollywood producers were apparently impressed by his thrift.
Shall we search for a copy?
When we do, we learn that the correct title is The Life and Death of 9413 a Hollywood Extra,
which he created together with Slavko Vorkapich.
Here it is:
The above article indicates that shooting was now delayed until Monday, 4 February.
Regardless of what the above article claims, Florey did not rehearse the Marx Brothers, and certainly not before shooting began.
Though Florey was diligently rehearsing the other cast and crew,
we discover that the production wanted to hire an apprentice who would, oddly, take codirection credit.
Enter
Joseph Santley, who was hired
three days before filming commenced.
The above clipping is also pulled from Gene Zonarich’s online tribute to Kay Francis.
This is from Film Daily, 31 January 1929.
Joseph Santley, circa 1912
Joseph Santley and his wife Ivy Sawyer on stage in 1923
in a revue called The Music Box, Palace Theatre, London.
Shall we dig a little further?
Left to right: assistant director Ray Cozine, choreographer Joseph Santley, Zeppo, Groucho,
cinematographer George Joseph Folsey, Chico, Harpo, Robert Florey
As the least important crew members, Santley and Florey had no time to dawdle.
They had to get film in the can, and no excuses.
A feature film generally requires six to eight weeks behind the cameras.
What was the schedule for The Cocoanuts?
I’m not sure.
We do know, though, that Monday, 4 February, was announced as the first day of filming.
We also have a little piece of evidence published on 3 March, but we do not know when it was submitted:
There was also this report, which was obviously at least a week out of date:
Animal Crackers began at 8:30 every evening and let out at about 11:30 at night.
The Marxes then had to get out of costume and makeup, make their way home
(Groucho lived in Great Neck, about 20 miles from the 44th Street Theatre, about 17 miles from Astoria), grab a snack, and catch a snooze.
The above news clip states that the Marxes began work at ten o’clock in the morning, and that makes sense to me.
According to Groucho’s son, Arthur, who was at Astoria to witness the shooting,
his dad had to be in costume and made up by eight o’clock in the morning,
which meant he had to be out of bed by six in the morning.
Perhaps that is true, but I suspect that Arthur’s memory was playing tricks on him.
First thing in the morning, the crew would review the previous day’s rushes,
and so there would be no need for actors to be made up and costumed by eight, unless they were reviewing the rushes as well.
Arthur further explained that his dad “never slept well when he knew he had to rise early in the morning.
Any 8 a.m. call by the assistant director was sure
to give him instant insomnia and necessitate
a sleeping pill, which usually wouldn’t work
on him until just before it was time to get up ”
(Arthur Marx, “Father Busy Earning — to Lose in Crash,”
Chicago Daily News, Tuesday, 5 December 1972, sec. 2, p. 19).
A press release published in The Morning Herald in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Wednesday, 31 July 1929, p. 8,
states that Groucho had to be at the studio by nine o’clock in the morning.
Three claims. Take your pick: 8:00, 9:00, or 10:00.
Assuming a ten o’clock start time, it follows that the Marx brothers were working 14-hour days, six days a week.
Assuming an eight o’clock start time, it follows that the Marx brothers were working 16-hour days, six days a week.
Anyone who has worked in theatre understands that it is not like other jobs.
Three hours of work on stage is twenty times as exhausting as nine hours of work in an office.
I have done both, and I can vouch for this.
Further, anyone who has worked on a stage show knows that the adrenalin is so high that it is impossible to fall asleep right afterwards, regardless of fatigue.
It takes an hour or two even to begin to wind down.
Others on the Astoria movie crew complained that the Marx brothers arrived late or that Harpo disappeared to fall asleep.
Who can blame them for tardiness or absenteeism?
That is the part of the equation that is missing from the grievances.
According to an interview by William C. Richards in The Detroit Free Press, Sunday, 8 December 1929,
which we shall see below, the Marx brothers worked on the filming of The Cocoanuts for four weeks.
Another claim is by Brian Taves, in
Robert Florey: The French Expressionist (Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2014, pp. 113, 114),
who maintains that filming lasted 20 days, with the implication that filming was six days a week.
According to Inez Wallace’s article in The Cleveland Plain Dealer of Sunday, 17 March 1929, which we shall see a little below,
by the time she visited the set, towards the end of filming, the crew and the extras were all on overtime, seven days a week.
So, I shall guess that the crew and the extras were all working day and night on Sunday, the 24th of February.
If we exclude Sunday the 10th and Sunday the 17th, and if we assume that Taves is correct,
then filming would have finished on Monday, 25 February 1929.
The schedule was compromised, as i Fratelli Marx were available
only from nine or ten in the morning until, I would guess, five in the evening,
when they (and Margaret Dumont) had to get back to the
44th Street Theatre,
216 W 44th St, Manhattan, NY, across the East River, 4.3 miles away, to perform the 8:30 show of Animal Crackers,
and, presumably, get a dinner on the way.
On Wednesdays and Saturdays, when they needed to perform the 2:30 matinées, they could work only three hours on the film.
This begins to explain why there was often no time for retakes,
which is why there are so many flubs, but I love those flubs.
The flubs make the performances seem more human.
Or maybe that’s just me.
You see, I enjoy watching magic tricks only when I know exactly how they are done.
As for stage productions, I most enjoy the rehearsals, when I see the actors and writers creating the parts and refining the script.
I am bored once the final production is open to the public and locked.
That’s why I enjoy the flubs — the performance is not locked.
I am witnessing something in the process of being created, or re-created.
There were definitely some retakes, though.
According to Taves (p. 114), “...Groucho, Harpo, and Chico never became accustomed to remaining
in the limited space being photographed and were
constantly walking out of the field of vision. Since the
bulky, enclosed sound cameras could not pan to follow the
moving actor, he would seem to disappear and then to re-enter
the frame or be cut in half inexplicably. Naturally, this necessitated frequent retakes....”
It is amusing to see that i Fratelli Marx were up on their rôles in Animal Crackers,
which meant they were by now a bit rusty with bits and pieces of The Cocoanuts.
For instance, in the viaduct/why-a-duck scene, Groucho starts to call Chico “Ravelli,” the name of his character in Animal Crackers.
Groucho delivers some of his lines listlessly, as he is clearly trying to remember them.
Brian Taves quotes Florey (pp. 114–115), who recalled that when the Marxes forgot their lines, they
“would start to talk about things that didn’t
make any sense and couldn’t be edited off — on account of
the recording on disc.”
He would halt the scene, the camera operators would load new 1,000' rolls in their magazines,
the sound operators would load new wax discs,
and the scene would be done again.
Amusing note: Harpo, as we all know, could not read music but taught himself the harp,
which he tuned and played in a manner unknown by any professional harpist.
We also witness him play the clarinet, which he apparently taught himself as well, not long before production.
He puffed out his cheeks as he blew through the horn, which surely made him painfully sore,
and he finished off with a squeak.
Doesn’t bother me.
Anyone who can play by ear earns my admiration.
The most beautiful shots in The Cocoanuts were Florey’s inventions.
The stunning opening shot of a woman photographed through a twirling parasol was
Florey’s idea (Taves, p. 116).
To have “The Monkey-Doodle-Doo” seen from different heights,
Florey had three camera booths, stacked one atop the other,
to capture the dance, all shooting simultaneously (Taves, p. 116).
Taves (p. 117) quotes cinematographer George Joseph Folsey:
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My association with Florey was pleasant, interesting
and involved because of the various things he
wanted, he had an eye.... He was an artist, with
a good sense of balance and composition and very
productive ideas. He knew how to handle a chorus
line from below, he knew it was interesting to shoot
down on a bunch of chorus girls unfolding like
flowers — we hadn’t done that before.40
40. Folsey, interview with the author, February 8, 1983.
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Taves (p. 117) also reveals that Paramount sent Rouben Mamoulian to the set of The Cocoanuts
so that Florey could teach him his camera techniques, which he then incorporated into his
upcoming film, Applause.
We also have Anobile’s interview with Florey in The Marx Bros. Scrapbook (NY: Norton/Darien House, 15 November 1973), pp. 116–117:
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For Chico’s solo, I used three cameras. One shooting
through the piano from the inside, another focusing
on his hands and the third handled his face and body.
This was the same way I had once shot George
Gershwin.
I had been doing a picture with Eddie Cantor when
Gershwin happened to visit the set. I asked him if
he’d play something for us and I photographed it.
I remember how effective the shot through the piano
was with him so I used it again with Chico.
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Stories I had disbelieved are turning out to be verified, if not in exact detail, then in general thrust.
There is a legend that, despite the handsome salary, the Marx brothers ignored the scripts and improvised their parts on the fly.
Allen Eyles wrote of the frustrations felt by Robert Florey:
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...the Marxes themselves
made a problem. Florey recalls that they were never all available:
Harpo spent his time making jokes and running after girls; Chico
would either be on the studio roof or down in the basement; Zeppo
came late; and Groucho would make interminable speeches....
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The above is Eyles’s paraphrase of a quotation that appears in Taves, p. 114,
and is credited to Florey’s Hollywood d’hier et d’aujourd’hui
(Paris: Èditions Prisma, 1948), p. 156.
That seemed to me to be an exaggeration.
To Richard J. Anobile, Florey was more specific:
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They really weren’t disciplined. One of them was always
missing. This was during prohibition and Chico
had found an Italian restaurant whose owner produced
homemade wine. And that’s where we’d find Chico
most of the time. Zeppo would also frequently be
missing. Actually, they seemed to take turns and
I’d always have to send assistants all over the place
to look for the missing member. Until the missing
brother was found, there was little we could do but
sit around.
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I had my suspicions about that story, thinking it was probably biased.
So, I turned to Anobile’s interview with Morrie Ryskind,
and he had a similar story, from a different point of view (p. 80):
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Both directors went crazy. Joe couldn’t get the team
together. Chico would jump out every minute to see
what the market was doing. There was no way to
coördinate anything. One day, Chico went up to Joe
and told him that he had a headache and wanted
to walk around the studio for a half-hour. As they
were setting up a scene, Joe thought it would be okay
and gave Chico the
Knowing Chico, I called up the New York Bridge
Club and asked if he was there. A voice on the other
end of the phone tells me, “He’s bidding his sixth
So you had that sort of stuff going on all the time.
It might be humorous now but it wasn’t very funny
then. You know what I mean?
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I just purchased Harpo Speaks! (NY: Bernard Geis Associates, 1961), and,
in flipping through the pages, I found this extraordinary passage (pp. 270–271):
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Our first picture, Cocoanuts, was shot in New York that
spring, between performances of Animal Crackers. “Shot” was just
the word for it. All they did was point a camera at us while we
ran through our old stage version of Cocoanuts.
Still, it wasn’t as simple as it might sound for the producer,
Walter Wanger, or the directors, Joseph Santley and Robert
Florey. There were many long delays in the shooting, due mostly to
the unexcused absences of Chico from the set. Since nobody had
bought tickets to watch him, Chico figured there was nobody
to squawk whenever he ducked out to consult with his bookie or
play a few hands of pinochle. The trouble was, Chico would forget
to come back if the action was good. Then Groucho, Zeppo and
I would wander off looking for him. Sometimes Chico returned
while we were gone, and he’d say the hell with it — if that’s all we
cared, he’d take the rest of the day off too.
When Santley and Florey hit the jackpot and had four Marx
Brothers on the same set at the same time, and the camera got
going, the shooting would be interrupted every time we started
improvising. It wasn’t that our ad libs weren’t funny. The trouble
was, Florey couldn’t help breaking up. When he laughed, he
laughed so hard he drowned out everything else on the sound
track. Laughing left him very weak, so he would have to lie down
to regain his strength before they could call a retake. This would
give Chico a good chance to duck out to see how the action was
going, which would soon send the rest of us out looking for Chico.
Wanger solved Florey’s problem by having the directors use
hand signals, from inside a soundproof glass booth. We still
played to Florey, however. When he flew into a fit of silent convulsions
we knew we had done something good. It was the weirdest
audience we ever played to.
Then Wanger solved the Chico problem. He had the four cells
used in the jail scene bolted to the studio floor. He had four signs
made, one for each cell — CHICO, HARPO, GROUCHO and ZEPPO — and
he had a telephone installed in the one labeled CHICO. Now Chico
could call his bookie any time he felt like it, without bringing production
to a standstill.
Between takes we were locked behind bars and the directors
were let out of the booth. When shooting resumed, the directors
were put back in their glass cage and the stars were let out of their
jail cells. Too bad they didn’t film the filming of Cocoanuts. It
would have been a lot funnier than the movie was.
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Nota bene: I wish I could remember where I read Robert Florey’s denial of Harpo’s anecdote.
Florey was not prone to laugh at most of the Marxes’ material, as he did not find the brothers funny.
He thought Chaplin and Linder were hilarious, but not the Marxes.
He thought that it was actually Joseph Santley who was locked away in a booth, laughing uncontrollable.
If you know where I read that, please write to me. Thanks!
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Please note that, though these four stories have commonalities, they all contradict one another.
More importantly, they all contradict the evidence in the film itself.
Despite tardiness and wanderings, the four Marx brothers got all their scenes shot in 19 days (or less?), which is no mean feat, I think.
So they couldn’t have caused many delays, and certainly no serious ones.
Further, Florey added a sentiment (Anobile, p. 117):
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I would like to add, though, that all the brothers
were good actors. They were clever performers and I
enjoyed working with them. Although at times I may
have wondered what I was doing there.
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Florey made other statements as well, and Taves (p. 115) consolidated them:
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Despite the difficulties, Florey enjoyed working with
the brothers. “Harpo was my favorite,” he said.29 “I
would have loved to have done a picture with just him.”30
He found the task of inventing visual gags for the silent
member of the quartet particularly challenging. Among
Florey’s contributions were the chocolate telephone Harpo
devoured and his sudden game of darts. “After all, as
long as this thing was crazy anyway,” Florey asserted,
“one might as well add to it!”31
29. Florey, Hollywood d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Èditions Prisma, 1948), p. 157.
30. The Marx Bros. Scrapbook (NY: Norton/Darien House, 1973), p. 117.
31. Ibid, p. 116.
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As a final flourish, Groucho added one more detail (Anobile, p. 112):
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Harpo was fascinated by the camera. He would always
look through the camera before a scene was to be
shot.
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While the Marxes were away at the 44th Street Theatre,
Florey and Santley and the crew and the
Gamby-Hale Girls and the
Allan K. Foster Girls and the extras
continued shooting the remaining scenes, such as “Florida by the Sea,” the flower-blossom ballet, the Bellhops’ dance, the Monkey-Doodle-Doo,
and any other scenes that did not require the presence of the brothers.
(Note that during “The Monkey-Doodle-Doo” the Marx Brothers completely disappear,
and that Groucho magically reappears the moment the dance ends.)
Joe Santley assisted with all the dancing scenes, which had already been choreographed by Maria Gambarelli and Chester Hale.
Robert Florey directed the entire film.
Florey chose how the dancers would be photographed, whether from overhead or from down in a pit on the sound stage.
According to a site called Trophy Unlocked,
the production cost was $500,000, which seems rounded to me, and which in 2020 dollars would be something like $7,500,000.
By the way, the sets and set decoration are quite lovely, aren’t they?
