For nearly a decade now, The Farrelly Brothers have been trying to get a Three Stooges biopic to the start gate. Numerous times they’ve seemed to be closing in on shooting, but for various reasons it’s never happened, most recently because the film got caught up in the financial mess over at MGM.
However with the courts approving MGM’s pre-packaged bankruptcy, that’s allowed 20th Century Fox for take over the project, and according to Deadline, a March 14th filming start date has been announced, which is about as definite as this project has ever been.
That leaves leaves the Farrellys just a few months to find a new cast, as following the MGM hoo-hah, the previously attached Jim Carrey and Sean Penn have definitely dropped out, and while Benicio Del Toro may still appear, it’s by no means certain. It’s a real shame about Penn and Carrey, as just looking at pics of the Stooges and you can really see them in the roles.
Deadline says, ‘The picture takes place when the trio are dumped out as newborns at the door of an orphanage, and they are talking with Richard Jenkins to play the head nun who is terrorized by the precocious Stooges. The comedy follows them to adulthood and is very much in the spirit of the original shorts, in which the blue collar bumblers got the best of the wealthy society matrons that tried to exploit them. Oh, yeah, there will be the non-stop physical comedy that is the trademark of the Stooges franchise.’
“The script is ready to go, and we are opening up these roles to the world right now,” Peter Farrelly says. “We’ll make it with the best possible people. Our feeling is that no star is too big to audition and no matter who it is, we’re going to have to see him in the role. This is not The Flinstones. You’ve got to be Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard, and that could be a major movie star or an unknown.”
It’ll certainly be an interesting biopic, with the plan being to do it in the style of three back-to-back slapstick shorts, which tell the Stooges story, but with non-stop silliness. Farrelly adds that it’s “More in the tone of Dumb and Dumber than anything else we’ve done. “Our goal is 85 minutes of laughs in a film that will be very respectful of who the Stooges were. It’s by far the riskiest project we’ve ever done, without question, but it is also the one closest to our hearts.”