Salvador Dalí’s screenplay Giraffes on Horseback Salad, often referred to as The Surrealist Woman, will be produced using AI through Google’s video generation platform, Veo 2. The film was announced on April 9th at the Google Cloud Next convention in Las Vegas. At the convention, there was a screening for the trailer of the film—what has been described not as a direct recreation but a “reawakening” of Dalí’s vision. The project is supported by the advertising company Goodby Silverstein & Partners and The Dalí Museum in Florida.
Initially penned in 1937 for the Marx Brothers, Giraffes on Horseback Salad was reportedly deemed too surreal for production by their studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The screenplay, thought to have been lost, detailed an unconventional love story involving a Spanish aristocrat, intended to be played by Harpo Marx, and a “surrealist woman,” whose face remains unseen.
“Dalí imagined a film so surreal, so untethered from convention, that it wasn’t realized in his lifetime,” said Jeff Goodby, co-chairman of Goodby Silverstein & Partners. “Now, thanks to the astonishing capabilities of Veo 2 and Imagen 3, we’ve been able to help bring that vision to life—not as a replica, but as a reawakening. It’s one of the most creatively thrilling things we’ve ever done.”
The history behind Giraffes on Horseback Salad is complicated. A few paragraphs of a screenplay was uncovered in Dalí’s archive in 1996, seven years after his death. Then, in the mid-2010s, pop culture scholar Josh Frank discovered an 84-page handwritten notebook at the Centre Pompidou, containing Dalí’s extensive notes and visions for the project. Using these archival materials, Frank partnered with comedian Tim Heidecker to compose a full screenplay, which the two adapted into a graphic novel illustrated by Manuela Pertega in 2019.
“Salvador Dalí said that he would be remembered for the words he wrote even more than for his paintings,” said Dr. Hank Hine, director of The Dalí Museum, Florida. “This technology, in the respectful hands of artists, allows Dalí’s imagined world, locked in language, to erupt into visibility.”
This project marks another milestone in the partnership between Goodby Silverstein & Partners and The Dalí Museum, which includes previous ventures such as Ask Dalí, an AI-powered interactive conversation with the artist, and The Dream Tapestry, a surrealist art generator.
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