The hotel lobby is completely convincing.
I was most curious about the two paintings behind the reception desk:
Now, let’s enlarge that painting on the left:
How on earth could we possibly identify that image?
How? Simple!
We merely tune in to The Marx Brothers Council Podcast Episode 21: No Snow and No Ice!
That is how we learn what this is!
Ivo Saliger’s Braut und ihre Dienerin (Bride and Her Maid),
which dates, I would hazard a guess, from sometime between 1915 and 1925, but, really, that’s just a guess.
Now, what about that painting on the right?
I searched the Blu-ray to grab the clearest frame I could locate.
I could make it out at least a little bit:
Let us enlarge that:
Pretty tough, huh?
Well, this has all the hallmarks of Academic art.
So I spent hours and hours and hours and hours searching Academic art on Google.
At long last, I landed upon this:
Hans Makart, Der Sommer (1880/1881)
The image on the wall is an inexact copy of the original. I suspect it is a detail of Das römisch Bad from 1900, copyist unknown. Unfortunately, Das römisch Bad was destroyed in 1945, but we do have an inferior copy of that copy:
On the other hand, the detail behind the desk may not be from the above copy.
It might be taken from Okänd Konstär’s inferior copy, also from 1900:
Welcome to my rabbit hole.
I find it amusing to see how horribly cropped both these reproductions are in their squarish frames.
It is almost as though this is a comment upon what was already happening in movies,
and an anticipation of the even worse atrocities to come over the next decades.
Here we learn the identities of four of the extras, Sylvan Lee, Elsie Gernon, Ernest Barton McLane, and June Shirley Blake.
We learn the identity of three of the Gamby-Hale dancers too, Frances Johnson, Helen Schieber, and Marion Eddy,
and we also learn something about a few of the musicians in the orchestra:
Sylvan Lee, the eccentric dancer, did no eccentric dancing in The Cocoanuts, at least none that survives in the final film.
He played Eddie, the bell captain, though any mention of his name was chopped out of the final film.
As for Elsie Gernon, she could have been any of the gals at the beach.
As for June Shirley Blake, her scene(s?) ended up in the waste bin.
We shall learn a little more about her below.
Ernest Barton McLane was the lifeguard at the beginning with women on his shoulders.
We also learn some meaningless but fun trivia:
The American Film Institute
provides some more information, and some more uncredited names — uncredited in part because all their work ended up in the rubbish bin.
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The 12 Jan 1929 Motion Picture News announced production was expected to begin
on 1 Feb 1929 on Paramount Pictures’ The Cocoanuts,
based on the 1925 musical play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Irving Berlin.
The Four Marx Brothers would reprise their stage roles in the “all-talking” screen version,
among one of the earliest “talkies” released by Paramount.
The picture was made at Paramount’s East Coast Studios in Astoria, Queens, New York City.
Irving Berlin composed an original score, and George S. Kaufman reportedly served as the film’s advisor.
On 6 Feb 1929, FD [Film Daily] reported that principal photography had begun.
The 2 Mar 1929 Motion Picture News indicated that production would soon be finished,
and listed performers from two singing groups who participated in the film:
“Louise Bernhardt, Madeleine Southwrith, Rita Sebastian and Ann Reichl,
and the Miami Serenaders, Smith Blue, Max Sulser, Jack Cronin and Wendell Mayhew.”
The 23 Mar 1929 Exhibitors Herald-World noted that actor Oscar Shaw had recently completed The Cocoanuts.
According to the 18 May 1929 Motion Picture News,
the world premiere was held at New York City’s Rialto Theatre on 23 May 1929.
Reviews were mixed. The 29 May 1929 Var reported “many laughs” throughout the film,
but criticized the performers for talking “too fast” and for talking over their laughs.
The 2 Jun 1929 FD declared that the film version did not add upon the stage presentation,
but noted several “excellent” dance numbers.
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This next snippet needs interpretation.
It does not mean that the Marx Brothers have almost finished their work.
It means that the post-production crew has almost finished its work.
The Marx Brothers had actually finished their work two months previously.
The two directors did great jobs, despite the short schedule, and The Cocoanuts has some stunningly gorgeous images.
(Those images never looked gorgeous back in the murky NTSC CRT days.
All of the movies that the Marxes did for Paramount looked pathetically primitive when shown in 16mm prints on NTSC CRT TV broadcasts,
but The Cocoanuts suffered far more than the others.
Seeing good copies is a revelation.
On DCP and on Blu-ray, some of the images in The Cocoanuts are breathtaking.)
The promotional piece below is interesting, because it justly boasts about the superior camerawork.
It is also interesting in showing a “Scene from the Paramount Picture” that was deleted prior to release.
We shall examine this a little more by and by.
This was a multicam production (at least three cameras, probably more, rolling during many but not all sequences, each shooting from a different angle).
Ah. Here we have an article by a journalist who visited the set one day.
There were at least four cameras.
The four she mentioned were in the flies.
That was for the flower-blossom ballet.
There were probably no cameras on the stage floor for that particular shot.
So we can be fairly confident that much of The Cocoanuts was shot with at least four cameras.
Cameras were noisy, but that didn’t matter for the overhead shot of the ballet,
or for the other shots taken from the flies, because they were surely postsynchronized, and perhaps even shot silent.
So why did she mention the microphone just outside of camera range?
My guess is that the microphone was placed for another shot, one taken from the studio floor an hour or so later.
After all, the scene did continue, and it was taken from several vantage points.
Or, perhaps production audio was recorded, including the camera’s noisy clatter, just as reference for later postsynchronization.
You see, the ballet was performed in time to a live orchestra on set.
The orchestra would need to be recorded again, minus camera clatter, and the conductor could use the first noisy recording as a guide
when conducting the orchestra later on in a recording studio.
When actors spoke lines, the cameras were locked into
soundproof booths.
(Here’s one on wheels.
Here’s
another. You will see that the windows are large enough to allow the cameras to pan and tilt.)
Actors, while speaking, were not filmed from cameras in the flies, for reasons that should be obvious.
Note that Inez Wallace, in her article below, makes no mention of seeing the Marx brothers on set.
Surely they were performing at the 44th Street Theatre at the time.
She describes the shooting of the beginning of the Spanish-party scene with the ballet.
What it looks like, to me, is that different camera operators framed different ways.
I would guess that the majority of the camera operators framed to fill the entire aperture.
I would guess that one of the camera operators framed for the most severe crop.
I would guess that one of the camera operators framed half-way in between.
The overhead shot of the flower-blossom ballet was definitely framed for a crop.
The camera operator who composed this shot clearly took care that the image
would look good and balanced if the left side and top and bottom were to be lopped off in the presentation.
He was correct to assume that most cinemas would indeed crop it that way. Look:
Some years ago, in casual conversation, I asked Joe Adamson
about the camerawork in The Cocoanuts and about the possible survival of any original elements.
He told me that George Folsey had told him that he was irritated that the head office would never answer
his simple question about how the film would be printed and released.
He wanted to know how to compose the images, but the head office would never divulge that information.
That explains why different camera operators on his crew framed the image in different ways.
I just now discover that Joe mentioned this in his book,
Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo (NY: Pocket Books, March 1976, paperback reissue, pp. 71–72):
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It was never clear from one minute
to the next whether the sound was going to go out
to the theaters on the film or on a separate disc....
you were never sure how wide the
image on the film was going to be, since the sound track
crowded one-tenth of the frame off the film and the
disc didn’t. So there was no way of knowing whether
anything on the left side of the picture was going to
show up on the screen or not.
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Why was The Cocoanuts shot multicam?
The legend is that multiple cameras were needed to keep up with the Marx brothers, whose stage movements were unpredictable.
That’s not such a good legend.
There were two reasons this film was shot multicam.
The lesser reason was the tight schedule.
When a movie is shot with a single camera, there needs to be a pause and a new set-up for each change of angle,
and that’s when continuity can so easily break down.
Every time the crew needs to stop the long shot to go to a medium shot or a close-up or whatever,
or choose an image of a different actor or of a detail,
the entire crew needs to stop and re-set everything.
When a movie is shot multicam, an entire scene can be gotten in a single take,
with each camera capturing each needed angle simultaneously.
That makes for a much faster shoot, and it also eliminates much of the continuity girl’s duties.
(“Continuity girl” was the standard term, as the staff in charge of continuity were pretty much all young women.)
Of course, multicam generates three or four or five times as much film,
but when a crew is under the gun to get a movie shot rapidly, multicam is the only way to go.
It also makes editing easier.
When assembling, just run the footage from all three or four or five cameras at the same time, synchronized, and you can instantly see what belongs where.
Easy peasy.
The accountant will suffer cardiac arrest every time a lab bill arrives, but who cares?
The more important reason for multicam, as Brian Taves makes clear, was that, when recording sound-on-disc , short takes are inconvenient.
In later years, you could load ten minutes of film into a camera, shoot a one-minute scene, take a break, shoot another one-minute scene, take a break,
shoot a half-minute scene, and so on and so on, until the roll of film was mostly used up.
In the days of sound-on-disc, it was not so easy.
Any scene that was less than ten minutes long ended up wasting film, because every scene needed to start with a fresh 1,000' roll.
If you needed to shoot a one-minute scene, you shot that one-minute scene, and then trashed the remaining nine minutes of unexposed film.
If you shot a one-minute scene and made a mistake, you had to toss out the entire ten-minute roll that was in the camera.
Cameras were loaded with ten-minute (1,000') rolls, and the recorders were loaded with 10-minute (16" 33⅓rpm) wax discs.
The goal was to shoot a ten-minute take whenever possible.
As a matter of fact, it is obvious that many scenes in The Cocoanuts were indeed shot in single takes.
A single static camera shooting a ten-minute scene would usually be unacceptable, and so multiple cameras were generally a necessity.
Also, there was often no time for second chances.
Nowadays, if a performer flubs a line, it is easy to do a second take of that single moment.
In the days of sound-on-disc , nope.
If a performer made a mistake, or if a camera misframed, or if there was some other imperfection,
the only way to correct the error would be to reshoot the ENTIRE SCENE.
Predictably, if the scene were to be reshot, there would be a different mistake, so what was the use?
Unless the mistakes were serious, they would stay in.
The most painful example of this that I have seen is Vitaphone subject 443, the one-reel performance by
Bernardino De Pace.
At 7 minutes and 15 seconds, one of the strings of his mandolin breaks.
No second chances. Two cameras, one take, and that was it.
There was no going back.
He just had to keep on playing, and he had to keep on smiling.
Fortunately, mandolins have redundant strings, and so a single broken string would not matter.
Heaven help him, though, if two strings had broken!
On Thursday, 15 November 1973 (after a three-day court-ordered delay), W.W. Norton/Darien House issued a book
compiled by Richard J. Anobile entitled The Marx Bros. Scrapbook, which I have quoted above.
I salivated over a few pages at B. Dalton Bookseller at Winrock shopping center in Albuquerque, but I was 13 years old and penniless.
I could have asked my parents to spend the unreasonably enormous sum of $13.95 plus 4% tax for the book,
but my mother had gotten two Marx Brothers books for me already, and a third would have been too much to ask for, especially at a price my parents could not possibly justify.
The price was considerably more than both the previous books combined!
Besides, there was the possibility that my parents might flip through a few pages and get confused,
for Groucho employed vocabulary that was simply unknown in our household.
Such vocabulary was not forbidden, and it was not punished; it was simply unknown
(except for the occasional outburst of σκατά!
in Greek, which nobody guessed I could understand).
So, I never asked for the book, and I only just acquired a copy today, Saturday, 25 April 2020.
The first thing I looked for, of course, was The Cocoanuts, and lo and behold, there was a one-and-a-half-page
interview with Robert Florey!
It turns out he shot much of the movie with five cameras.
If someone had asked me for my best guess about how many cameras were used on The Cocoanuts, I would have said five.
Florey reveals the identity of one of those five cameramen: Joe Ruttenberg.
Florey also mentioned that he had never met the Marx brothers until the first day of shooting,
when they simply walked into the studio and performed a scene for the cameras, without rehearsal.
He realized that he generally did not need to rehearse the Marx brothers, and so the action was not always blocked.
He simply let them do what they had been accustomed to doing on the stage,
and hoped that the five cameras would be able to capture everything — which they did, thank goodness.
He mentioned something about the sound-proof camera booths: No ventilation!
After a take, the camera operators would emerge gasping for breath!
He also revealed that, in addition to the intermittent presence of George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind,
Irving Berlin also popped by the studio and even occasionally conducted the on-set studio orchestra,
relieving the studio’s orchestra director, Frank Tours.
Courtesy of Anobile, we also have Morrie Ryskind’s terse memories of the camera booths and of the orchestra:
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Cocoanuts was the first musical film produced on
the East Coast. Nobody knew exactly how to handle
things. Sound was new. They couldn’t solve the
problem of explaining where the music was coming
from. Today, we just take for granted that music is
part of a film. You can’t produce an orchestra every
time there’s a musical scene! I tried to explain that
the audience would just have to accept the music.
There was a big argument and finally they erected
a stand. On it they put a bunch of extras and put
instruments in their hands. They never played because
the picture was scored. Occasionally, to justify the
music, the director was supposed to throw in a shot
of that orchestra. However, that never happened because
they forgot to shoot that stand. And nobody
ever asked where the music was coming from.
There were lots of problems. Don’t forget this was
one of the first sound pictures. If a fly buzzed on the
set, it sounded like an airplane.
The biggest problem was the poor cameraman who
was locked up in a box with the camera. After a
while, the poor guy would literally stagger out of the
box for air! We’d all have to take a break while he
got his breath back.
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They forgot to shoot that stand? No no no no no. I don’t think so.
I think they “forgot” to shoot that stand.
Ryskind mentioned the problems with microphones picking up more than they were meant to pick up.
Here’s an interesting little YouTube video:
It turns out that it was for the best that I did not read The Marx Bros. Scrapbook when I was 13.
The interviews with Robert Florey and Morrie Ryskind and Susan Marx and Jack Benny are interesting,
but I flipped through a few more pages just now, and shall not continue.
Whenever I learn about the personal behavior of those I admire professionally, well,
to say that I am disappointed is an understatement.
It is truly best that I never learn these things.
Some decades ago, Charlie Stein (editor of American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries)
told me that he had met and interviewed George Burns when he toured Buffalo.
George went on at length about how shabbily Groucho had treated his fellow vaudevillians,
and Charlie asked if he could quote him on that.
George was horrified and said, “ABSOLUTELY NOT!”
Only now do I realize what George meant.
The microphone
The editing crew must have been at work beginning on Tuesday, 5 February.
According to IMDb,
the editing crew were under the direction of Barney Rogan.
As we shall learn below, the (chief?) sound mixer was
Shelby Chapman.
Rogan, Chapman, the editing crew, the two directors, the camera operators, and the sound crew probably watched the rushes beginning at 8:00 that morning.
By 10:00, Santley maybe apprenticing to Florey, or maybe observing rehearsals with the dancers on a set, or maybe in a rehearsal room, and Florey got to work directing the film.
While Santley and Florey were at work,
the picture and sound editors got busy, making sense of what had been shot and recorded the day before.
I have never witnessed a sound-on-disc editing session, but my imagination fills in a few gaps.
First, a sequence from the film was edited, silent.
