Dali worked with Harpo Marx. That is quite enough to enlarge one’s mind with endless surrealist possibilities. But there’s more. They became friends and devised a screenplay for a movie in which man of mundane reality falls in love with a dream-woman from the realm of comical absurdity. A notebook and treatment was presented to the MGM movie studio, but the studio declined the project. These materials have now been tracked down, and much research undertaken. The resulting ‘graphic novel re-creation’ of the planned movie will be published, sans the Marx Bros. distinctive physical comedy and syncopated wisecrackery, on 19th March 2019 as Giraffes on Horseback Salad.

So far as I know Lovecraft never saw the Marx Bros. movies, though from 1930 to 1935 he could have seen all the classics newly-released at one of the Providence movie-houses: Animal Crackers; Monkey Business; Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races.

What would a Dali / Lovecraft collaboration have sired? We can only dream…