The Three Stooges Book of Scripts

by Joan Howard Maurer

Traces the career of the Three Stooges comedy team and examines the scripts for three of their movies

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not Maurer's finest hour. Moe's daughter could do excellent work, like Curly: The Illustrated Biography of the Superstooge, but also things like this. Unfortunate choice of movies, for starters, since as she admits, "Men in Black" and "Three Little Pigskins" aren't Grade A Stooges -- and even stranger, there's no script here for the latter, since the drafts Maurer was able to track down were too different from the finished product. She wound up including a chapter on it anyway, since "the cover art was at the printers and the Pigskins title would be on it," so points for honesty.

The hundreds of still photos and enlarged frames are welcome, but have not always been improved by adding word balloons to many of them giving the original dialogue or, worse, "new dialogue if we [Maurer and her husband, Stooges manager Paul Maurer] thought it was funnier." It isn't. Then there's stuff like "What follows is a totally cockamamie football sequence with incredible screw-ups that only the screwy Three Stooges could perform." But memories of growing up in the Stooges' extended family do a lot to make up for that, as do the occasional script pages with scenes that didn't make it onto the screen. (There's more where that came from in Stoogeology, if deleted scenes grab your interest.)

If this book were a Stooges movie, it would be one of the Joe Bessers -- but one of the better ones.

[Keri-Ann Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It was so much fun comparing what we see on the screen to what was written in the original outline. Only thing i was disappointed about was that even though its advertised the actual script to Thee Little Pigskins and Punch Drunks is not in there. For Punch Drunks i understand as this was the ONLY short the boys wrote themselves so the out line they completed is what we see in this book. However for Three Little Pigskins, Joan Howard Maurer states that she left it out as the script looks nothing like what we got on screen. So why include it? What she added instead was pictures from the short and little details about the scene. Considering it was called a book of scripts, no matter how different i was looking forward to seeing the actual script. Even with that though, the rest of the book and the pictures included still warranted a five star from me.