Then the sound crew found the matching sections on the discs, and cued them.
If extra music or sound effects were needed, those were recorded as well, separately, and they were cued.
Once an entire reel was assembled, the dozens of discs began rolling in predetermined sequences, interlocked with their complicated cue patterns,
and mixed together onto at least three new wax discs, one of which would serve as a test, and the other two of which would be pressed,
with the hope that at least one of them would turn out properly.
Because dozens of discs spinning on turntables can never be synchronized perfectly, they would never exactly match the edits in the film.
If everything went well, and if one of those three new wax discs was usable, the reel would be considered completed.
For those sequences that were slightly out of synchronization, the film would be re-edited slightly
(inserting or deleting a few frames here and there) to match the accompanying disc.
I cannot vouch for any of this, but I cannot imagine how else the work could have been done.
Here is a little article on the topic, but it is not nearly as detailed as I would like.
Almost a year later, Robert Florey voiced his opinions about cinema,
and what he said now comes across as ironic, but, wait, think about it.
He did have a point.
Chapter Six
The Preview Screening
The Preview Screening
Below, we have the only reference to a preview screening that I have found.
It was not open to the public, but was only for studio personnel.
Where was this screening? In Manhattan, I presume, but maybe in Hollywood?
When was it? A little before 28 March 1929, yes, but can we pin it down more precisely?
Who saw it?
Paramount/Publix executives, yes, but precisely who? Who else was invited?
What records are there of this preview print?
If you know anything about this, could you write to me,
pretty please with sugar and honey on it?
My guess is that shooting was completed on Monday, 26 February 1929.
The preview was available before 28 March 1929.
That’s pretty quick: A month after shooting was completed, the edited film was ready.
Remember, The Cocoanuts was not shot with Smartphones and it was not edited on a laptop.
It was shot in 35mm and the sound was recorded on wax discs.
Four weeks was a pretty darned good turnaround.
Chapter Seven
The Deletions
The Deletions
The above article is how we know that the preview print that the studio bosses saw a few days before 28 March 1929
was longer than the version that was sent to cinemas two months later.
What went missing?
According to
IMDb, two cuts were made before the première:
|
• When the bellboys are protesting against being unpaid,
Zeppo tells them that Groucho has yet to arise at four in the afternoon.
His comforting postscript, that Groucho always gets up on Wednesday, precedes his arrival.
This scene was shot, but later cut after the preview, leaving Groucho descending down the stairs,
still putting on his coat, allowing time to ward off his staff to catch a 4:15 train. • Another item that was cut from the preview version of the film was a love ballad sung by Groucho to Margaret Dumont entitled “A Little Bungalow”. Originally sung in the play by the romantic leads Polly Potter and Robert Adams, the song slowed up the picture. |
Who submitted that information to IMDb, and where did that information come from?
We already knew about “A Little Bungalow,”
which Allen Eyles had mentioned in passing, and I wonder where Eyles learned about it.
Is there perhaps a surviving “cutting continuity” (transcript) of a pre-release version of the movie?
Though I do not have any version of the film script, I can check the opening of the play as it was performed on opening night at the
Lyric Theatre, Tuesday, 8 December 1925
(in By George, St. Martin’s Press, 1979, p. 203).
Assuming that little or nothing was changed in that brief sequence, we are dealing with only a few lines.
Let’s take a look:
|
AT RISE: Discovered: A number of hotel guests on stage. JAMISON and
Ensemble go into OPENING NUMBER joined by BELLBOYS. At the number’s
end, the BELLBOYS remain on stage.
JAMISON: Eddie!
EDDIE: Yes, sir?
JAMISON: People are complaining that they don’t get any service.
How about it? (BELLBOYS start to jabber)
EDDIE: Shut up! (To JAMISON) The trouble is they’re dissatisfied.
(The BELLBOYS start to talk again) Keep still. (To JAMISON) Keep still. They
haven’t been getting their wages.
BELLBOY: No!
BELLBOY: We want our money.
JAMISON: Well, business hasn’t been very good so far, but you’re
sure to get paid soon.
BELLBOY: We want to talk to Mr. Schlemmer.
BELLBOY: Yes! Where is he?
JAMISON: Why, he’s — he’s not up just yet, but —
BELLBOY: Not up? It’s four o’clock.
BELLBOY: That’s the trouble with the hotel. JAMISON: But he’s sure to be here soon. He always gets up Wednesdays. |
So, that comes to what? Forty-five seconds, maybe?
A minute at the very most?
That was not the beginning of the scene of the confrontation between the Bell Hops and Groucho, though.
Both sequences were probably shot in a single take, but the two halves were to have been split into two scenes.
I am almost certain of that.
The duet by Margaret and Groucho was likely three minutes.
Did you click on “A Little Bungalow”?
My heavens! Isn’t that a great song?
I never heard it before. Wonderful! Here are the lyrics.
I can’t imagine how Margaret and Groucho would have performed it.
Not straight, certainly.
You can see exactly where it was chopped out.
The scene that introduces the song cuts off abruptly when Groucho says,
“You wear a necktie so I’ll know you.”
There was undoubtedly some more dialogue, and then the song.
Ach, Mein Gott in Himmel! What am I saying? What am I thinking?
We do not know how long the song was.
It was probably about three minutes.
When songs were recorded for issue on 10" 78rpm, they had to be about three minutes,
because that’s how long a 10" 78rpm was.
Longer songs were played faster and abridged to fit into that tight time frame.
For shorter songs, the 78rpm recordings were padded with extra repeat signs.
Many songs were originally three-minute compositions simply so that they would be able to fit onto 10" 78rpm shellac discs.
We can safely conclude that those two deletions account for no more than five minutes altogether.
I can understand why these two segments were cut.
The introductory confrontation between the Bellboys and Jamison becomes redundant once Groucho’s Schlemmer/Hammer character descends the staircase.
As for the song, let us take a look at the script of the play as it was performed on Tuesday, 8 December 1925:
|
GROUCHO: Well say that you’ll be truly mine, or truly yours, or
yours truly, and that tonight when the moon is sneaking around the
clouds, I’ll be sneaking around you. I’ll meet you tonight by the
bungalow, under the moon. You and the moon. I hope I can tell you
apart. You wear a red necktie so I’ll know you. I’ll meet you tonight
by the bungalow under the moon.
MRS. POTTER: But suppose the moon is not out.
GROUCHO: Then I’ll meet you under the bungalow.
(Into reprise of “BUNGALOW” number. He sings. They exit)
|
This must have been changed somewhat for the movie, since the song was likely no longer a reprise.
Remember, for the movie version, Irving Berlin had written a new song for the young couple,
“When My Dreams Come True,”
and so it is a bit surprising that a remnant of “A Little Bungalow” was retained in the film.
That reprise is deleted from the Samuel French edition, and it seems it may have been deleted from the revised 1926 stage edition.
After you watch the movie two or three times, you will see plenty of places where there are obvious excisions.
Below we have a most curious press-kit still.
Harpo kisses a rubber snake. Most in the crowd seem unmoved. Chico and Zeppo are amused. Margaret is concerned. Groucho is mortified.
When a fellow Marxist (who is much more devout than I am) referred me to
The Marx Brothers Council Podcast Episode 21, I was most puzzled by the comments about the still with the snake.
What still with what snake? I asked about this, and then, lo and behold, I saw that I already had an image of it on this web page!
I had seen this still several times, but I had no idea what Harpo was holding or why.
It looked to me like some sort of curvy whistle or wind instrument.
You see, I’ve met countless snakes in my time,
but I have never met a snake who looked like whatever it was that Harpo had to his mouth, and so I never made the connection.
This sequence was filmed, but it was deleted. Why?
Now, I have so far managed to collect a grand total of two versions of the script.
First there is the script as performed on opening night at the Lyric Theatre in Manhattan on 8 December 1925,
and second is the current version as published by Samuel French. Shall we take a look?
| AS PERFORMED AT THE LYRIC, 8 DECEMBER 1925 |
CURRENT VERSION, AVAILABLE FROM SAMUEL FRENCH |
|
GROUCHO
He wants to know if you object if he hangs himself.
(HARPO is persistent, finally clears a path to the hollow stump, reaches down and brings out a snake.
He reaches down again and triumphantly brings up the necklace.
Naturally the entire procedure brings reactions from PENELOPE and HARVEY, but they dare not say anything)
|
SCHLEMMER
He wants to know if you object if he hangs himself.
(SAM is persistent, finally clears a path to the hollow stump, reaches down and brings out a snake.)
SCHLEMMER
He’s offering you his first born.
(SAM produces a mouse and a crib toy and puts both in his pocket.)
SCHLEMMER
Dessert.
(SAM reaches down again and triumphantly brings up the necklace.
Naturally the entire procedure brings reactions front PENELOPE and HARVEY, but they dare not say anything.)
|
Now, when you watched this movie, you never noticed that anything seemed to be missing.
Am I right?
If you had paid close attention, you would have noticed a jump in the action, but probably put that down to the exigencies of primitive editing.
Well, now, let’s watch just a moment again, when Harpo digs into the tree stump.
Now do you see that something is missing?
You’ll never be able to enjoy that scene again as long as you live, will you?
Just a few hours after I thought I had at last completed my final draft of this web page, I discovered that
Robert Kimball and Linda Emmett compiled
The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
If you turn to page 234, you will find something amazing.
What? All the lyrics to The Cocoanuts!!!!!
That is how we discover the songs that were included in the stage show,
most of which were scissored out of the movie.
The songs appear to average about three or four minutes each.
Many or all were written that way surely so that they could be issued easily on 10" 78rpm shellac discs.
Below is the entire inventory, probably.
The 8 December 1925 script also indicates a “Tambourine Drill,” but offers no description.
In parentheses, I offer my best guesses as to where these songs occurred.
Study the inventory below, listen to all the recordings, read all the lyrics, and then watch the movie again.
Some of the edits are last-minute deletions, and they will be so obvious that they will scream at you.
I simply must find every draft of the script, both the stage and the movie versions.
(You’ll be able to hear the vast differences between 1920’s musical interpretations and current ones.
No comparison.)
|
THE GUESTS and THE BELL HOP Sung by Guests, Chorus, and Bellboys. Opening numbers. DELETED from the film. The music from “The Bell Hop” is played during the bell hops’ dance on the stairs. Click below for a tiny piece of music from “The Bell Hop” as it appears in the release version of the movie:   Sheet music was never published.
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When My Dreams Come True
Sung by Bob and Polly. On the hotel grounds, near the beginning of the film. Reprised during Spanish party and again at the end. Unique to the film. Click on the label below to hear a rendition of the song:  Paul Whiteman puts his spin on it:  Waring’s Pennsylvanians:  Click on the cover below to see several editions of the sheet music:  
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With a Family Reputation
Sung by Polly. If this was used, it was probably just after disagreement with Mrs. Potter. A scene seems to be missing after the elevator door closes. PERHAPS DELETED from the film, or PERHAPS NOT FILMED. According to Dan Dietz’s The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295), “Family Reputation” was deleted from the show in 1926:  Click on the image below for a fragment of a performance:   This song is included in Mark Nadler and KT Sullivan’s CD, but it’s only a  .Sheet music was never published, though it was advertised.
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Lucky Boy
Sung by the Company. Shortly after the sewer pipe. DELETED from the film. Click on the image below to hear an instrumental performance:  Click on the label below to hear a medley that includes an excerpt from this song:  Click on record label below to learn more, or click on the CD image to hear an instrumental: 
 Click on the cover below for the sheet music — published in twice in 1925 (Cover A and Cover B) and again in the “New Summer Edition” in 1926:  
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Sung by Eddie and a Bell Hop named Tony. This would indicate, to me, that the No clue where this belonged. Included in the Boston & Philadelphia try-outs. Dropped prior to NYC opening. PROBABLY NOT FILMED Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295):  Sheet music was never published.
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Sung by Groucho. After Harvey enters the elevator, and before Harpo eats the telephone. NOT FILMED. Dropped during rehearsals in 1925. Replaced by “Why Am I a Hit with the Ladies?” Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295):   Sheet music was never published.
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Why Am I a Hit with the Ladies?
Sung by Groucho. After Harvey enters the elevator, and before Harpo eats the telephone. PERHAPS DELETED from the film, or PERHAPS NOT FILMED. According to Dan Dietz’s The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295), “Why Am I a Hit with the Ladies?” was deleted from the show in 1926: If that is true (and I have my doubts), then it was likely replaced by “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Click on the image below for a rendition:  Click on the image below for an excerpt of a performance:    Mikael Uhlin just sent me a photo from the stage production. This appeared in Hector Arce’s The Groucho Phile and in Glenn Mitchell’s The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia:  The bell boys were played by gals in the movie. This photo indicates that the same held true for the stage version. Bizarre ambiguity: In the movie, Groucho slips and starts to call them “girls” but catches himself and switches to “boys.” Then, when Harpo summons the boys and they sure look like girls, he and Chico start chasing after them. Nothing is clear, nor is anything meant to be clear. Sheet music was never published, though it was advertised.
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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Sung by Groucho. Maybe this replaced “Why Am I a Hit with the Ladies?”? DELETED from the film. Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295): Click on the album cover below to hear a rendition:  Click on the album cover below to hear a different rendition:    Wrongly advertised as available for purchase by the general public; actually published only as a b&w professional copy.
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No clue who sang it or where it fits. My best guess is that this was from the deleted Eddie/Tony subplot. Dropped during rehearsals in 1925. NOT FILMED.  Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295): Click below for the lyrics (page 242):  Sheet music was never published, though it was advertised.
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No clue who was to have sung it or where it was to have fit. NOT FILMED. Intended for The Cocoanuts, but never used, per Thomas Inglis, Sheet Music Art of Irving Berlin (2003). Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295):   Sheet music was never published, though it was advertised.
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A Little Bungalow
Sung by Groucho, and maybe Mrs. Potter? Concludes the love scene on the couch. DELETED from the film. According to Dan Dietz’s The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295), “A Little Bungalow” was deleted from the show in 1926: I really have my doubts about that. Click on the label below for a recording.  Click below for the sheet music — published twice in 1925 (Cover A and Cover B); published again in 1926 for the “New Summer Edition,” though it was not advertised:  
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Why Do You Want to Know Why?
Sung by Polly and Bob. Did this replace their rendition of “A Little Bungalow”? DELETED from the film. Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295): Click on the label below to hear a recording:  Click on the label below to hear a different recording:  Click below for the sheet music:  
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Florida by the Sea
Sung by the Company. Right after the robbery. Originally this was the play’s opening number. The final cut of the film uses a fragment as the opening, but something seems to have been remixed and A FRAGMENT remains in the film. Click on the label below to hear a medley that includes an excerpt from this song: Click on the cover below for the sheet music — published twice in 1925 (Cover A and Cover B), and again in “New Summer Edition” in 1926:   
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The Monkey-Doodle-Doo
Polly and Company. Before the auction. Sung by Eddie and Company in the stage show. Click on the label below to hear a medley that includes an excerpt from this song:  Click below for a different recording:  And yet another, quite different, recording: _Monkey_Doodle-Doo_Ted_Lewis.png) Even more different?  You like player pianos?  You like Photoplayers?  Wow! I didn’t know that Joe had a Photoplayer! I guess I’ll need to hear a personal demonstration someday! How about a Gavioli organ?  You like Paul Whiteman?  Want to compare those with a modern interpretation?  Hear the differences? Another modern interpretation, combined with a moment from “The Bell Hop”? _1925.png) Even more aggressive about taking liberties? _at_Sweet_&_Hot_'10_Labor_Day_LAX_Marriott.png) Performed as lounge music?????  Click on the cover below for the sheet music — published in twice in 1925 (Cover A and Cover B) and again in the “New Summer Edition” in 1926:  
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Opening of Act Two
Instrumental. Probably a variation on “A Little Bungalow.” NOT FILMED.
