Meet The Lagoon's Forgotten Lady And See 'The Strangest Movie Never Made'

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. What place in America could accommodate monsters, the Marx Brothers and the artist who immortalized melting clocks? The answer, of course, is Hollywood. And our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, has a review of two new books about forgotten stories from Hollywood's past.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Lost Hollywood - the phrase conjures up starlets in silver lame and lunchtime gimlets at The Brown Derby. It does not bring to mind slimey swamp creatures or screwball surrealists starring in movies featuring walking melons. But two new books that retrieve forgotten moments in Hollywood history expand our sense of La La Land's long legacy of magic and bad behavior.

Mallory O'Meara is a young producer and screenwriter who works in the monster/horror genre. Growing up a self-professed monster geek, she first watched that 1954 classic "Creature From The Black Lagoon" when she was 17, and she was smitten. Filmed in 3D black and white, the movie follows a team of archaeologists who search for a prehistoric fish man rumored to be paddling around in a remote Amazonian pond. Of course, there's a gorgeous woman on the team who becomes romantic fish bait. But as O'Meara says, it's the lonely creature himself, sometimes called Gill-man, who's the real star.

Curious, O'Meara began Internet surfing and discovered that a woman designed the creature's monster suit. Her name was Milicent Patrick, and she herself was a raven-haired knockout who looked like a movie star. In fact, when the movie was about to premiere, Universal Studios sent Milicent on a publicity tour, billing her as "The Beauty Who Created The Beast." But Milicent's powerful male boss was jealous of the attention and insisted that the tour be retitled "The Beauty Who Lives With The Beasts," making it sound like Milicent was some kind of den mother for the Creature, along with the Mummy and Wolfman. Even worse, her boss fired Milicent after the tour. Because her name appears nowhere in the original credits, Milicent's accomplishments faded from memory, known only to geeks like O'Meara. To date, Milicent Patrick is the only woman credited with designing a great Hollywood monster.

O'Meara's chatty, impassioned book "The Lady From The Black Lagoon" lifts Milicent Patrick out of the mire of obscurity. There's so much great material here, including Milicent's childhood at Hearst Castle and her early career as one of Disney's first female animators, that her own life story could be a film. O'Meara is a dogged researcher and a fierce partisan. She even sports a tattoo of Milicent and the Creature on her left forearm. But I must warn readers that this book should be rated O for oh, my God. Where was an editor? O'Meara's prose is bogged down in lame jokes and Wikipedia-level historical context. I think it's worth putting up with these transgressions for Milicent's story, which, as O'Meara points out, has resonances for today, when women in Hollywood still find themselves in the company of monsters.

And now, for something completely different. In 1937, the surrealist artist Salvador Dali traveled to Hollywood to meet one of his idols, Harpo Marx, whom Dali called the American surrealist. If ever there were two people who got each other in terms of their shared manic subversion of reality, Salvador Dali and Harpo Marx were those kindred spirits. After their meeting, two things happened. Dali sent Harpo an actual harp festooned with silverware - spoons, knives and forks - whose strings were made of barbed wire. The other outcome was a script scenario written by Dali of a movie for the Marx Brothers called "Giraffes On Horseback Salad." Big surprise - Louis B. Mayer, the humorless head of MGM Studios, turned it down, and the unfinished script was presumed lost, appearing only on lists of greatest movies never made.

Enter Josh Frank, who, like Mallory O'Meara, is, among other things, a screenwriter and a geek - in his case, a Marx Brothers geek. Frank excavated Dali's forgotten film treatment from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. And in collaboration with comedian Tim Heidecker and artist Manuela Pertega, he's produced a gorgeous graphic treatment of "Giraffes On Horseback Salad."

It's far beyond me to encapsulate the storyline here, which involves a businessman named Jimmy who's in love with a dame called The Surrealist Woman. Some of Dali's directions call for Groucho, who's dancing the tango with a woman whose cheek annoys him, to remove her cheek with a spoon and for the three Marx Brothers to cut off the nose of a locomotive train with a guillotine. Don't even try to understand. Just revel in the weirdness, along with the wonderful photographs and other archival material Frank includes in this book. Lost Hollywood turns out to be stranger and, in a way, more ahead of its time than most of us could've imagined.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "The Lady From The Black Lagoon" and "Giraffes On Horseback Salad." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, my guest will be Aidy Bryant. In addition to being a cast member on "Saturday Night Live," she stars in a new comedy series called "Shrill" that's based on the collection of autobiographical essays by Lindy West, who identifies as fat and a feminist. "Shrill" starts streaming on Hulu Friday. I hope you'll join us.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our associate producer for digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm Terry Gross. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.