Farrelly Brothers Stooges Movie Won't Be the First Biopic Done About the Trio

With all the exciting news of a Farrelly Brothers-produced Three Stooges biopic with Sean Penn playing Larry Fine, it seems that the media is trying to play up the idea that this will be the first biopic ever made about the legendary comedic trio. Nowhere has the media mentioned that there was a two-hour biopic done in April of 2000 on ABC, produced by Stooges fanatic Mel Gibson and filmed in Australia of all places (with American actors). With that cast comprising moderately well-known actors, this biopic may not have been perfect on the details, yet managed to create a sympathetic portrait of the Stooges that likely surprised those who previously didn't know the inside story of the trio's relationship.

Of course, that emotional drama will make the potential of Sean Penn, Jim Carrey and Benecio Del Toro's performances in the upcoming Farrelly Bros. production all the more powerful, right along with the choreographed slaps, eye pokes and "Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk's."

It may be that because the Farrelly Brothers want their movie to stand alone, perhaps no mention of the 2000 Stooges biopic was intentional. It's a shame that it isn't on DVD so people can compare that one with this upcoming big screen version, even though some brave souls who defy copyright occasionally upload it to Youtube. Certainly it seems that the Brothers Farrelly will make more of an effort to get the history of the Stooges right than the 2000 biopic did. That isn't to say this earlier movie didn't have its charms and get most things right. With the actor Paul Ben-Victor playing Moe Howard, we see the usual biopic flashback of someone older looking back on everything that came before.

And that's the way this biopic started with a believably older Moe in 1959 who's both supposedly struggling financially and disgusted at Columbia Studios for not giving him any decent work after being there with his former (and late) brothers for decades. Those familiar with the Stooges career trajectory know what's coming later when the surviving trio have a huge renaissance with the younger generation in the early 60's and star in feature films designed mostly for children. We're reminded, though, that the Stooges never had a feature at Columbia prior to that. Flashing back nearly 30 years earlier, we see that for all of those three decades, they were basically workhorses cranking out shorts of variable quality.

The early part of this movie had it mostly right about the origins of the Stooges. With their beginnings in vaudeville and working initially with a forgotten comedian named Ted Healy, Moe is already working with Larry (played well by Evan Handler) and with brother, Shemp (played by John Kassir). Later, when Shemp bows out of the vaudeville act, we're introduced to Moe's other brother, Jerry, who so happens to set the persona of Curly. He was played by the best known actor of the cast (Michael Chiklis). Chiklis arguably gives the best performance of anybody in the movie. Obviously, the other Stooges seem bland compared to the persona of Curly. Even so, Curly had a lot of drama in his life that the intense Chiklis ultimately could do to a tee--hence anchoring the true interest of this movie. Because Curly had a wild lifestyle and ultimately had a debilitating stroke at the height of the Stooges' success in the mid 1940's, Jim Carrey (who, at the time of this writing, is scheduled to play Curly in the Farrelly Bros. production) will have one of his most challenging acting parts since playing Andy Kaufman.
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To be frank, Chiklis might have been the most perfect actor to play Curly because of his natural physical resemblance as well as superior acting chops. Having Jim Carrey play Curly could be more of a stretch. Even so, Curly's tragic demise is the heart of the drama surrounding the Stooges when they were trying to keep their ship afloat in the movie industry. The 2000 biopic pointed out (accurately) how shaky things really were for years due to all the health problems enveloping each member. When Shemp took over after Curly's death, it was barely a decade later when Shemp died of a heart attack in the mid 1950's. The film then gives the impression that it hurt the Stooges financially.

According to most Stooge sources, Moe and Larry weren't hurting all that much financially after Shemp died and the Stooge act was up in the air. This film did that, though, to emphasize that the comedy trio was long taken advantage of by studio head Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures. Yes, the Stooges should have been making features already by the late 1930's, yet were forced to do only shorts clear up to the late 1950's before they were dropped from the studio roster. Unfortunately, the 2000 movie didn't delve much into the Stooges revival in the early 60's after Moe hired a new Curly (Joe DeRita) and started making a slate of very popular movies that lasted up until the middle of that decade before they all mostly retired.

And just how accurate were the comedy routines in the 2000 movie? From my remembrance of it, they were dead-on accurate, despite it being impossible to capture the complete magic of a classic comedy routine when other actors are acting it out. This production had a lot of respect attached to it, which isn't surprising coming from earlier-mentioned executive producer Mel Gibson. It's just the depictions of behind-the-scenes showbiz stories that supposedly were fabricated for the sake of drama.

We'll have to expect the same of the Farrelly Brothers movie, no matter how in-depth their research is. It's a necessary evil and annoyance in the genre of biopics.

It wouldn't surprise me then if the new take on the Stooges will be a three-hour film in order to get everything in there. With the 2000 movie only at two hours when it should have been a two-parter, covering some of the Stooges' other ground will be necessary to get the whole epic picture of their career path. Yes, they really did have an epic career trajectory as hard as it might be to believe for those who still despise their style of comedy. Their careers were really one of the most dramatic and wildly popular of any other comedic team in Hollywood next to the Marx Brothers or Abbott & Costello.

With Sean Penn selected to play Larry, we may have a chance to see a broader picture of the reportedly gamble-hungry, good-hearted Larry Fine than the 2000 movie had a chance to present. Each one, however, are complex portraits of comedic greatness and struggles to keep that torch lit. Seeing a biopic that takes them from very young to their final health-challenged days in the 1970's when they were still working (and considering a TV series that never happened), the movies will ultimately benefit rather than getting a continual double eye poke...

Sources:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0214698/

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j1P7VDHMLxjuEfOzm-JBGcBoiWjQD975V5DG1

Edit Note by the Author:

There seems to be growing rumors that the Stooges movie from the Brothers Farrelly may be just a modern incarnation of the trio rather than an historical biopic on their careers...