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Sung by the Company. Probably after the jail break, before Bob returns to hotel. NOT FILMED. Deleted in the summer of 1926. Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295): Click on the album cover below to hear an excerpt and to order the song:  Click below for the lyrics (page 238):  Sheet music was never published.
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Everyone in the World Is Doing the Charleston Sung by the Company. Probably after the jail break, before Bob returns to hotel. Replaced “They’re Blaming the Charleston.” DELETED from the film. Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295): Click on the image below to see a performance:    Wrongly advertised as available for purchase by the general public; actually published only as a b&w professional copy.
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We Should Care
Sung by Polly and Bob. After Harpo shows Bob the diagram. PERHAPS DELETED from the film, or PERHAPS NOT FILMED. According to Dan Dietz’s The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295), “We Should Care” was deleted from the show in 1926: I really have my doubts about that. If Dietz is correct, then my guess is that it was replaced by “Ting-a-Ling the Bells’ll Ring.” The sheet music was published twice in 1925 (Cover A and Cover B). Only a sample is on line:    
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Ting-a-Ling the Bells’ll Ring
Sung by Polly and Bob. This almost certainly replaced “We Should Care.” DELETED from the film. Dan Dietz, The Complete Book of 1920s Broadway Musicals (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, p. 295): Click below for the sheet music, published as “New Summer Edition” in 1926:  Click below to hear the song, Victrola 8-9: 
Click below for an instrumental rendition, Victor 20116-B: 
And cleaned up a bit:  Ampico roll #207981-E, November 1926:  Not online, Fred Rich and His Orchestra, Columbia 720-D:  Discogs, Fred Rich and His Orchestra — Ting-ling the Bells’ll Ring Instrumental: Majestic Dance Orchestra, Pathe Actuelle 36500 B:  Instrumental, WMCA, Harmony 232-H: .png) instrumental, WMCA, Harmony 232-H:  instrumental, WMCA, Harmony 232-H:  Not online, Nathan Glantz and His Orchestra, Champion 15160-B:   DAHR Discography of American Historical Recordings, UC Santa Bárbara Library
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Five O’Clock Tea
Sung by Penelope and Company. Probably right after “We Should Care” or “Ting-a-Ling” or whatever it was. DELETED from the film. Click on album cover below to hear an excerpt and click here to order the CD:  The sheet music was published in twice in 1925 (Cover A and Cover B) and again in the “New Summer Edition” in 1926 (not on line):   
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Tango Melody
Sung by the Company. Opens the Spanish party. A FRAGMENT remains in the film. Click on the label below to hear a medley that includes an excerpt from this song: Click on the image below to see Dolores del Rio and Don Alvarado dance the “Tango Melody” in The Bad One in 1930:  Click below for the sheet music — published in 1925 (Cover B) and again in the “New Summer Edition” in 1926:  
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The Tale of a Shirt
Sung by Hennessy and the Company. During Spanish party.   Sheet music was never published.
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Minstrel Days
Sung by Polly and Company. Probably before the speeches at the table. DELETED from the film.   Sheet music was never published, though it was advertised.
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Do make sure to listen to the fourteen songs that were recorded.
If you know where to find any of the eight others, please let me know. Thanks!
If all the missing songs were of such caliber, it is a pity that they ended up in the rubbish bin.
That’s twelve songs from the 1926 revision of the show that were deleted in their entirety, and two that remain only as fragments.
We also need to keep in mind the several songs that had been dropped from the stage show, some of which may or may not have been filmed.
We are then led to the question: Were all these songs filmed?
If they were, then that easily accounts for about 45 or 50 minutes’ worth of missing music.
Now, listen closely, and you will hear that the ending of “Tango Melody” survives in the final film,
but only as an instrumental, not as a dance or a song.
Where is the beginning?
There is an obvious chop, as the scene begins at the tail end of the musical piece.
That, of course, is when the maître d’ announces the arrival of the guests at the Potters’ party.
So, that’s about three minutes deleted.
If you disbelieve my claim that there is an obvious chop, watch again:
So, were the rest of these songs performed for the cameras?
After all, it would be reasonable to suppose that the producers decided not to bother with most of the songs for the movie version.
So, were they performed for the cameras, or were they not?
We have an answer!
Miles
Kreuger told me the story.
In 1904, George Ade presented his play,
The College Widow,
a term that is familiar to Marx admirers.
In 1917,
Guy Bolton,
P.G. Wodehouse, and
Jerome Kern adapted that play into a musical called
Leave It to Jane.
Miles
Kreuger told me that Oscar Shaw had played the part of
Stub Talmadge in the original 1917 production.
The
Sheridan Square Playhouse
staged a revival of
Leave It to Jane
beginning on
25 May 1959, and the production ran a year and a half.
I do not know the closing date, but I see that it was still playing as of
30 September 1960
and seems to have run to about 10 October 1960, when it was replaced by
Tom Sawyer.
Miles tells me that the Sheridan Square Playhouse was the size of an average living room.
Methinks he was being a little hyperbolic, but only a little.
Miles had a radio show on WBAI called Opening Night,
Wednesday nights, 8:00, and he also worked for Decca.
He suggested that Decca issue a cast album, but Decca dismissed the idea.
“Who would want a cast album for an off-Broadway show?”
Miles also knew Marv Holtzman, who had just been hired away from Decca.
Jack Kent Cooke
was a Canadian tycoon who had maxed out the number of Canadian media companies he was legally allowed to own,
and so he started Strand Records in the US.
It was Strand Records
that had hired Marv Holtzman away as its A&R (Artists and Repertoire) person.
Miles suggested that Marv have Strand issue a Leave It to Jane cast album, but Marv dismissed the idea,
arguing that the only way to make money anymore was with rock-and-roll, that there was no further market for the older types of music.
Miles countered that one needed to sell, but one also needed to give a label legitimacy,
and what better way could there be to give a label legitimacy than by issuing an album by Jerome Kern, for heaven’s sake?
Marv was unimpressed, saying that Miles was too much of an idealist, that an album of an off-Broadway show would never sell.
So Miles phoned Marv’s wife at home and invited her to see Leave It to Jane.
She accepted and took Marv along.
They were so thrilled by the show that they couldn’t stop talking about it.
They and Miles and the show’s producer, Joe Bellew or Barrou (not sure of the name or of the spelling),
went round the corner to a coffee shop after the show and hammered out a deal that night.
Miles arranged the cast album, which was
recorded on Monday, 13 July 1959, and did the original liner notes, though all production credit went to Marv Holtzman.
N.B.: The only album that made money for Strand Records was
Leave It to Jane, which was the only asset when the company finally folded.
On 7 November 1959,
the New York Daily News reported that Oscar Shaw had already caught a performance of this revival.
A month later, on 18 December 1959,
the Daily News reported that Oscar would attend again that evening,
together with Ruloff Cutten, another actor from the original production,
as well as with the creators of the play, Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse.
It was some sort of special occasion, and Miles had an invitation as well.
Bolton and Wodehouse were VIP’s who sat in the front row.
Oscar Shaw and Miles sat in the second row.
The issue about the songs in The Cocoanuts was a problem that had been vexing Miles.
Were they never filmed, or were they filmed but deleted in the editing?
He had to know.
He asked Oscar if the songs were filmed, and Oscar assured him that indeed they were!
He said the film was filled with music, but he was not aware if the musical numbers were deleted before or after the première.
The two of them then entertained themselves by singing “When My Dreams Come True.”
That leads to a further question that vexes me:
As far as I know, the last public presentation of The Cocoanuts was in late 1932.
Miles was born in 1934.
There was a private screening at a Hollywood party in 1939, according to Joe Adamson, and I am willing to bet a million dollars that Miles was not there.
The Cocoanuts was then effectively a lost film — until March 1959 when MCA TV pieced it back together from battered prints and a pirated copy.
The Cocoanuts was not shown again in or near New York City until August 1960, when it had its local television première.
So how on earth did Miles see it prior to meeting Oscar on 18 December 1959?
Either there was a public screening in 1959 in NYC that I do not know about,
or Miles managed to attend a private screening.
Miles thinks he maybe saw it at a private screening at
MoMA, but he really does not remember,
nor does he have any memory of what year he might have seen it.
When he saw the film, whenever that was, he had no inkling that what he was viewing was uncommon in any way at all.
In any case, he had seen it multiple times prior to December 1959,
and that is how he learned the lyrics.
All this leads to yet another question: Which songs were performed for the camera?
Certainly the ones that were in the summer 1926 rewrite of the play, but might there have been more?
After all, Robert Florey did say that the film version included more material than was in the play.
That is why it would not surprise me to discover that some of the songs that had been dropped from the stage version were filmed as well,
together maybe even with some new pieces.
We know that “When My Dreams Come True” was written specifically for the movie version.
Maybe some other songs were newly written, too?
By the way, I suspect that most people today do not realize that Oscar Shaw was a major Broadway star.
Here is a little web page about him.
There is a problem also with the sequence of scenes towards the beginning of the film.
Morrie Ryskind definitely restructured the story for the screenplay, but we do not know all the changes that he made,
and until we find his final shooting script, we shall never know.
Now that I watch this movie some more,
I wonder if the opening shots of the beach originally had different music.
I wonder if “Florida by the Sea” was its own fully contained song/dance later on,
and that a fragment of the song was pasted over the beach.
I am becoming almost convinced that the sequence ran like this, more or less:
| 1. | A new opening number invented for the movie. [DELETED] |
| 2. | Song: The Guests. [DELETED] |
| 3. | Song: The Bell Hop. [DELETED] |
| 4. | Jamison talks to the Bell Hops. [DELETED] |
| 5. | Penelope and Harvey at an outdoor table. |
| 6. | Groucho/Hammer descends the stairs at four o’clock, and encounters the Bell Hops. |
| 7. | Dance: The Bell Hop — Reprise. |
| 8. | Groucho leaves for the train station. |
| 9. | Song: When My Dreams Come True. |
| 10. | Mrs. Potter scolds Polly, and they enter the elevator. |
| 11. | MAYBE Song: Polly sings Family Reputation. [DELETED] |
| 12. | Groucho back from station, lectures Mrs. Potter about sewer pipes. |
| 13. | Song: Lucky Boy. [DELETED] |
| 14. | Ice water in 318. |
| 15. | Penelope and Harvey meet Chico and Harpo. |
| 16. | MAYBE Song: Why Am I a Hit with the Ladies? [DELETED] |
| 16. | MAYBE Song: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [DELETED] |
| 17. | Hennessy intro. |
| 18. | Penelope flirts with Chico. |
| 19. | Penelope flirts with Harpo. |
| 20. | Song: A Little Bungalow. [DELETED] |
| 21. | Harp solo. |
| 22. | Robbery in Rooms 318 and 320. |
| 23. | Hammer hires Chico to be a shill. |
| 24. | Song: Florida by the Sea. [A FRAGMENT is pasted over the opening of the film] |
| 25. | Auction. [The beginning is TRIMMED OFF.] |
Shall we? Let’s start with “Family Reputation”:
| AS PERFORMED AT THE LYRIC, 8 DECEMBER 1925 |
CURRENT VERSION, AVAILABLE FROM SAMUEL FRENCH |
|
MRS. POTTER
Remember that in two hundred years, the Potters have never been involved in a single scandal.
POLLY
(As though she has heard this many limes)
I know, mother, except for Uncle Dick.
MRS. POTTER
Polly, it is a well known fact that your uncle was drunk at the time. Now listen, dear, I want you to promise me, that you’ll give up this clerk.
POLLY
But mother, he’s not a clerk. He’s an architect.
MRS. POTTER
One who clerks, Polly, is a clerk. (Enter GIRLS and BOYS) And that settles it.
POLLY
But mother, you just won’t try to understand.
MRS. POTTER
I understand perfectly, but that a daughter of mine should be seen in the company of a hotel clerk when she has the opportunity of marrying a Yates, that I don’t understand.
(MRS. POTTER exits. POLLY sits on ottoman)
GIRLS
Families are an awful nuisance. Aren’t they?
POLLY
Especially mine.
(Number — “FAMILY REPUTATION” sung by POLLY. At cue, MRS. POTTER enters)
MRS. POTTER
Polly, I want to speak to you.
POLLY
Yes, mother.
(BOYS and GIRLS and POLLY finish singing the last two lines of Chorus. Then they exit. BELLBOY enters)
BELLBOY
Hey, Mr. Schlemmer is up. He’s coming down the stairs. Come on.
(The BELLBOYS enter talking as they come.
The talk slowly changes into a concerted growl.
Then GROUCHO comes into sight.
As he appears, the growling suddenly becomes a road.
GROUCHO, never pausing, turns and goes up the stairs again. Disappears.
Then after a moment, he cautiously appears again.
The discontent is still audible, but lower in tone.)
GROUCHO
There’s a lot of static here tonight.
BELLBOY
We want our money.
|
MRS. POTTER
Remember that in two hundred years, the Potters have never been involved in a single scandal.
POLLY
I know, mother, except for Uncle Dick.
MRS. POTTER
Polly, it is a well known fact that your uncle was drunk at the time. Now listen, dear, I want you to promise me, that you’ll give up this clerk.
POLLY
But mother, he’s not a clerk. He’s an architect.
MRS. POTTER
One who clerks, Polly, is a clerk And that settles it.
POLLY
But mother, you just won’t try to understand.
MRS. POTTER
I understand perfectly, but that a daughter of mine should be seen in the company of a hotel clerk
when she has the opportunity of marrying a Yates, one of the Boston Yates, that I do not understand.
(MRS. POTTER exits and BOB enters to desk.)
POLLY
Well, I was scolded.
BOB
You were? What did she say?
POLLY
I’m supposed to remember that I’m a Potter.
BOB
But you can’t be a Potter all your life. Families are an awful nuisance aren’t they?
POLLY
Especially mine.
(Number — “FAMILY REPUTATION” sung by POLLY. MRS. POTTER enters)
MRS. POTTER
Polly, I want to speak to you.
POLLY
Yes, mother.
(POLLY finishes singing the last two lines of Chorus. BOB, POLLY and ENSEMBLE exit. A BELLHOP enters down the stairs.)
BELLBOY
Hey, Mr. Schlemmer is up. He’s coming down the stairs. Come on.
(The BELLBOYS enter talking as they come.
HENRY W. SCHLEMMER(GROUCHO) enters down staircase.)
GROUCHO
There’s a lot of static here tonight. You boys are grounded.
BELLBOY
We want our money.
|
So there we have it.
The scenes seem to be thrown out of sequence to facilitate the abridgment’s continuity.
In the stage version, Polly has to keep put in the lobby.
In the movie version, she can easily head away in an elevator.
