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ONLY IN
HOLLYWOOD
A story which
links Christian Bale (top left), Batman (here in the shape of George Clooney), Beyoncé, the Three Stooges (below left) and the two Farrellys (below right, on the Shallow Hal set with Jack Black)…
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FOR A TOWN that prides itself on being at the cutting edge of almost everything, Hollywood certainly loves digging things out of last year’s lumber box. Forrest Gump, remember, was 10 years in turnaround before making it to box-office and Oscar success. And the various Batman and Superman retreads currently barrelling down the production pike are not only revivals of franchises anywhere from 30 to 50 years old: they’re retuned versions of revivals that were, in turn, for scheduled the first time up to five years ago.
Batman 5 was all ready to go in the spring of 1997, which was also when we first started hearing about Superman Reborn. And if I wanted to fill the next two pages with glossy pictures of male stars, I could do so simply by listing all the actors who have been in line to play the lead in one or other of those ever-morphing superhero tentpoles in the intervening years.
That particular wait will be over soon (or soonish). Shooting is finally underway on Batman: Intimidation (aka Batman 5), with a couple of Brits in the driving seat: Christopher Nolan as director, with Christian Bale as the caped one (and no less than Sir Michael Caine taking the role of Alfred, the butler). Also in the cast are Katie Holmes as a childhood friend of Bruce Wayne (aka you-know-who); Liam Neeson as his mentor; Gary Oldman as a Gotham cop; and Ken Watanabe as the bad guy.
As for a reborn Superman, Charlie’s Angels director McG is set to deliver that one in the summer of 2006, with Beyoncé among those reported to be bidding for a role. There are, however, the usual signs of the uncertainty that comes from handling kryptonite for too long, and rumours have been circulating recently that the whole gig is off again.
If it does happen, Superman - apparently dealing with the ‘Smallville years’ - will be a Warner Bros movie, as will the new Batman. As chance would have it, the same studio is also planning another nostalgia fest - and another one which has been hanging round for a couple of years: a new film about Moe, Larry and Curly, otherwise known as The Three Stooges.
Having started off in vaudeville in the twenties, brothers Moe and Shemp Howard teamed up with Larry Fine in 1928 and began a knockabout comic partnership which would last until (and indeed beyond) their deaths. There were some 200 Stooges shorts made at Columbia between 1934 and 1958, followed by half a dozen features, including Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961) and an appearance in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963).
By this time, the trio had gone through quite a few personnel changes. Shemp left before they found fame, but returned in 1946 after Curly had a stroke and departed. Shemp, in turn, died, and was replaced, first by Joe Besser, then by Joe De Rita (aka Curly Joe). Like so many classic comedy acts of the thirties (think Laurel and Hardy), however, the Stooges owe much of their fame among younger viewers to the fact that their shorts were rerun endlessly on television.
Which is where the Farrelly Brothers come in. The Farrellys are Stooges fans big-time: the trio’s comedy, described by one film historian as “specialising in violent, vulgar slapstick”, is exactly the vein of humour that the brothers have mined in every film since Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. They have apparently been playing around with the idea of doing a Stooges movie for the best part of a decade - a familiar Farrelly pattern, since most of their projects have been marinated over a long period of time to ensure proper ripeness.
For a while, the Stooges movie got caught up in the Heidi Fleiss scandal, when someone noticed that Hollywood’s most famous madam’s name showed up on the list of payments made from a fund supposedly used to develop a Stooges film. But that was long before the Farrellys became involved.
Their plan, first reported here some three years ago, is to bring the trio straight up to date without any explanation (so it won’t be like they’d been trapped in a cryogenic freezer): they’d just be The Three Stooges, but in 2000-and-whatever. Quizzed on why the Farrellys wanted to do this, Peter pointed out this would enable them to have Moe stick Curly’s head in a microwave (don’t try this at home, kids).
In the meantime, the Farrellys have made a couple of non-Stooge movies, including Shallow Hal and Stuck on You, as well as seeing two of their most memorable characters reprised in Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (directed by Troy Miller, with Peter taking a script credit). The only fly in the ointment (and you can bet that, if this was a Farrelly movie about the Stooges, it wouldn’t be ointment) is the fact that Warner Bros committed to the film last October, a couple of months before Stuck on You opened. And the box office response to that film has been somewhat below what we have come to expect from the Farrellys.
Still, the brothers did once say that they loved the Stooges so much, they’d do a film about them for no money. Could it come to that? Probably not in Hollywood.
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