Given Rob Zombie’s cinematic back catalogue, you might be forgiven for thinking that a project called Raised Eyebrows would be about a spectral pair of eye fuzzies that come to life and urge their owner to kill people. Not so! It’s actually and adaptation of Steve Stoliar’s memoir about the later days of Groucho Marx.
Oren Moverman is writing the script based on Stoliar’s book, subtitled My Years Inside Groucho’s House. It chronicles his time spent as Groucho’s personal secretary and archivist in the years before the comedy legend died. His unusual job meant he not only got to know one of his heroes, but also some of those in the man’s life including brothers Zeppo and Gummo, plus George Burns, Mae West, Jack Lemmon, Bob Hope and more. And though it might have seemed like a dream assignment, he also had nightmarishly tough encounters with the spiky Erin Fleming, the woman who ran Groucho’s life during those twilight times.
Zombie might not be the first person you’d expect to tackle this subject, but he’s got the fan-base bona fides. “I have been a huge Groucho Marx fan ever since I was a child and have read countless books on the comic legend, but after reading the book Raised Eyebrows, a totally new perspective on Groucho’s life emerged,” he tells Deadline. “I immediately saw this project as Groucho’s Sunset Boulevard and knew I had to bring it to the big screen. It is a sad, funny and very dark tale of a one of Hollywood’s greatest stars final years.”
It won’t be his next job, though: he’s currently shooting horror thriller 31, about a group of people kidnapped and taken to a killer funhouse called Murder World. And he has several other projects in development, including Broad Street Bullies, about the scrap-happy 1970s years of hockey team the Philadelphia Flyers.