This can be argued both ways.
If the filmmakers had wanted to delete “Family Reputation,” this would be a perfect way to do it.
Yet, if the filmmakers had wanted to introduce “Family Reputation,” more naturally, it would make perfect sense to split the scene in two,
have Polly exit on the elevator, have Bob enter the lobby, and have Polly reappear.
If “Family Reputation” was replaced by something else, musical or not, then I am at a loss until I can get the shooting script.
What about “Lucky Boy”?
In the stage show, after Groucho/Schlemmer hands Mrs. Potter a sample of a sewer pipe, we find something that must have been in the movie.
| AS PERFORMED AT THE LYRIC, 8 DECEMBER 1925 |
CURRENT VERSION, AVAILABLE FROM SAMUEL FRENCH |
|
MRS. POTTER
Here, what am I going to do with this? Take this, Mr. Schlemmer.
(Ad lib talk and both exit. After they exit BOB takes his place behind desk. A GUEST enters, goes to desk) GUEST
260 please.
BOB
(Handing key) Yes ma’am, here you are.
(As GUEST turns away, POLLY enters, crosses to desk. GUEST exits)
POLLY
Well, I was scolded.
BOB
(Taking her hand across desk) You were? What did she say?
POLLY
I’m supposed to remember that I’m a Potter..
BOB
But you can’t be a Potter all your life. (BOYS enter. BOB becomes the clerk again)
Why no, Miss Potter, I’m afraid there’s not a thing for you.
POLLY
(Taking the cue) Oh! Well, thank you. (Exits)
FIRST MAN
Well, you did that pretty well.
BOB
What do you mean?
FIRST MAN
But not well enough to fool anybody.
BOB
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
FIRST MAN
We’re not exactly blind, you know.
(Go into number — “LUCKY BOY.”
ALL exit after number — the telephone on the desk rings.
GROUCHO enters, goes to desk and answers phone)
GROUCHO
Hello. Ice water in 340? There is? Oh, you want some? That’s different. Have you got any ice? No ma’am. This is Cocoanut Beach. No snow and no ice.
How are you fixed for coal and wood? You too.
(Hangs up receiver. JAMISON enters behind desk)
|
MRS. POTTER
Wait Mr. Schlemmer, I don’t want this.
SCHLEMMER
Ah, pipe down will you.
MRS. POTTER
But it’s all dirty
SCHLEMMER
Well, take it to the pipe cleaners,
(SCHLEMMER and MRS. POTTER exit. When they are gone, BOB enters to the desk and a GUEST enters.
Various MALE HOTEL EMPLOYEES enter, as does POLLY.)
GUEST
Two-sixty, please.
BOB
Yes ma’am, here you are.
(As GUEST turns away, POLLY rings bell and ALL EMPLOYEES stop and look. The GUEST exits.)
BOB
Why no, Miss Potter, I’m afraid there’s not a thing for you.
POLLY
(Handing BOB a flower from the vase.) Oh! Well, thank you. (POLLY exits.)
JAMISON
Well, you did that pretty well.
BOB
What do you mean?
JAMISON
But not well enough to fool anybody.
BOB
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
JAMISON
We’re not exactly blind, you know.
(Go into number — “LUCKY BOY.”
ALL exit after number — the telephone on the desk rings.
GROUCHO enters, goes to desk and answers phone)
SCHLEMMER
Hello. Ice water in three-forty? Is that so? Where did you get it? Oh you want some?
That’s different. Have you got any ice? No, ma’am. This is Cocoanut Beach.
No snow and no ice. Get some onions, that’ll make your eyes water. You too.
(Hangs up receiver. JAMISON enters.)
|
That, as you can see, is an uncomfortable edit.
Something was definitely cut, and, after reading those two different versions of the stage script,
we have a fairly good idea of what was cut.
Then there’s that song, “Why Am I a Hit with the Ladies?” which Groucho sang.
Where did he sing it? Or did he sing it?
Did he sing “Gentelmen Prefer Blondes” instead?
We can look at two versions of the stage script.
The film was necessarily revised, but the basic drift remained the same.
| AS PERFORMED AT THE LYRIC, 8 DECEMBER 1925 |
CURRENT VERSION, AVAILABLE FROM SAMUEL FRENCH |
|
PENELOPE
Suppose I flirt with these two, and they happen to come up in my room. Then what? On the night the necklace disappeared, they were seen near the room —
(There is a sound of voices off stage. PENELOPE lays a warning on HARVEY’s arm.)
Careful. Here’s someone coming.
(HARVEY and PENELOPE stroll upstage, talking as they go. GROUCHO and GIRLS enter; ad lib talk)
PENELOPE
Oh, thank you, Mr. Yates. You’re so thoughtful.
HARVEY
It’s lovely here at this time of day. Don’t you think?
PENELOPE
Oh yes. I really prefer it to California.
(Exit HARVEY and PENELOPE)
GROUCHO
No, no girls, you’re wrong. And besides, Valentino is much taller than I.
GIRLS
Oh, Mr. Schlemmer, we think you’re just marvelous.
GROUCHO
Well, it was always like that.
(Go into number “WHY AM I A HIT WITH THE LADIES?”
At finish of number — CHICO and HARPO enter.
Business.
HENNESSY enters.)
Walks down stage to CHICO and HARPO. Business)
HENNESSY
Hey.
|
PENELOPE
Suppose I flirt with these two, and they happen to come up in my room. Then what? On the night the necklace disappeared, they were seen near the room...
Careful. Here’s someone coming.
(SCHLEMMER and GIRLS enter U.C., chatting)
PENELOPE
Oh, thank you, Mr. Yates. You’re so thoughtful.
HARVEY
It’s lovely here at this time of day. Don’t you think?
PENELOPE
Oh yes. I really prefer it to California.
(Exit HARVEY and PENELOPE)
GROUCHO
No, no girls, you’re wrong. And besides, Gary Cooper’s shoulders are much broader than mine.
GIRLS
Oh, Mr. Schlemmer, we think you’re just marvelous.
GROUCHO
Well, it was always like that.
(Go into number “WHAT’S THERE ABOUT ME?”
GIRLS carry SCHLEMMER off.
SAM enters, telephone rings, SAM eats phone then drinks ink from inkwell to wash it down.
WILLIE enters.)
WILLIE
Hey, hey, whatsa matter for you? What do you do, eh? All the time you eat. Na. That’s no good. We gotta get the money.
Right now I’d do anything for money. I kill somebody for money. I kill you for money.
No, no, you’re my friend. I kill you for nothing.
(HENNESSY enters; they play it cool.)
HENNESSY
Hey.
|
Now that you’ve read that portion of the stage script, watch a moment of the movie again:
Now, if the people who made this movie had decided ahead of time to eliminate whichever song was here,
this is precisely how they would have altered the script.
The cue for Penelope and Harvey to shush as Groucho and the Girls enter is deleted,
and therefore Groucho and the Girls are deleted, right?
I don’t think so.
Because a movie transitions from one sequence to another differently from the way the stage does,
this is also exactly the sort of alteration one would make in order to keep the song,
but to do a more natural introduction to it.
Besides, watch Harvey’s exit.
It cuts off too abruptly.
“A Little Bungalow”? You want to know about “A Little Bungalow”?
Well, so do I.
In the stage version, this was the Polly/Bob theme song,
which Groucho picked up at the end of his scene of wooing Mrs. Potter.
We had it above, let’s have it again, but this time both versions.
The Samuel French version deletes the song, and so perhaps Dietz was right that this song was removed from the show in 1926.
Yet it must have been filmed, since the dialogue in the scene leads up to it.
| AS PERFORMED AT THE LYRIC, 8 DECEMBER 1925 |
CURRENT VERSION, AVAILABLE FROM SAMUEL FRENCH |
|
MRS. POTTER
Really, I’m afraid I must be going.
(Starts to exit)
GROUCHO
Don’t go away and leave me here alone. You stay here and I’ll go away.
MRS. POTTER
I don’t know what to say.
GROUCHO
Well say that you’ll be truly mine, or truly yours, or yours truly,
and that tonight when the moon is sneaking around the clouds,
I’ll be sneaking around you.
I’ll meet you tonight by the bungalow, under the moon.
You wear a red necktie so I’ll know you.
I’ll meet you tonight by the bungalow under the moon.
MRS. POTTER
But suppose the moon is not out.
GROUCHO
Then I’ll meet you under the bungalow.
(Into reprise of “BUNGALOW” number. He sings. They exit)
|
MRS. POTTER
I’ll not stay here any longer and be insulted this way.
(Starts to exit)
GROUCHO
Oh, no, don’t go away and leave me here alone. You stay here and I’ll go away.
MRS. POTTER
I don’t know what to say.
GROUCHO
Well say that you’ll be truly mine, or truly yours, or yours truly.
MRS. POTTER
Will you keep your hands to yourself?
GROUCHO
Come on. I’ll play you one more game. Come on the three of you.
Just think tonight when the moon is sneaking around the clouds, I’ll be sneaking around you.
I can see it now — you and the moon.
You wear a necktie so I’ll know you.
I’ll meet you tonight be the bungalow under the moon.
MRS. POTTER
But suppose the moon is not out.
GROUCHO
Then I’ll meet you under the bungalow.
(They exit. POLLY enters.)
|
See how obvious that deletion is? The scene abruptly cuts off before the finish. Chop chop chop.
You never noticed that the beginning of the auction scene is chopped off, did you?
You’ll notice from now on.
| AS PERFORMED AT THE LYRIC, 8 DECEMBER 1925 |
CURRENT VERSION, AVAILABLE FROM SAMUEL FRENCH |
|
CHICO
What’s out there?
(Starts to exit)
GROUCHO
That’s the cemetery. If you’ll walk over here, I’ll show it to you.
I have a waiting list of fifty people, but I like you and I’m going to try to slip you in ahead of all of them.
(Both exit)
END OF SCENE ACT ONE Scene Five
SCENE: Cocoanut Manor
Scene opens with number — “THE MONKEY-DOODLE-DOO.” At finish of number business of HARPO finding the necklace. POLLY and BOB enter. HARPO exits. BOB
Here it is. This is the place. Remember?
POLLY
Why yes.
BOB
There’s the lots we were looking at yesterday. The one with the trees on it. That’s where we’re going to live.
POLLY
But, Bob, dear, can you afford it?
BOB
Well, I’ve a little bit saved. I can make a first payment anyhow.
(Noise off stage)
BOB
Here they come.
GROUCHO
(To CHICO) Now don’t forget, bit em up.
(To the CROWD) All ye suckers, right this way. This way for the big auction.
|
WILLIE
Yes. Everything — excepta why-a-duck.
(Starts to exit)
SCHLEMMER
Well, that’s fine. Now I can go ahead. I’m going to take you down and show you our cemetery.
I have a waiting list of fifty people, just dying to get in. But I like you...
WILLIE
Ah, you’re my friend.
(Starts to exit)
SCHLEMMER
I like you and I’m going to shove you in ahead of all of them. I’m going to see that you get a steady position.
WILLIE
That’s good.
(Starts to exit)
SCHLEMMER
And if I can arrange it, it will be horizontal.
(Both exit, BOB and POLLY enter)
BOB
Here it is. This is the place. Remember?
POLLY
Why yes.
BOB
There’s the lots we were looking at yesterday. You see it?
POLLY
Where.
BOB
Where those thatched palms are? There’s a little clearing with a wire fence around it You see that?
WILLIE
(From the back of the house)
Why a fence?
SCHLEMMER
(Offstage)
Oh no, we’re not going through that again! POLLY
But, Bob, dear, can you afford it?
BOB
Well, I have a little bit saved. I can make a first payment anyhow.
POLLY
Oh Bob, this is crazy. It’s no use pretending. Mother will not allow it. Well never be together, here or anywhere.
BOB
Oh Polly. Polly.
(Music — “THE MONKEY-DOODLE-DOO”)
Scene 4: Auction Drop
(JAMISON, PENELOPE, HARVEY, SCHLEMMER, WILLIE and GUESTS enter.)
SCHLEMMER
(To WILLIE) Now don’t forget, bid ’em up. If somebody says one hundred, you say two hundred.
WILLIE
I speakum up?
SCHLEMMER
That’s, right. Above all be alert. Be alert. That’s it, be alert.
WILLIE
I be — I don’t know what it is, but I be it all right.
SCHLEMMER
All ye suckers, right this way. This way for the big auction.
|
Do you see what the editors did?
To delete Polly and Bob’s introduction,
they pulled in a spare moment of people milling about,
a spare moment that consisted of the few seconds before Robert Florey called out “Action!”
By deleting the Polly/Bob intro, the editors made nonsense of Bob’s refusal to answer Hennessy’s question.
Bob was by no means ready to divulge his plans to Mrs. Potter.
Now we arrive at the greatest difference between the stage version and the movie version,
and the movie version is a tremendous improvement.
Act One ends with Harpo/Sam and Polly after the auction.
Fade out.
The opening of Act Two, Scene 1:
In the stage version, Bob’s bail is set at $2,000, but his boss (Groucho) hasn’t got that sort of dough.
Mrs. Potter comes along to give Harpo a $1,000 reward for the return of her necklace, but that is not enough.
Harpo steals her purse, and pretends to discover it, and wins yet a further $500 as a reward, and then performs the same stunt a second time.
This tedious sequence, which stretches all credulity, is bookended by two songs,
“Five o’Clock Tea” and “Everyone in the World Is Doing the Charleston.”
In the movie, this scene is mercifully junked and replaced by a jail break, which is much more fun,
but once the scene was swapped out, where did the songs go?
Were they deleted?
Probably not.
They were moved somewhere else. Where?
In the Lyric 8 December 1925 version, Penelope and Company sing “Five o’Clock Tea” in the hotel lounge.
After the song, Groucho enters to say to a bell hop,
“”Boy, it’s been reported to me that there’s a poker game going on in room four-twenty.
You go up there and knock on the door and see if you can get me a seat.”
The Samuel French version is quite different.
It opens on the patio, as Waiters seat the Ensemble at tables,
and the Ensemble sing “Five o’Clock Tea.”
Then comes a lengthy and very silly conversation between Groucho and Mrs. Potter about making plans for the dinner reception.
It gets sillier yet when they talk about a furry quail that looks like a cat, and so forth.
In the Lyric script of 8 December 1925, this occurred a bit later.
Groucho calls out to a clerk,
“Hassim! It’s been reported to me that there’s a poker game going on in room four-twenty.
You go up there and knock on the door and see if you can get me a seat.”
Then the ensemble and Penelope sing “Everyone in the World Is Doing the Charleston.”
The tables are cleared, and Harpo/Sam bursts on the scene to chase after all the Girls.
When the stage is empty, Penelope and Harvey enter.
| AS PERFORMED AT THE LYRIC, 8 DECEMBER 1925 |
CURRENT VERSION, AVAILABLE FROM SAMUEL FRENCH |
|
(They all exit. Into number — “THEY’RE BLAMING THE CHARLESTON”
After “CHARLESTON” number stage is clear and PENELOPE enters. She is rather flustered — peers off stage.
A BELLBOY enters)
PENELOPE
Oh, boy?
BOY
Yes, Miss Martyn.
PENELOPE
Will you ask Mr. Yates to step in here. He’s right outside.
