Otis B. Driftwood Meets Max Bialystock

Wednesday evening, Turner Classic Movies is running A Night at the Opera followed by The Producers — at 9 PM and 10:45 respectively on my cable provider. Apart from being two very funny, held-in-great-esteem comedies, what do these two films have in common?

Well, for a brief time, similar plots. One of the early drafts of A Night at the Opera involved Groucho trying to work a scam because he would find a new but terrible opera, sell 50,000% of the show to investors (including Margaret Dumont) and then get away with it when the show flopped immediately and folder…which it would do because he hired Harpo as the lead male tenor. Irving Thalberg vetoed this storyline…

…which was based on the same Broadway legend as The Producers. It was, you are no doubt aware, about a guy who shares a zillion percent of a guaranteed-to-close-in-one-night flop.

I dunno if anyone at TCM knows of this and matched up those films for that reason or some other. But I thought it was worth a mention and maybe a setting of the TiVo. Or you could just run your DVDs of those movies back to back since you probably own them both.