> while I was on holiday in Edinburgh, Max wrote:
>
> >. The Brooks play (based on my favorite
> > movie of all time)
>
> Which compels me to spoil the movie for everybody by revealing that,
> as I found out the week before last, the central conceit of "The
> Producers" (trying to find the worst possible artist in order to
> ensure the failure of a project which has been sold several times
> over) is directly lifted from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead"!
>
> unless anyone knows different.
I understand that it was a show business joke that was old in vaudevile days. Irving Thalberg reportedly vetoed it as the idea for the Marx Brothers' followup to "A Night at the Opera", saying that you can't make a funny movie based on a funny idea. Thalberg had some strange notions about comedy.
Brooks, of course, proved him wrong.
Best, Peter
> dd
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest--2000 Results
Winner: Vile Puns (co-winners)
"We have created a monster, Doktor Frankenstein!" screech Igor, the doktor's right and left hand man, his little body quivering with delight, and before the good doctor could stop him Igor waved various human limbs and organs in the patchwork face of the giant, howling, "Tell me, stranger, are you from these parts?"
It was the night before Christmas when Santa Claus's sleigh team became one member short because of a sudden illness, and when an inflatable plastic reindeer was used to fill the void in the team so no one would take notice the missing animal, Regis, Chief of Elves, asked Santa, "Is that your vinyl Prancer?"
John L. Ashman Houston, TX