(With a nod the BELLBOY exits. PENELOPE is left alone for another nervous moment, then HARVEY enters)
HARVEY
Did you want to see me?
PENELOPE
I just happen to remember something. (She comes closer to him)
What ever became of that diagram that you drew up in my room?
HARVEY
What diagram?
PENELOPE
Showing how to get to that tree stump. Remember?
It had written on it “Hollow Stump.” “Jewels.”
HARVEY
Well?
PENELOPE
Well. It might be a nasty bit of evidence if it happened to be found.
HARVEY
It hasn’t been found.
PENELOPE
How do you know that?
HARVEY
What?
PENELOPE
How did that dummy know the necklace was in the tree?
(HARVEY looks at her)
Did it ever occur to you that he might have picked up that diagram?
HARVEY
By jove. You’re right. I never thought of that. I —
PENELOPE
And suppose he still has it and it happens to get into the wrong hands?
HARVEY
(Nervously) That’s all right. They couldn’t prove I wrote it.
PENELOPE
How do you know they couldn’t? What we’ve got to do —
(HARVEY waves her to silence as he sees HARPO entering)
HARVEY
(Uneasily) Oh, hello there. (Business)
PENELOPE
(Sweetly) We — we haven’t been seeing anything of you lately.
HARVEY
Why no.
(HARPO perks up — begins to enjoy his popularity)
PENELOPE
Are you — are you feeling all right? (Business) Oh, you’re not.
(Business) Oh, you are. Well that’s fine.
HARVEY
By the way, we wanted to ask you something. Did you happen to see a paper anywhere around the hotel? You know what I mean.
(HARPO nods yes)
PENELOPE
You did see it?
(HARPO nods yes)
HARVEY
Did you pick it up?
(HARPO nods yes)
HARVEY
Oh, that’s fine.
(HARPO starts to leave. PENELOPE and HARVEY start after him)
HARVEY
No, no, wait a minute. Now a — this paper — have you got it with you?
(HARPO nods yes)
PENELOPE
Will you give it to us?
(HARPO nods no)
HARVEY
Well, will you sell it to us?
(HARPO nods yes)
HARVEY
Now, supposing I were to give you a hundred dollars — would you give it to us?
(HARPO nods yes)
HARVEY
All right, here is the hundred.
(Business — HARVEY and PENELOPE exit. Enter BOB and GROUCHO. Business)
GROUCHO
(To HARPO) Say I wish you’d decide where you’re hurt.
(Business) Well here he is. I got him out of jail for nineteen hundred. They had a sale.
BOB
I’m ever so much obliged to you, Mr. Schlemmer. (To HARPO) And to you too. (To GROUCHO) It was nice of you to bail me out.
GROUCHO
That’s all right. I expect you to do the same for me some day. But a jail is no place for a young fellow.
There is no advancement. The highest you could ever get to be is Warden.
|
Music 12: EVERYONE IN THE WORLD IS DOING THE CHARLESTON
(GIRLS dance as OTHERS clear off tables and chairs.
BOYS enter and ALL dance.
Following the encore, SAM enters and chases off the GIRLS.
PENELOPE and HARVEY enter.)
HARVEY
Did you want to see me?
PENELOPE
I just happen to remember something.
What ever became of that diagram that you drew up in my room?
HARVEY
What diagram?
PENELOPE
Showing how to get to that tree stump.
It had written on it Hollow Stump. Jewels.
HARVEY
Well.
PENELOPE
Well.
HARVEY
Well what?
PENELOPE
How did that dummy know the necklace was in the tree? Did it ever occur to you that be might have picked up that diagram?
HARVEY
By jove. You’re right. I never thought of that. I —
PENELOPE
And suppose he still has it and it happens to get into the wrong hands?
HARVEY
That’s all right. They couldn’t prove I wrote it.
PENELOPE
How do you know they couldn’t? What we’ve got to do —
(There is a crash in the pit. A GIRL enters from pit without her dress, SAM in hot pursuit; she exits.
HARVEY
Oh, hello there.
PENELOPE
We — we haven’t seen anything of you lately.
HARVEY
Why no. How are you? (Leg business.)
(HARPO perks up — begins to enjoy his popularity)
PENELOPE
Are you — are you feeling all right? (SAM kisses her arm and back.)
No, you’re not. Yes, you are. Isn’t that nice.
(SAM pulls out a salt shaker, salts her arm and tries to take a bite. She screams.) Oh, you are. Well that’s fine.
HARVEY
By the way, we wanted to ask you something. Did you happen to see a paper anywhere around the hotel? You know what I mean.
(SAM nods yes.)
PENELOPE
You did see it?
(SAM nods yes.)
HARVEY
Did you pick it up?
(SAM nods yes.)
HARVEY
Oh, that’s fine.
(SAM starts to leave. HARVEY stops him.)
HARVEY
No, no, wait a minute. Now a — this paper — have you got it with you?
(SAM nods “yes.”)
PENELOPE
Will you give it to us?
(SAM shakes his head “no.”)
HARVEY
Well, will you sell it to us?
(SAM honks “yes.”)
HARVEY
Now, supposing I were to give you a hundred dollars — would you give it to us?
(SAM honks “yes.”)
HARVEY
All right, here is a hundred. This is it all right.
(SAM puts his pocket against HARVEY’s pants.
Without noticing, HARVEY puts the paper in SAM’s pocket.
HARVEY and PENELOPE exit. BOB and SCHLEMMER enter.)
SCHLEMMER
Well here he is. I got him out of jail for nineteen hundred. They had a sale.
BOB
I’m ever so much obliged to you, Mr. Schlemmer. (To SAM, who gives SCHLEMMER his tie.)
And to you. (SAM gives BOB his watch.)
SCHLEMMER
Why that’s polygamy.
BOB
(To SCHLEMMER) It was nice of you to bail me out.
GROUCHO
That’s all right. I expect you to do the same thing for me some day.
|
The film was restructured quite drastically.
The above Penelope/Harvey/Sam scene may or may not have been included, but if it was, where was it?
The only logical place for it would be immediately after the auction, where it would work remarkably well.
Even though the film is terribly chopped up, we can nonetheless clearly see that the film script did not match either
the opening-night script or the Samuel French script.
The film’s structure here is definitely more mature,
and I would love to know where the songs were put.
This scene continues for a while, but then is cut terribly short, and one does not even need to reference the script to know that.
The fade to black simply does not belong there.
It feels wrong, and the scene ends too abruptly.
So we can check the scripts of the stage version, and we discover that Polly enters.
In the stage version, Polly reveals to Bob that Mrs. Potter’s plan is to marry her off right away to Harvey.
In the movie version, that is already established, and so the dialogue here was certainly different.
Nonetheless, we can learn something, and we can see that there was obviously something here.
Dietz claims that “We Should Care” was deleted from the stage show in 1926, but something must have replaced it,
whether musical or not.
I’m almost certain that “Ting-a-Ling” replaced it.
If so, then the dialogue between Bob and Polly would have been further developed.
Their plan to thwart Harvey would have correlated with their plans to marry when all was done.
If my guess is right, that would explain why the film finishes on Bob and Polly rather than on the Marx brothers.
| AS PERFORMED AT THE LYRIC, 8 DECEMBER 1925 |
CURRENT VERSION, AVAILABLE FROM SAMUEL FRENCH |
|
BOB
Whoever drew this must have been mixed up in that —
(POLLY enters)
POLLY
Bob.
BOB
Polly.
(They embrace. HARPO stands fascinated, watching)
GROUCHO
(Starting off) Well, I’ve got to wash the dishes. (To HARPO)
Come on, you dry them. Say, two is company — three is a quartet.
(Business of GROUCHO blindfolding HARPO. GIRL crossing and HARPO after her)
GROUCHO
That guy must be a police dog. (To BOB and POLLY)
Say, young folks, you can’t make love in this room. You’ll have to go in the mushroom. (GROUCHO exits)
POLLY
Bob, do you know what mother’s done? She’s announced my engagement to Harvey Yates.
BOB
To Yates?
POLLY
She’s giving an engagement supper tonight, but I won’t go through with it.
BOB
Yes you must. That’s just what I want. Will Mr. Yates be there?
POLLY
Well, it’s customary.
BOB
Well, I have an idea. I don’t know how to do it yet. But I’ll let you know before evening. Until I get it all worked out, don’t say a word about it.
POLLY
I can’t. I don’t know what it is.
BOB
But you do trust me.
POLLY
You know I do.
BOB
Then what’s the difference what happens? We should care.
(Go into number — “WE SHOULD CARE” — POLLY and BOB.
After number — GROUCHO and MRS. POTTER enter)
[Then the script goes into the lengthy routine about setting up for the engagement dinner.]
|
BOB
Whoever drew this must have been mixed up in that —
(POLLY enters)
POLLY
Bob.
BOB
Polly.
(They embrace. SAM starts toward them.)
SCHLEMMER
Hey, let’s go down to the lumber yard. I’ll buy you lunch.
(The GIRL SAM chased from the orchestra pit earlier enters. SAM chases her off.)
Pardon me, young folks, you can’t make love in this room. You’ll have to go to the mushroom.
(SCHLEMMER exits.)
POLLY
Bob, do you know what mother’s done? She’s announced my engagement to Harvey Yates.
BOB
To Yates?
POLLY
She’s giving an engagement dinner tonight, but I won’t go through with it.
BOB
Yes you must. That’s just what I want. Will Mr. Yates be there?
POLLY
Well, it’s customary.
BOB
Well, I have an idea. I don’t know how to do it yet. But I’ll let you know before evening. Until I get it all worked out, don’t say a word about it.
POLLY
I can’t. I don’t know what it is.
BOB
But you do trust me.
POLLY
You know I do. I always will.
BOB
Then what’s the difference what happens? We’ll always have each other.
(Music 13: “ALWAYS)
[Then the script goes into “Tango Melody.”] |
Had the couple’s encounter not been deleted,
Polly’s behavior during the engagement dinner would have made sense.
Her song was not directed to Harvey, but to Bob.
Harpo is in on the plan, and he pretends to get drunk,
but then, when he needs to give the cue about what is happening behind Polly,
out of her field of vision,
he is perfectly sober and leans over to her to gesture to her that the moment has come for her announcement.
Then he instantly goes back to pretending to be drunk.
In this next bit, there seems to be a sequence deleted between “snappy neckin’” and the banquet table.
Is this where “Minstrel Days” belonged?
At first, you might think that the images on either side of the cut match,
since they have the same characters moving in the same direction.
The images do not match, for Mrs. Potter’s mood has changed too quickly.
There was something between those two shots originally.
Thomas Inglis, in his
Sheet Music Art of Irving Berlin (Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer, 2003), makes a point on page 111:
|
In THE COCOANUTS, Berlin discovered the way of the movie producer/director. What was
to be a musical based on his
|
Not exactly.
The movie had more than one Berlin tune, and it was not the directors or the producers who changed the film.
It was the head office that made the changes afterwards.
The main director didn’t seem to care, because he never cared for the movie anyway.
I don’t know what the producers (Bell and Wanger) thought of the hacking.
Why Zukor and his executives agreed to hacking the movie almost to nothing is beyond my imagination.
Yes, exhibitors, including Paramount/Publix exhibitors, insisted on movies of no more than about 90 minutes,
in order to squeeze more shows in, but at what expense?
At the expense of so butchering the story that the selling points are deleted?
Irving Berlin was a huge selling point, and so why were nearly all his songs extirpated?
Paramount had paid for them, and then literally tossed its investment into the garbage dumpster.
Even with a much longer running time and four shows per day rather than seven,
cinemas would have sold twice the number of tickets had the film been shown in its complete, authentic form.
The Marx brothers’ routines would have been twice as funny when retained in their original musical-comedy context.
Joe Adamson brought to light a claim that:
|
When the Marx Brothers first saw the film
in a Paramount screening room, they were filled with
such wrath and dismay at this pallid version of their
classic show that they asked permission to buy back the
negative and have it destroyed....
(Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, NY: Pocket Books, March 1976, paperback reissue, p. 93).
|
Some (many?) Marx fans have taken that as a definitive statement that the Marx brothers were horrified by the film as we know it.
I do not take it that way at all.
I just get confused.
Where did Joe get this information?
We need to check his endnotes, where we find two passages of interest to this inquiry.
Here is the first:
|
The making of The Cocoanuts is a combination of evidence given
by George Folsey, the cinematographer, in
personal interview; Robert Florey, the director, in Hollywood
d’Hier et d’Aujourd’hui; and Morrie Ryskind, who
devised the screen version of the play, in personal interview....
(Ibid, p. 443.)
|
Did Folsey, Florey, or Ryskind regale him with this tale?
Perhaps.
Before we look at the second endnote of interest, we need to understand that Joe argues that The Cocoanuts is a perfectly dreadful film:
|
...it is as enigmatic and baffling a remnant from a dead
civilization as the Great Sphinx....
the overwhelming preponderance of the film is genuinely depressing....
a stale glimpse of vintage Marx Brothers....
the humor falls to the level of lead-balloon puns....
Looking at Cocoanuts today, you would expect it to
be received in 1929 as one of the Great Disasters of
the year, like the Stock Market Crash....”
(Ibid,
|
Joe’s opinions are quite justifiable, as the film truly is quite creaky.
Depending upon one’s particular mood, though, the film can be painfully unwatchable or it can reduce one to fits of helpless laughter.
Also, as anyone who has sat through several screenings of a single film in a single day can attest,
different audiences react radically differently.
A line that dies at the three o’clock screening can get a good laugh at the five o’clock screening
and can get such a loud rolling guffaw at the seven o’clock screening that the audience drowns out the next five lines of dialogue.
I do not understand this.
I’m sure some shrinks have studied this phenomenon diligently and have even come up with a clever Greco-Latin name for it,
but I am just left mystified.
Now that we know Joe’s opinions, we are ready to look at this other important passage in his endnotes:
|
Jesse Lasky provides the story of the destruction request
in I Blow My Own Horn. This was backed up by Walter
Wanger in The Real Tinsel....
I tried showing the film to an audience in
1967. Good heavens.
(Ibid, p. 445.)
|
All right. That calls for a trip to the library, but all the libraries are closed.
So that requires a trip to eBay to order used copies of both books.
A very good copy of the Lasky book just arrived, a first edition with the dust jacket in a protective mylar cover.
Jesse L. Lasky with Don Weldon, I Blow My Own Horn (NY: Doubleday, 1957, p. 228).
We shall thus start with Lasky’s version of events.
The Four Marx Brothers were playing in their first big Broadway
hit, The Cocoanuts, and their agent, William Morris, convinced us
that their screwball antics would be a novelty on the screen. We bought
the picture rights to the show, which they owned, for $75,000 and a
percentage of the profits. It was made at Astoria in the early days when
monk’s cloth on the walls served in lieu of proper soundproofing, and
the brothers’ characteristic rapid-fire delivery rendered the dialogue
unintelligible on the sound track at times. Besides which, all our directors
being tied up on other pictures, we had assigned it to Joseph
Santley, who worked at the studio in various capacities but had never
directed a feature. It happened that the print previewed for the
Marxes was a mess and the sound was projected carelessly. They were
so disgusted they wanted to buy back the negative and destroy it, and
they put up quite a howl about it. They could easily have afforded
such a luxury, but — protected by our contract — we ignored their protests.
|
Who sees a problem with Lasky’s account?
