The Last Poke in the Eye Was Real

How’s this for a classic Three Stooges moment: Curly’s in the hospital, his body atrophied due to stroke. Moe’s there, to deliver a letter. The letter informs Curly that he’s being replaced in Stooges movies by brother Shemp Howard, and further asks that Curly renounce all rights to Stooges merchandise, Stooges recordings, Stooges anything. Curly, who would be the first of the Stooges to die, in 1952, breaks down in tears.

Given the current wave of TV biopics that trade on the dish behind such pop culture icons as “The Brady Bunch” or the Beach Boys, some die-hard fans have been groaning at the prospect of a “dark-side-of-the-Stooges” TV movie offering. But “The Three Stooges,” which airs on ABC tonight at 8, doesn’t so much traffic in melodrama as present a bittersweet postcard to an overlooked and professionally exploited comedy team, with Moe the protective, workaholic father figure, Larry the reliable comrade and Curly the emotionally flawed, carousing comic heart of the trio.

To many, the Stooges are America’s lowbrow kings of comedy, as integral to the canon of great comic performers as the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton. Others don’t see the genius. But fewer still know anything about their off-screen lives.

And yet, fascinating as it might be for fans to glimpse the men behind the eye pokes, a sober Stooges biopic begs a larger, perhaps more existential question: Why take a subject as free of pathos as the Stooges and recast it as prime-time drama?

“You’re advertising the Three Stooges, which is all about laughs and comedy and silliness and escape, but what you’re giving them is a soap opera about three talented Jews. So what?” scoffs Danny Jacobson, the co-creator of the hit sitcom “Mad About You” and a die-hard Stooges fan. “That’s not going to make anyone want to go out and buy Three Stooges tapes.”

Jacobson has reason to be skeptical--he spent several years crafting a Stooges feature film, long stalled in development at Columbia Pictures, with Chris Matheson (“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”) the screenwriter currently attached. Columbia’s interest is said to be in a new Stooges franchise, the trio’s comedy transposed onto the 21st century, at a time when slapstick humor (“There’s Something About Mary,” “American Pie”) is the bread-and-butter of big-budget studio comedy. “They start out as tow truck drivers and they end up refereeing the Super Bowl” is how Jacobson describes his Stooges script. A Columbia spokesperson says a Stooges feature is still on the studio’s to-do list.

By contrast, it took less than a year to put together “The Three Stooges,” which was directed by James Frawley and shot in Australia, using a predominantly Aussie cast, with the Stooges played by Paul Ben-Victor (Moe), Evan Handler (Larry) and Michael Chiklis (Curly).

“The thing that I found most extraordinary,” says Kirk Ellis, who co-wrote “The Three Stooges” after working on “The Beach Boys,” “is that contrary to what is often the case in these stories, the onscreen personalities and the off-screen personalities [of the Stooges] were almost completely in sync.”

The movie is based on Michael Fleming’s 1999 authorized biography, “The Three Stooges: An Illustrated History.” That book’s subtitle is “From Amalgamated Morons to American Icons,” which is roughly the journey the TV movie takes, though its tone is more earnest than playful, its approach less an homage to what Jacobson calls the Stooges’ “clown art” than an evocation of Hollywood’s early years and the Stooges’ struggles within the studio system.

Actors Are Impressive Doing Stooges Shtick

Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, whose Storyline Entertainment produced the recent ratings successes “Annie” and “The Beach Boys,” got involved last summer, after Columbia TriStar Television optioned Fleming’s book; from there, three other production entities were brought in, including Stooges fan Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions and Comedy III Productions, which is composed of the Stooges’ heirs and was established in 1959 by Moe, Larry and “Curly Joe” DeRita. Since a protracted legal fight among the heirs was resolved in bankruptcy court in 1995, Comedy III hasn’t been shy about capitalizing on the trio’s retro popularity, putting the Stooges image on everything from golf club head covers to slot machines.

