The story behind A Night at the Opera is very much the story of its script. Once Irving Thalberg and the Marx Brothers agreed to an approach to the movie, the process of developing the final script was a long one involving many people. The first writer to tackle it was James McGuinness, a former sportswriter and eventual head of the MGM story department, who had penned Tarzan and His Mate (1934). He concocted a plot built around Harpo as the world's greatest tenor, who never sings or speaks throughout the film. Thalberg rejected this idea and, at Groucho's insistence, brought in noted songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who had contributed to the scripts of the Marx Brothers' earlier films Duck Soup (1933) and Horse Feathers (1932) and to their hit play Animal Crackers, made into a movie in 1930.

Some sources say Kalmar and Ruby were the creators of the next phase of the story; others credit George Seaton and Robert Pirosh, two relatively unknown writers Groucho considered "unspoiled" neophytes. Whoever it was, the new story was based on an old Broadway legend and popular backstage tale that would cast Groucho as a producer plotting to stage the worst opera in history so that the show would close quickly. The backers he had soaked for ten times the production costs would assume they had lost their money, and Groucho could escape to South America with the sizable profits. But his plans are thwarted when the opera becomes a huge hit and he is left owing ten times what the show actually brings in.

Groucho loved the idea; Thalberg nixed it. He explained they didn't want a funny story but a good, simple plot that the Marx Brothers could use as a springboard for their comic ideas. So the bogus play idea was shelved - and resurfaced more than 30 years later as the Mel Brooks film The Producers (1968). (And that film has now been turned into a stage production that is currently the biggest runaway blockbuster on Broadway in years.) The only remaining elements of Kalmar and Ruby's contribution were the character names of Groucho as Otis B. Driftwood and Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Claypool. As for Seaton and Pirosh, they got their break as the scripters of the Marxes' follow-up movie, A Day at the Races (1937).

Finally, the Marx Brothers and Thalberg agreed on established playwrights George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, two of the creators of the play Animal Crackers and the writers of the first Marx Brothers movie The Cocoanuts (1929). When they had finished their draft, Thalberg brought in Jack Benny's top gagman, the 300-pound writer Al Boasberg. He punched up the jokes and wrote the famous stateroom scene, which almost didn't happen thanks to Thalberg's constant pressure on the writer. Tired of repeated calls asking for the material, Boasberg told Thalberg the scene was ready and to come to his office to pick it up. Thalberg and the Marx Brothers arrived to find no Boasberg and no sign of the script. They looked everywhere and were about to give up when Groucho happened to glance up. There he spied the scene, cut into ribbons and nailed to the ceiling. According to Groucho, it took them hours to piece it together.

Later, Thalberg hit on the idea of having Groucho and the boys try the material out in front of live audiences before committing a minute of it to film. The Marxes took five scenes on a road-show tour of Seattle, Salt Lake City, Portland and Santa Barbara. An article in The Reader's Digest detailed the process: "When the patrons failed to laugh at a gag, the line came out. When they laughed late, the line was sharpened to take effect more quickly. When they laughed mildly, the line was sent back to the workshop. When they roared, the line was okayed for the film version." Ryskind and Boasberg sat in the audience at every performance (four times a day) making notes and timing audience reactions. Later, when director Sam Wood would try to change the pace or timing of a scene or bit, the writers would remind him that X number of seconds had to be left for laughter. That's why in the film there are what seem to be inexplicable pauses between lines - the performers are holding for the timed response.

by Rob Nixon