Who sees two problems?
Who sees nothing but problems?
|
• The Marx brothers were no longer playing in The Cocoanuts,
which was their second big Broadway hit.
The Marx brothers were by this time on Broadway in their third big hit,
Animal Crackers.
• It was William Morris who convinced Paramount?
Maybe, but, as we learned above, Walter Wanger had a somewhat different account,
saying that Morris offered the project, but that Zeppo convinced Paramount.
• Walter Wanger, as we saw above, had something different to say about the $75,000 figure.
• What rapid-fire delivery, and where was it unintelligible?
• Not all the other directors were tied up.
• Joe Santley was not the director, but a glorified assistant.
• Robert Florey was the director.
• The print was a mess and the sound reproduced poorly?
We’re expected to believe that?
In a studio screening room?
The print and the projection and the sound reproduction would have been fully tested ahead of any VIP screening.
In the highly unlikely event that there had been a problem, the show would have stopped until the difficulty was cleared up.
End of story. Period. No further debate.
Now, if the Marx brothers had first seen The Cocoanuts not at a studio screening room,
but at a regular cinema during regular showtimes, then all bets are off.
Anything could have happened.
• The Marxes could easily have afforded such a luxury? Half a million plus? No way. |
What can we make of Lasky’s story?
I hate to say it, but next to nothing.
About the only value is his implication that the screening was at a studio screening room, perhaps at the Astoria studio,
or perhaps at Paramount’s NYC office.
Even that, though, becomes problematic, as we shall see in just a few moments.
Did you notice what Jesse did not tell us?
He did not tell us which version of the picture was screened for the Marxes.
Was it the 140-minute fine cut?
Was it some intermediary cut?
Was it the 93-minute final cut?
Knowing which version the Marxes saw would make a world of difference.
Lasky’s next two paragraphs do almost nothing to help:
|
Even after it was released, we had all kinds of complaints about
patrons coming back to see the picture two or three times, trying to
understand what it was about.
It made something like two million dollars’ profit, I guess because so
many people kept seeing it over to try to figure it out. Kay Francis
made her screen debut as the feminine foil in the picture, and soon
became a star in her own right. The Marx Brothers — mollified by a
resounding success after they had expected the mishmash to ruin their
stage reputation — made four more pictures for us: Animal Crackers,
Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup.
|
If any lines were difficult to understand, that was only because the laughter drowned out some of the lines.
Whether this was Kay Francis’s first picture is debatable, because her first two pictures were produced simultaneously.
Note Jesse’s use of the word “mishmash.”
Why did he use that word? Does anybody know?
Also now in my possession is an almost as-new copy of Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein, eds., The Real Tinsel (NY: Macmillan, 1970).
I already quoted from it above, but here is a little more, also from Walter Wanger (p. 97):
|
The picture spelled a complete
revolution in show business. You know how fast the Marx Brothers
talk and the gags they use. We opened at the Rialto, and the Marx
Brothers hated the picture. They wanted to buy it back, take it off. But
it was a sensational success, partly for a funny reason. Exhibitors complained
that their customers thought the Marx Brothers talked too fast.
People had to come back two or three times to catch what was being
said. In this way, it proved to be a fantastic success. That was the first
picture we made at Long Island without Western Electric hanging around.
I used Joe Santley, a stage director, and a Frenchman named Robert Florey
as
|
Who sees a problem with Wanger’s account?
Who sees two problems?
Who sees nothing but problems?
|
• “Without Western Electric hanging around”?
Western Electric was most definitely hanging around!
• “How fast the Marx Brothers talk”?
No. Again, audiences at the time, unaccustomed to such humor, probably just laughed over lines.
• The implication here is that the Marxes did not object until after the film had opened at the Rialto. |
If you had already read Walter’s passage fifty years ago,
you probably concluded that it meant the Marx brothers were disappointed in the movie and wished to suppress it.
Now that you know a little more, you can see that your previous interpretation was not right at all.
So, what does this passage really mean?
We do not know.
Walter does not tell us why the Marxes hated the picture.
Walter does not explain how the Marxes could possibly have raised more than half a million dollars to buy it back.
Walter does not tell us if this was just a bluff or a bargaining chip.
So, what does this passage really mean?
We know that the original film contained all the songs from the 1926 stage production as well as a new one, and possibly others, too.
We can see, from evidence in the film as it currently stands, that it was re-edited multiple times, always with a sledgehammer.
So which version(s?) of the film were the Marxes shown?
Which version(s?) of the film did they find objectionable?
How serious were the Marxes about buying the film back?
The cost would have been considerably more than Paramount’s (and Harris’s?) $500,000(?) investment.
They did not have that much money.
The cost of a buy-back would further have had to take into account the exhibitors who had already(?) laid out money
for the upcoming season’s program.
More seriously, stars buying back their movie would have set a worrisome precedent,
and I doubt that any studio would have allowed such a thing under any circumstances.
Also, was the Marx demand for a buy-back merely a bargaining chip?
I cannot but help but wonder if the Paramount-Publix executives were divided into two factions, one arguing to delete Irving Berlin, and the other arguing to delete the Marx brothers.
Perhaps what the Marxes had just witnessed was a musical minus the comedy?
On the other hand, could it have been that the Marxes were horrified to see their comedy fragmented and scrambled,
minus the musical numbers that had done much to make the stage show a hit?
Perhaps the Marxes won that battle?
Perhaps parts of the film were reinstated in order to reach a compromise?
There is so little that we know — two vague claims combined with two drafts of the stage script and the remains of the musical numbers,
put together with the inherent evidence of the obviously hacked-slashed-sliced-diced-flayed movie as it has come down to us.
What conclusions can we draw?
First conclusion: Never trust anything a Hollywood producer says.
Second conclusion: Neither Lasky nor Wanger had even a beginner’s knowledge of performance or filmmaking.
Third conclusion: Lasky and Wanger were vague because they wanted to be vague.
Fourth conclusion: Lasky and Wanger wanted to tell amusing anecdotes that could be related in a matter of seconds,
anecdotes in which they would come across as the adults in the room,
as opposed to such insignificant pesky little people as Florey and Santley and the Marx brothers and the Western Electric technicians.
Fifth conclusion: Neither Lasky nor Wanger wished to go into details, as details surely bored them,
and also, quite possibly, because details would ruin their clever anecdotes.
I have come up with a sneaking suspicion, one for which there is no evidence at all.
My sneaking suspicion, though, fits what little evidence we have, though it contradicts Lasky’s and Wanger’s clever anecdotes.
Here is my sneaking suspicion:
The Marxes saw the 140-minute fine cut and approved it,
and were then horrified to see the 93-minute abridgment at the Rialto, with the audience laughing at all the wrong places.
It was a double whammy. They lost many nights of sleep after witnessing that.
They got their lawyer to make noises about shutting down the show unless the film were restored to its full version.
Perhaps they planned to raise the money to purchase the film outright so that they could
destroy all prints of the abridgment and restore the film to the original, and then release it independently on their own?
(It was next to impossible to release an independent film in those days, by the way.)
Maybe they gave up their plans when they were told that the full version had already literally been chopped with axes into hundreds of thousands of pieces
before being sent to a reclamation firm that pulled the silver out of the film and poured the remains into a landfill?
Yes, that is what studios did to any film that was deemed of no further use:
They hired people to chop the films with axes.
The silver was then extracted and re-used.
Another method was to burn the old films when a new film needed a fire scene.
There was no sense at all that this material was important.
Many people are amazed to learn that
(probably) the majority of films made prior to about 1950 seem no longer to exist.
I, on the other hand, am amazed that anything at all from that era still exists.
(Can anybody find the 1912 version of
Quincy Adams Sawyer,
please, please, please, please, please?)
By the time the Marxes had lodged their complaint, the film was already making a mint at the box office, and so they didn’t have a leg to stand on, anyway.
That’s my sneaking suspicion.
I could very well be wrong, because, after all, this is nothing more than a sneaking suspicion.
Below, we shall find an interview by William C. Richards in The Detroit Free Press, Sunday, 8 December 1929, pt. 1, p. 10.
Before we get there, let us examine a brief passage.
The Cocoanuts came up, and then the conversation took a turn:
|
“How did you like it?” from Chico.
“Not so good, eh?” from Harpo.
“The difference between string beans and canned stringed beans, yes?” from Groucho....
“We looked like firemen when we were making it,” said Groucho.
“Always hurrying at 50 miles an hour.
You know what was wrong with it, of course?”
“Timing?”
“You can’t pace it. They laughed at things in the film where we never looked for laughs.
At least, one can readjust oneself to those situations on the stage, and you also can wait for the laugh to subside.
In the films, one talks into laughs, or maybe you say something and think they’ll laugh and they don’t,
and then there’s that
|
What Groucho said was true,
but what none of the four brothers said, or at least what none of them was quoted as saying,
was that the film was so butchered that the show was ruined.
I just today (Saturday, 21 June 2020) discovered Scott Eyman’s book,
The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930
(NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997), which I just now quoted from above.
On pages 332 and 333 he mentions the problem that sound movies had at the time:
foreign-language markets.
Silent films could be exported with little or no problem.
The dialogue and exposition were contained in on-screen titles,
and foreign distributors simply had those titles translated into the local language (or, often, entirely rewritten in the local language,
or, sometimes, just deleted altogether as a nuisance),
and spliced them in, to replace the English titles.
What to do with a talking movie, though?
That was a puzzle, and it was a few years before the studio technicians figured out how to make foreign-language dubbing sound half-way convincing.
Subtitles were, for the most part, out of the question.
From what I understand,
Italy and Spain outlawed subtitles.
Any film shown in Italy at a commercial cinema was required to have an Italian-language soundtrack,
and any film shown commercially in Spain was required to have a Spanish dialogue track.
In Italy, at least, I think that law is still on the books and still enforced.
In Germany, whose citizens are pretty much all proudly multilingual, all foreign films are dubbed into German.
In France, another proudly multilingual land, foreign films were all dubbed into French,
though a handful of cinemas boasted that they were showing the “VOST” (Version Originale Sous-Titrée).
As for other countries, I really haven’t a clue.
So, we turn to Eyman’s book, and we discover Paramount’s policy in the early days of talkies for preparing foreign editions,
and this policy was quite remarkable:
“we take out the dialogue, retain the dance numbers, and then synchronize the entire picture to a musical score.”
Oh how much I would love to see an example of that.
Eyman then specifically mentions the situation with The Cocoanuts, but he quotes only two sentences from a memo:
|
For the Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts, Paramount told foreign exhibitors that
“if we had this picture to do over again we would have eliminated
the dialogue entirely, taken out some of the purely American comedy
scenes, and would have synchronized the entire picture, retaining
the musical numbers. It is too late for us to attempt this work now.”
|
It would be most important to read that entire memo, but, alas, there is no footnote, and so I have no clue where to locate that memo.
What exactly does that memo mean?
We are left to wonder, but it does suggest that my suspicion, mentioned above, was correct:
The Paramount executives probably were divided, with half arguing to delete Irving Berlin’s numbers,
and the other half arguing to delete the Marx brothers.
The executives who argued to delete Irving Berlin and retain the Marx brothers prevailed in the debate.
After discovering that there was almost no foreign-language market,
the Paramount executives decided that they had allowed the wrong side to win.
They realized that it had been a mistake to retain the scenes with the Marx brothers,
and it had been a mistake to delete Irving Berlin’s songs.
Further, it was “too late“ to remedy that mistake,
simply because all the discarded song-and-dance numbers had been destroyed.
The 1929/1930 Paramount Exhibitor’s Book included this two-page spread:
The image of the four brothers is a collage of two press stills.
Harpo and Chico are pulled from F6-P8 ,
and Zeppo and Groucho are pulled from this other still:
The image of Irving Berlin was his own press photo.
Now let’s look at a different detail:
._Exhibitor_Book_Lot_83113_Heritage_Auctions_detail_2.png)
This was definitely a still from the movie, and this scene was definitely deleted.
Of course, once the studio execs ordered deletions, the sound mix for the affected reels needed to be created all over again, from scratch.
Since a third of the movie was deleted at the last minute, every reel would have been affected.
There was a two-month delay between the time that the original film was completed and the time that the film, drastically cut, was premièred.
Further, Miles Kreuger assures me that it was highly unusual for a major film to get its world première at the
Rialto.
Major Paramount pictures, he explained, opened at the
Paramount, not at the Rialto.
That suggests to me that there was a great deal of back-and-forth between the production office and the editing crew,
and that the executives kept changing their minds and sending the film back to the editors to recut and remix.
This delayed the release, and resulted in a scheduling conflict that forced the film to open at the Rialto rather than at the Paramount.
That’s all guesswork, and I cannot prove any of it, but I think it’s fairly plausible guesswork.
Let us keep that as a working hypothesis until better information comes along.
_Pressefoto_Saenger_Marx_Brothers,_Cocoanuts,_ca._25,5x20,5_cm_1192-57_F5-57.jpg)
Is this just a publicity photo?
I bet it’s more than that.
I bet this is the Bell Hops dancing and singing “The Bell Hop” a few scenes before Groucho descends the stairs.
I betcha!
Mabel Withee and then
Phyllis Cleveland portrayed Polly in the stage production, and
Jack Barker portrayed Bob Adams.
For the movie, they were replaced by Mary Eaton and Oscar Shaw, bigger names
who had just had a hit together with The Five o’Clock Girl.
Here, listen to some selections from the music,
though not performed by Mary or Oscar, unfortunately.
There’s more.
According to Alma Whitaker, “Mary Eaton May Not Be Recognized,”
The Los Ángeles Times,
Sunday morning, 4 August 1929, Part III, p. 15:
|
Mary Eaton isn’t just very sure
that the public will recognize the
peculiar charms and dash of Ziegfeld’s
famous original Sally in “Cocoanuts” —
with the ebullient Marx brothers monopolizing the screen
and “mike” ... especially as the
best bit was cut out, as best bits
have a way of being ...
|
Now, what might her best bit have been?
I know not, but take a look at this herald for the Carlton cinema in Los Ángeles, 7 October 1929:
There are several things to note here.
For the moment, just look at the bottom left and observe Mary and Oscar:
They never do that dance step in the final film.
The image is flopped, for the sake of visual balance.
That was definitely filmed, and it was definitely deleted.
That same image, unflopped, also appears on the sheet music:
As further evidence, here is another unit or publicity still
as it appeared on the Australian publication of the same sheet music:
Note that Mary is wearing the same hat and dress as in the previous image.
The hat and dress prove that this was another moment of the same dance scene,
and this is further confirmation that such a scene was indeed shot.
Then look what the Detroit Evening Times published from a press kit to announce the forthcoming movie:
Does that look familiar?
Is that all? Of course that’s not all! Scroll back up to that 1929/1930 Paramount Exhibitor’s Book and pay attention to this detail:
._Exhibitor_Book_Lot_83113_Heritage_Auctions_detail.png)
Same hat, same dress, same set, same song, same dance.
A little further down, you will see another publicity still published in
the New York Daily News, Saturday, 25 May 1929.
Before we scroll all the way down, let’s take a sneak peek:
Here, Mary wears a different hat and dress.
