Tuesday, October 1, 2013

What knucklehead left it in a garden shed?

2cents emails to point out breaking news from the world of art.  A long lost Three Stooges film has been rediscovered:
A Three Stooges short previously thought lost in a 1967 fire has just received its first screening since being rediscovered in a garden shed in Australia.
Hello, Pop!, a 17-minute short made for MGM in 1933 featuring the Stooges alongside their creator, Ted Healy, was the only Three Stooges film thought not to have survived, after MGM's negative was destroyed in a vault fire in 1967 that also consumed the only known copy of Tod Browning's silent shocker London After Midnight. However, 78-year-old film collector Malcolm Smith came across a 35mm nitrate negative of the film in his shed in a Sydney suburb while sorting through his collection for disposal. Smith then contacted the Vitaphone Project, an archive and preservation organisation in the US, in December last year, and they took on the job of restoring it.
The article has a lot of Three Stooges background that I hadn't known, even though these played a big part of my (and 2cents') youth.  And there are some more things I hadn't known here, too:


1 comment:

TOTWTYTR said...

I don't know if I should be ashamed or proud that I knew all of the trivia facts in the video.

Shemp was the original third stooge. He quit because he didn't want to work with Ted Healey who was a heroin user and at times would punch the his three "stooges" around. Not in the vaudeville way, but in a real way. Shemp quit and while remaining close to his two brothers and Larry Fine, went on to have a comedic career of his own. He only returned at the request of Moe after Curly had a stroke in 1945 and was unable to return. There is only one short "Hold That Lion" in which all four of the original Stooges appear. Curly had a cameo in which he was seated on the train. Not too long after that, he died.

Shemp continued on as the third Stooge until his sudden death in 1955. Many of the Shemp shorts were very good, but they are overshadowed by the remakes of earlier Curly shorts and over use of both stock footage and footage from the Curly shorts.

Of course by this time TV was starting to gain a foothold, and short subjects became a dying art form. Ironically, TV also resurrected the Three Stooges Careers as a new generation started to watch them. No doubt the TV stations put them on at first because they were cheap. The Stooges made something like $10,000.00 per short and there was no such thing as "residuals".

Which, by the way was an idea invented by none other than Ricky Ricardo for "I Love Lucy".

When the shorts were big in the movies, they were really only promos for the Stooges thriving Vaudeville shows. They made more money from live shows than the shorts.

Moe invested his money in CA real estate and was quite wealthy. Larry, OTOH, spent his and died in a movie actors charity rest home.

To show you that I have no real life, except for the year of Shemp's death everything I just wrote was from my knowledge of the Stooges.

One other fun fact before I stop. "Men in Black" 1934, was nominated for an Emmy for Best Short Subject. It lost to another short from MGM called "La Cucaracha". Which probably hasn't been seen anywhere since, uh, 1934.