Stooge Stuff

I said recently in a Tweet, "Betcha the budget for movie with fake Stooges is 10 times the budget for all the movies ever made with the real guys." Film historian Randy Skretvedt responded by noting…

The budget for a Stooges two-reeler in 1934 was around $18,000, and it got smaller and smaller as the years went by. (The Stooges' salaries, by the way, stayed the same–they never got a raise!) Even if we keep the budget at $18,000 per film, for 190 shorts that would be $3,420,000. I'm sure the new Farrelly travesty cost many times that amount.

Press reports say the budget on the new film was $40,000,000 so I guess it's so. And to be fair, that's not uncommon and not just because of inflation. I was on the set the last day of shooting of that recent Land of the Lost movie — the one with Will Ferrell, the one you didn't see and I didn't, either. Marty Krofft, its Exec Producer and one of the guys behind the original 1974-1976 TV series on which it was based was telling folks that that last day of filming cost more than the budget of the entire original 43 episodes.

I haven't, by the way, seen the new Stooges movie…and as is my tendency, I'm pretty much staying away from reviews. I do note though that a lot of my friends have been and apparently there are two completely different versions of this movie being exhibited. One is riotously funny and the other is one of the worst movies ever made. Sure hope I get the good one when I go.

Hey, the picture above reminds me. I'm supposed to be a bit of a Stooges authority but I don't know this. What's with the "e" in Curly? Everywhere I've ever seen his name written, it's been Curly but on the title cards, it was Curley. Did he change it or was that a longtime typo or what? I can imagine he started off being Curley and at some point, so many people and press reports were spelling it Curly that he gave up and went with Curly…or maybe he, Jerome Howard, always spelled it Curly and everyone else changed it. Not that this is of great importance but I'm wondering it anyone has any info on this. Maybe he sold the letter to Wile Coyote or something.