Those tuning in to see how well Ben-Victor, Handler and Chiklis can re-create the Stooges’ physical comedy will likely be impressed. But more awe-inspiring are the personal struggles and professional slights the former vaudevillians from Brooklyn endured, principally at the hands of Harry Cohn, the Columbia Pictures studio boss who delighted in their comedy nearly as much as he enjoyed manipulating their careers to his financial advantage. Cohn kept the Stooges in the picture business across three decades, through 190 shorts. But he also kept them underpaid and, more significantly, left out in the cold when their shorts enjoyed a sudden renaissance on TV. While Columbia made millions, the Stooges made nothing.

The resurgence in popularity did prompt Moe and Larry to find another Stooge, “Curly Joe” DeRita, whereupon the trio embarked on personal appearances. They also made feature films, titles like “The Three Stooges in Orbit” and “The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.” However, the group’s artistic heyday, clearly, was over.

“We approached it from the point of view of a family drama, with Moe running things,” says “Three Stooges” executive producer Meron, who saw dramatic fruit in the story of a brother whose compulsion to secure work, particularly as the country moved through the Great Depression, continually clashed with familial obligations. Taking the “emotional” approach, Meron says, enabled the producers to get around an age-old axiom: Men love the Stooges, but women just don’t get them.

Adds Zadan: “If somebody had said to us, ‘Do you want to do two hours of shtick?’ I think we would have said, ‘Pass.’ ”

To be sure, even those fans who grew up on a steady diet of their comedy shorts may only be dimly aware that the Stooges were even Jewish. Born to Solomon and Jennie Gorovitz (Lithuanian emigres who changed their name to Horwitz), Moe and older brother Shemp Howard were the first of the brothers to enter show business, becoming part of a vaudeville act fronted by comic Ted Healy. In the act, he slapped them around, giving rise to many of the Stooges’ physical moves, but offstage Healy kept them under foot, at his mercy for bookings.

The two Stooges became three when dancing fiddler Larry Fine (born Larry Feinberg) joined the act in 1925. An attempt to break into Hollywood with the 1930 feature “Soup to Nuts” failed, and by the time the movies beckoned a second time Healy was out, studio bosses seeing more potential in his minions--Moe, Larry and Shemp--than in Healy himself. When Shemp left to pursue his own film career, Moe enlisted the youngest of the Horwitz clan, Jerome. He would later shave off his hair and call himself Curly.

The Stooges’ career in Hollywood, in a sense, mirrored their vaudeville years, but on a larger scale. Trusted and tireless performers, they never made it in feature films, unlike more-respected peers such as Abbott & Costello and Charlie Chaplin. And they worked under onerous contracts that, while typical for the era, were destined to leave them cheated and embittered. As depicted in the film, it was Moe who guided the Stooges on financial matters, Moe who failed to challenge the too-cozy relationship between the Stooges’ agent, Harry Romm, and Columbia’s Cohn. And it was Moe who, struggling for work when the Stooges’ run at Columbia ended in the 1950s, found himself fetching sandwiches for Romm.

Moe’s Daughter Had an Objection

Joan Maurer, Moe’s daughter, says she was heartened that the true, well-meaning nature of her father managed to come through in the film. But she did have one quibble.

“He was a very philanthropic man, and he was very loving of his brother. My dad would never have gone in and handed a legal paper to Curly when he was dying. Something like that most likely happened, but I know it didn’t happen like that.”

For Chiklis, however, that scene, factual or not, goes a long way toward explaining why he wanted to take on the all-important role of Curly, a comedy icon as indelible for some as Groucho Marx. Chiklis well understands the inherent danger in portraying legendary comedians; in 1989, he starred in the forgettable John Belushi biopic “Wired.”

“I was reluctant to even meet [the producers] for the role because of my experience with ‘Wired,’ ” he says. “I had been put through the mill so badly with that experience that I thought, all I need is to be put through that again with another biopic about a comedian.”

But Chiklis, who characterizes the real Curly as “this brooding man-child who was essentially unknowable, even to his own brothers,” says working on “The Three Stooges” allayed his fears, because the film fills in so many historical blanks.

“Some people are trying to bill it as the dark side of the Stooges,” he says. “I don’t think it’s that at all. It’s the rich life of the Stooges.”

* “The Three Stooges” can be seen tonight at 8 on ABC. The network has rated it TV-PG-LV (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for coarse language and violence).