So now we have five images of Mary and Oscar, representing two distinct scenes that were deleted from the final film.
Now let us look at that herald again:
We see a still of Harpo surrounded by adoring ladies.
We can see this more clearly in the following two images:
Are these just gag stills? Or is this a deleted sequence? I do not know.
Further, what about that image in the lower right of the herald? Look again:
Here is a closer view:
This is from the party scene, but this particular image never appears in the final film.
Perhaps it was deleted, or, again, perhaps it was merely a publicity still. I do not know.
This lobby card also represents a deleted moment.
Is this evidence of a full performance of “Tango Melody”?
I think it is!
Remember June Shirley Blake, the physical-culture baby, mentioned in an article above?
Have you ever heard of her? I had never heard of her.
After some searching, I found a photo of her. Take a look:
Well, there you go! She was deleted, too.
(Alsop and Fletcher are not in the photograph, by the way.
I suppose that the photo was cropped for this publication, which caused Alsop and Fletcher to vanish.)
Production departments, editing departments, and publicity departments do not work in tandem.
That is why stills from deleted sequences are sometimes included in press kits and on posters and other advertising materials.
Generally, there is a last-minute check to ensure that such troubling images do not get issued to the public, but that is an imperfect process.
Here, though, an unusual amount of stills that should have been suppressed were released anyway.
Had that happened three months prior to release, that would be perfectly normal.
Yet these stills of deleted sequences continued to be issued even after the release.
That further suggests to me that there was some hastiness and confusion during post-production.
Chapter Eight
How Long Was the Film Originally?
How Long Was the Film Originally?
Allen Eyles, in The Marx Brothers: Their World of Comedy, mentions:
“The Cocoanuts ran as much as 140 minutes at a preview but was
cut back to 96 minutes for release. The print that MCA-TV have sent
out for television was obviously put together with considerable difficulty
from a number of battered negatives or old prints, and runs
about 92 minutes, when projected theatrically.”
I just now discover that Joe Adamson, in Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, NY: Pocket Books, March 1976, paperback reissue, p. 93),
also makes the same assertion about the two-hour-twenty-minute running time, and claims this was released.
When I first posted this web page, I stated that I disbelieved the claim of such a lengthy running time.
Then, as my research inexorably continued, over my protests, I discovered that the claim of 140 minutes is pretty much right.
I would love to know Allen Eyles’s source, as well as Joe’s.
Finding that source (those sources?) would probably clear up even more mysteries.
Eyles’s other claims, though, need some adjustment.
Did the MCA version derive in part from the original camera negative?
It looks to me that it may well have all derived from optical-sound release prints.
Indeed, according to Anton van Beek,
“The 4 Marx Brothers at Paramount 1929–1933 Blu-ray Review,” Home Cinema Choice,
9 August 2017, “none of the original nitrate negatives still exist[s].”
I suspect this is correct, not only today, but as far back as 1958.
After all, the prints of The Cocoanuts that were shown on TV and at cinemas beginning in 1960 had
horrible sound.
That sound did not come from a master or submaster.
It seemed to me as though it was simply copied photographically from worn-out original release prints and pirated prints.
(The sound on the DVD and Blu-ray was taken from better sources and was cleaned up with some magical processors, and so it is now, in most sequences, quite acceptable.)
If the MCA version did indeed derive, in part, from the original camera negative, then I hope to high heaven that element still exists!
If it does, we could do a much better job with it now.
Eyles’s claim about the 96-minute version from 1929 as opposed to the 92-minute version for television is similarly problematic,
and it needs some adjusting too.
The original was less than 96 minutes, and the MCA version runs more than 92 minutes.
I am quite confident that not a single shot, gag, or line of dialogue from the May 1929 première version is missing from the MCA version.
Allen Eyles’s errors are all understandable, but we have better information now, and we shall explore that information below.
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NOTE: It is only because I am looking at Eyles’s book for the first time in nearly half a century that something occurs to me.
When I read Eyles’s passage, at age 11, I did not understand his phrase, “runs about 92 minutes, when projected theatrically.”
Why did Eyles feel the need to add “when projected theatrically”?
Wasn’t that a needless redundancy?
It was not a redundancy at all.
At the time Eyles wrote his book in 1966,
he had been able to see The Cocoanuts only shortly before, when it was broadcast on British television once or twice.
He had not seen the film at the cinema in the 1950’s,
for the obvious reason that, for several decades, it had been unavailable for viewing anywhere in the world
until it was offered to television in 1959.
Because he was under contract to write a book, he probably placed his tape recorder in front of the TV’s speaker,
and missed a minute here or there whenever a spool ran out.
He probably took copious notes by shorthand as well.
That way he would have sufficient material to submit to his publisher.
He must have timed the broadcast as best he could, using the clock in his living room,
which did not have a second hand,
and he must have done his best to subtract the station breaks, if any.
That is how he determined that the broadcast was about 90 minutes.
Now, Eyles lived in England.
England uses a different television system, a consequence of the country using 50Hz rather than the 60Hz used in the US.
To synchronize frames with pulses, films needed to be overspeeded slightly, 25 frames per second rather than 24.
After clocking the broadcast, he scribbled an arithmetical calculation on a napkin and came up with 92 rather than 93
as the result if slowed down to 24fps.
That simple, completely forgiveable minor error, which he openly provided only as an approximation, has now become dogma.
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Robert Florey, in the interview he granted to Richard J. Anobile for The Marx Bros. Scrapbook, stated,
“...by the time we got through with the film, it was longer than
the original play. You see, we had added a prologue
and some dance numbers.
As I recall, it ran a little over two hours. It had to be
cut because the exhibitors didn’t like the idea of long
pictures, because then they couldn’t have as many
shows a day as they would like.”
The film was longer than the play?
Scroll back up to Gary Johnson’s comment on Nitrateville.
With the musical introductions, the play would have been over three hours.
Perhaps Florey did not factor those extraneous musical préludes into the play’s running time.
The prologue to the film is “Florida by the Sea,”
accompanied by athletics, onlookers, and a dance on a phony beach.
As far as I know, the prologue to the stage play was “The Guests” and “The Bell Hops,”
though “Florida by the Sea” had indeed opened the original version of the show.
The stage version of “Florida by the Sea” was considerably longer, the film’s visuals are probably entirely different.
Now that I’ve watched that opening several times, I am less and less convinced that it matches the fine cut.
It looks as though it was trimmed and then had a fragment of “Florida by the Sea” pasted over it.
I’m not even convinced it was the opening of the movie, originally.
Maybe it was, but I would hazard a guess that the film originally opened in the hotel lobby,
and only several scenes later went out to the fake beach to establish the surroundings,
to serve as a bridge between the Polly/Bob story and the hotel story.
When Florey mentioned an added prologue, was he referring to what is now the opening of the film,
or was he referring to something else that is now lost?
What did he mean that dance numbers were added?
Did he reinstate some musical numbers that had been deleted from the stage show,
or did the choreographers and dancers invent new material for the film?
We also need to take into account the abrupt cuts between some of the scenes,
as well as the cuts in the middles of scenes.
Those deletions would all add up to another few minutes.
An example of such a deletion is the ending of the Groucho-Oscar-Harpo scene, which cuts off abruptly, quickly fading to black.
In the original, the scene surely continued.
Also, pay attention to the edits in the Spanish-party scene at the end.
Much of it was shot in single takes, with a minimum of three cameras.
Every time there is a cut to a different camera, maybe half a second is skipped.
Whether that was to reduce the running time by another few seconds,
or whether that was to pick up the pace, I do not know.
(Editing audio on disc to delete the occasional half-second must have been brutal!)
If I could ever find the final shooting script, I could make better guesstimates.
A daily journal of the shooting or the camera reports would help even more.
An exact record of the original 140-minute cut would provide us nearly certain knowledge,
but I doubt there ever was such a written record.
A dream would be to discover that all the deletions, together with outtakes and trims, are still stored somewhere
and are still in usable condition. That’s a dream.
The likelihood of that dream coming true is about nil.
The irony is that a filmed version of a famous Irving Berlin Broadway musical had nearly all the music deleted prior to release.
What was the point, then?
If all the deleted sequences could be found somewhere and inserted back into the film, what a different movie it would be!
It really would be a musical, and it would surely be quite engaging.
As it currently stands, “When My Dreams Come True” is sung three times,
“The Monkey-Doodle-Doo” interrupts a scene,
and several other numbers survive only as fragments.
Those few musical numbers no longer work, as they now distract and seem entirely extraneous.
In the original, with over a dozen musical numbers, most of which were addictively hummable,
the music and the comedy would have complemented each other.
Now, though, with the drastic cuts, the film is off-balance.
Oddly, no review I have yet run across mentions how much music was chopped away.
On the contrary, some reviewers compared the film version favorably with the stage version,
insisting that it was a faithful reproduction of the Broadway musical.
Yes, the film in its original form was somewhat faithful to the stage show, but, by the time it reached cinemas,
it was crippled, just a series of fragments.
No reviewer, to my knowledge, even made a passing mention of the deletion of a dozen musical numbers.
Most of the scenes with the Marx brothers remain fairly intact, and some were enhanced,
but the context and the background, which were at least half the enjoyment of the show, are all gone.
A fun project, hopelessly beyond my budget, would be to reshoot the missing sequences and cut them back in.
A cheaper, but still effective, solution, would be to re-record the missing dialogue and music and songs,
illustrate them with unit stills and drawings and sketches, and fill out the movie that way, just as an experiment.
Also, for the sake of capturing the look of the original, I would not be averse to colorization, if it could be done convincingly.
The result, I think, would be a much richer experience, truer to the original intentions.
I wonder if the dance numbers were ever notated, and if those records survive. Hope so.
If anybody has an interest in pursuing such a project, please write to me, thanks!
According to an uncredited abstract on
ProQuest,
the 10-reel film was 8,613 feet long, which would seem to mean 95 minutes and 42 seconds, except that it doesn’t.
Allen Eyles rounded that up to 96, and other film historians do the same.
(There is no sin in such rounding, for I doubt I have ever encountered a 35mm projector, anywhere, that ran at exactly 24fps.
They are all a tiny bit faster or a tiny bit slower, and the speed changes almost imperceptibly as the motors age.
Worse, many technicians replaced the factory-installed 1763rpm drive motors with standard 1725rpm motors, which slowed everything down.
Also, in 1929, many or most projectors for sound movies had speed controls, which were far from exact.
A year or two later, many or most of those projectors were junked and replaced by projectors that had a fixed speed.)
The official tally of 8,613 feet should not be taken so literally.
That 8,613 feet included the redundant pieces, the few seconds of duplicated action at the reel changes,
most of which would be skipped.
That 8,613 feet also included the Part Titles, which would not have been shown on screen, except by mistake.
In the silent days, the Part Titles were included in the total footage count,
even for those later MGM silent films for which the Part Titles were not meant to be shown on screen.
That practice surely carried over to the sound era.
If the timings of the reel changes in The Cameraman were typical,
then the title was held for an extra 30 feet and the Part Titles were 3 feet each, making for 36 feet of spare footage at every reel change.
If this more or less held true for talkies,
then we can assume about 36 feet of spare footage at each of the nine reel changes in The Cocoanuts.
36 × 9 = 324 feet,
which comes to 3 minutes and 36 seconds of waste footage all in all.
Subtract 3 minutes and 36 seconds from 95 minutes and 42 seconds and we get 92 minutes and 6 seconds.
Remember, this is all approximate, since there was nothing exact about reel changes in those days.
The MCA version, available on Blu-ray, is 93 minutes and 1 second,
and so it is about the same as the version shown at the Rialto in May 1929.
(The DVD included in the “Silver Screen Collection” seems to run a few seconds shorter.
I leave it to someone else to figure out why.)
Yes, it is a pity that the duplicated actions and the Part Titles are now missing.
It is a loss, a real loss, a sad loss, but it is not a monumental loss.
Besides, who knows? Maybe if someone were to dig through the MCA vaults, more footage might be found? Yes?
Maybe even the left side of the image?
Irene Thirer, in her review of the film,
“Four Marx Brothers Take Bows in ‘Cocoanuts’ Talkie:
Groucho, Zeppo, Harpo, Chico Get Laughs Galore in 3-Star Chinema,”
Daily News, Saturday, 25 May 1929, p. 28, says something most interesting:
“The changing of scenes is a bit choppy, but this is no doubt due to a good deal of cutting,
which we understand took place before the picture was ready for presentation.”
She also mentions “the ninety-minute screening.”
So that settles it.
The version we have now is pretty much the première version.
The Cocoanuts was and remains a 93-minute movie.
Presumably, any presentation would include previews, a cartoon, a newsreel, and a short subject,
as well as sufficient time to clear the auditorium after each show and to seat the next audience in the 1,960 seats.
Note the posted show times: 10:00, 11:30, 1:00, 3:00, 4:50, 6:30, 8:30, 10:20, midnight.
’Ow did dey do dat? I’m confused. Are you?
Chapter Nine
The World Première
The World Première
The Cocoanuts premièred in NYC on 23 May 1929 at the
Rialto Theatre and ran for five weeks.
I suspect this was the sound-on-film version,
for Martin Dickstein in his review, “The Cinema Circuit:
‘The Cocoanuts,’ with the Marx Brothers, Oscar Shaw and Mary Eaton, Becomes a Talkie Movie at the Rialto Theater,”
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle vol. 89, no. 143, Friday, 24 May 1929, p. A-16 ,
mentioned that “the Movietone has negotiated the path of straight musical comedy and has come out with colors flying.”
Movietone was a sound-on-film process.
(Dickstein here used “Movietone” as a generic term, and I am often guilty of doing the same.
“Movietone” refers strictly to films from the Fox studio.
Films from other studios that used exactly the same sound system should never be called “Movietone,”
which was a trademarked name.
They should be called optical-sound or sound-on-film.)
❧ ❧ ❧ ☙ ☙ ☙
Is the above interesting, or is it interesting?
Apparently included in the SHORT FEATURES was a promotional piece for The Cocoanuts. What was this?
Was this merely a preview of coming attractions?
If so, then why did it get special mention as being its own SHORT FEATURE?
Chapter Ten
The Release
The Release
IMDb and
Wikipedia,
with firmest confidence, proclaim that the general release date was 3 August 1929.
They seem to have borrowed that information from Allen Eyles’s book, The Marx Brothers: Their World of Comedy.
Where Allen Eyles got that date, I have no idea. I would love to know.
My guess (only a guess) is that he assumed the release date was the day after the copyright date,
and we discover from the
Library of Congress that Paramount Pictures / Famous Players–Lasky Corporation
copyrighted The Cocoanuts on 2 August 1929.
Unfortunately, I do not possess the admirably firm confidence exhibited by IMDb and Wikipedia.
People who are so firmly confident have magnetic personalities.
Alas, I am never so firmly confident, and I certainly do not possess a magnetic personality.
You see, I confess, I am wishy-washy, because I often suspect that reality is somewhat more nuanced than confident proclamations.
I decided to test the claim about the 3 August 1929 release date.
My heavens! I thought it would take an hour at most.
Once I got started, I saw that I was sinking into quicksand.
The more I tried to extricate myself, the deeper I sank.
Here are the results of my incredibly boring research:
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