Taking Gouging Into the Next Generation

Some thought they were hilarious, others sadistic. But the slapstick humor of these three hugely popular knockabout comics has rarely been successfully imitated.

Televison audiences in the late ‘50s and ‘60s thought they were watching a TV sitcom, when, in fact, they were tuned into broadcasts of old two-reelers that had been shown before feature films in the ‘30s, ‘40s and early ‘50s.

Now the grandson of the trio’s ringleader has movie plans for the trio he calls the Icons of Idiocy.

Need we say more? It’s the Three Stooges. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

“They were idiots, famous idiots. I think the term’s actually a kudo, a validation of how successful they were,” said Jeffrey Scott, the 39-year-old grandson of Mo Howard. Along with Interscope Communications, Scott has sold the rights to “The Three Stooges: The Next Generation” to Columbia Pictures, and the project is now in development. (That’s a tentative title, obviously, since there’s another “next generation” floating about the entertainment galaxy.)

Mo, in case anyone needs reminding, was the one with the helmet-like black haircut who used his two fingers to poke his buddies in the eyeballs, uttering lines like “you lame brain” and “oh, a wise guy, eh?” His pals were his brothers Curly, Shemp--at least in later productions--and Larry Fine. Shemp was later replaced by Joe Besser and then by Joe de Rita.

In the planned movie version, the three main characters will play grandsons of the Stooges who, once separated at birth, are brought back together through a set of comedic circumstances.

Scott wrote a first-draft of a screenplay for his father, Stooges manager Norman Maurer, back in 1971, that went nowhere. He subsequently wrote a second draft for a studio (which wasn’t made) and a third which he wrote independently and didn’t sell.

In the intervening years, the budding screenwriter and manager of the Stooges’ estate (following the death of his father in 1986) became an Emmy-award-winning writer on the animated children’s show “Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies.”

Things finally broke--apparently helped along by the trend of Hollywood producers to redo those shows with nostalgia value--when Columbia Pictures, which had optioned the rights, finally sealed the deal.

Columbia produced most of the Stooges’ shorts, including “Men in Black,” which earned them an Oscar nomination in 1934 (losing out to “La Cucaracha,” the first Technicolor movie). The studio is expected to bring in a new writer on the project.

Besides the movie version, there’s a Citadel Press coffee-table book and a line of toys available. A Three Stooges live show is planned for the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas when it opens next year and a “Wee Stooges” animated children’s television show is also in the works.

“They were the most popular comedy team in history,” Scott said. (As an aside, he mentioned how one New York television station ran three hours’ worth of Three Stooges shorts as counterprogramming to the presidential debates last year.)

And why shouldn’t he be the family cheerleading squad: “I’m a generation of Stooge myself.”