Evan Handler Links

Actor Evan Handler Is Slap-Happy in 'Stooges'

AP Online
FRAZIER MOORE, AP Television Writer
April 24, 2000

NEW YORK -- If you wanted to poke Evan Handler in the eye, you'd need to get your fingers past those cool eyeglasses with the diamond-shaped frames.

The Three Stooges, undisputed champions of the two-fingered eye poke, never wore glasses. For them, nothing got in the way of comedy.

Of course, they didn't really gouge each other's eyes out, as Handler found when he portrayed Larry, the bushy-haired Stooge. Your fingers, he learned, should actually make contact with the victim's brow, thus sparing him discomfort and possible blindness.

In this affectionate, bittersweet group portrait, you will also learn of the Stooges' humble beginnings as low-paid vaudeville performers.

Then Larry Fine, Moe Howard (played by Paul Ben-Victor) and his brother Shemp (John Kassir) got a call from Hollywood. When their big movie deal fell through, Shemp left the act. Moe drafted another brother (Michael Chiklis), who, after shaving his head, became Curly.

In 1934, the Stooges landed a regular gig at Columbia Pictures, where, never given their due in money or respect, they literally slapped together some 200 comedy classics that have helped define silliness for the past two-thirds of a century (and probably always will).

It's a story worth seeing, even for closet Stooges fans. You know, the people who may not cop to enjoying the sight of grown men playing Punch-and-Judy -- but who, if given half a chance, can't resist mimicking Curly's ''woo-woo-woo!'' or Moe's ''Oh, a wise guy.''

"As a kid, I was somewhere between indifferent to and frightened of the Stooges,'' Handler concedes over a recent lunch at a Manhattan coffee shop. ''I just thought they were creepy and weird.

''But in my late teens and early 20s, coming home after drinking and smoking pot, I found them hysterical. Absolutely hysterical!''

Handler, now 39, was starring on the ABC sitcom ''It's Like, You Know ...'' as trust-fund slacker Shrug when the ''Stooges'' offer arrived early this year. Then he got word that ''It's Like'' had been canceled.

Next thing he knew, he was on a plane to Sydney, Australia. There, Larry's porcupinish fuzz would be applied to Handler's shiny pate (treatment for acute leukemia in his 20s left him bald). Shooting began in late January.

''I didn't think the project was anything special,'' Handler confides, ''and I thought it was a long way to travel. But it turned out to be one of my favorite experiences, ever.''

With a dash of angst he adds, ''I don't tend to have a great experience easily.''

For Handler, the key to the movie -- and the Stooges -- is the fractious love that bonds brothers.

''The Stooges are all about a big brother, Moe, and a little brother, along with Larry, the outsider who was welcomed as a surrogate brother.

''Little brothers stick by their big brother even though they get smacked around 'cause they want his approval,'' Handler goes on. ''Curly and Larry are always turning to Moe as if to say, 'Didn't I do good?' And they get smacked instead of praised.''

Besides depicting the behind-the-scenes drama of these brothers, Handler with his co-stars got to create from scratch the Stooges' suitably threadbare vaudeville act.

Conversely, the actors had to resurrect certain sketches from the Stooges' actual films.

''I don't think we strove to do an absolute breath-by-breath re-creation, but they're pretty darn accurate,'' Handler says. ''We were all determined to break each routine down slowly and learn it.

''And we all took plenty of accidental shots. I got several fingers in the eye.''

Handler has suffered worse.

In the 1980s, leukemia ambushed him. He was a rising young stage and film actor. He was even up for a role in a big-budget comedy starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman; his disease may have spared him from the legendary bomb ''Ishtar.''

In any case, his four-year nightmare and miraculous recovery inspired Handler's mordantly uplifting memoir, ''Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors.'' It's a remarkable book that Handler plans to turn into a film, and to direct it.

Another Handler project will likely never see the light of day. During spring 1994, he co-starred in the TV pilot for ''Frogman,'' a
prospective new series for O.J. Simpson.

''O.J. just seemed to be a very, very famous guy who was perfectly nice,'' Handler recalls. ''He was dating his ex-wife again. He would talk openly about that.''

Come June, of course, Simpson's ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman were found hacked to death outside her home. ''Frogman'' never aired. But the world was sucked into a real-life O.J. drama.

Apart from the tragedy of the slayings, Handler says ''the most striking thing to me was, I was never contacted by the L.A. police department. I was there with (Simpson) for five weeks.''

Handler says that, at one point, they were filming in the neighborhood of the downtown Los Angeles cutlery shop where Simpson reportedly bought a 15-inch knife a few weeks before the murders he was charged with committing.

''Nobody ever contacted me,'' Handler says with a bemused smile. ''Except the tabloids.''

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