Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly’s distinctive, envelope-pushing comedy style has been celebrated worldwide since their 1994 directing debut, “Dumb and Dumber.” They have created iconic characters in distinctively original stories that have tickled the funny bones and pulled on the heartstrings of movie audiences. The Farrellys’ subsequent directorial efforts – “Kingpin,” “There’s Something About Mary,” “Me, Myself & Irene,” and “Shallow Hal” – have pulled in over $1 billion in worldwide box office.
With all of their commercial success, the Farrellys have never forgotten what ultimately drives their films and leaves audiences feeling good when they leave the theater. “For our movies to work, audiences must care about the characters,” says Peter Farrelly. “When we develop a film, we start the process by creating characters that are so likable, we can hang our brand of humor on them. In our films, we try to give the characters a lot of heart and moments of introspection because it makes them more realistic. A comedy that’s ninety minutes of laughs without any emotion tends to feel one-dimensional.”
In STUCK ON YOU, the Farrellys take their brand of humor into new directions, exploring the bond between Walt and Bob Tenor, who never let their situation prevent them from leading normal and successful lives. The genesis of the original story surfaced shortly after the Farrellys wrote “Dumb and Dumber.”
“This idea is thirteen years old,” notes Bobby Farrelly. “Our then-writing partner, Bennet Yellin, thought there’d be a good movie in a story about conjoined twins. Peter, Charlie Wessler and I agreed, but only if the twins would not be the butt of the jokes. It was very important to make them winners.”
“We wanted to do a movie about conjoined twins who really have it made,” adds Peter Farrelly. “There haven’t been many movies about conjoined twins and certainly not any with humor and a positive message. For the first five years we pitched the script, everyone was terrified of the concept. Over the years, people gradually warmed to the idea, but for one reason or another, the timing was never right for the film to come together.”
Although the script was a favorite of the Farrellys, it was not until after the completion of “Shallow Hal” in 2002 that the project got off the ground. “Our films tend to happen organically,” says Bradley Thomas, the Farrellys’ longtime producing partner. “STUCK ON YOU came together quickly when Peter took several old drafts of the script and melded them into one.”
One of the challenges in putting the film together was finding actors who could bring to life the two characters who have lived side by side for 32 years. “STUCK ON YOU is all about casting,” says Bobby Farrelly. “At first, we were unsure we’d be able to get the right actors together. In order for the story to work, the two leads had to possess chemistry. The roles also required two actors who were willing and capable of being physically connected to each other for three months, without letting that affect their performances.”
“Over the years we have had a number of potential combinations for the roles, but we didn’t quite get it right until my sister Cindy suggested Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon. Peter and I both thought they were a perfect combination.”
Early script drafts had the character of Walt looking twenty years older than Bob because they were sharing a liver and Walt was aging faster. The casting of Damon and Kinnear changed all that. “The liver-sharing element remains,” says producer Charles B. Wessler, but Matt and Greg are only a few years apart, which makes the story and their relationship much more organic and believable.”
The Farrellys and Bradley Thomas flew to New York to have dinner with Matt Damon, hoping they’d convince him to take on the role of Bob Tenor. “Matt hasn’t done a broad comedy like STUCK ON YOU, but we felt that if you’re a good actor, you can do anything – which Matt can.”
“I had heard that Peter and Bobby were interested in me for a role in a movie about conjoined twins,” says Damon. “At first I was a little skeptical because I thought it could be a little offensive. When I read the script, I found it to be a really sweet and heartwarming – and funny as hell.”
“Peter, Bobby and Bradley had me laughing all throughout dinner,” Damon continues. “I invited them to hang out at my apartment. My girlfriend was there with a few friends. Pete asked, ‘Can I use your bathroom?’ Two minutes later, he emerged soaking wet, with shampoo in his hair, and wearing only a towel. ‘You guys got any conditioner?’ he asked. The idea behind all this was, ‘If you think this isn’t funny, don’t work with us; but if you think it’s funny, then sign up. I thought it was genius, but what he didn’t know was that he had me at ‘Hello.’”
Greg Kinnear, a longtime friend of the filmmakers, was spared this bizarre meet-and-greet process. He immediately accepted the Farrellys’ offer to be joined at the hip with Damon.
“I loved Peter and Bobby’s enthusiasm and passion,” says Kinnear. “They wrote a funny script that follows two brothers, each with an identity despite being conjoined by an eight-inch piece of flesh. That’s not a typical or easy story to tell, but I thought if anyone could pull that off, it would be Peter and Bobby Farrelly.”
Says Peter Farrelly: “I feel Greg’s an unsung hero, particularly in comedies. Like the Walt character, Greg is a happy-go-lucky, optimistic guy. Matt’s character is more practical and reserved. It was perfect casting and ultimately they felt and even looked like they could be brothers.”
Bob and Walt grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, where they are accepted and loved. They own and operate Quickee Burger, a popular fast food restaurant. Despite being conjoined twins, the brothers have consistently proved that two is often better then one, as they excel in baseball, football, tennis, boxing and hockey.
Despite the twins’ hometown successes, Walt no longer can put off his dream of pursuing an acting career in Hollywood. Although Bob resists the idea, he ultimately yields to his brother.
“Walt’s desire to become an actor launches them on their journey,” says Damon. “Bob has 90% of their liver, so Walt is aging faster. Walt feels if he is ever going to take a shot at the big time, now’s his chance. It’s a big sacrifice for Bob to give up running the Quickee Burger, but ultimately he sees how much Walt really wants to be an actor. STUCK ON YOU is ultimately about the love and sacrifice of their 32-year relationship.”
After the twins leave the comfort and security of Martha’s Vineyard behind for the bright lights and uncertainty of Hollywood, they move into the seedy Rising Star apartments. Bob and Walt befriend their neighbor, April, a sexy young starlet also chasing the elusive dream of celebrity. Eva Mendes, one of today’s hottest leading actresseses, takes on the role.
“We weren’t familiar with Eva at the time of her audition,” says Bobby Farrelly. “She came in along with 50 other actresses and just blew us out of our seats. When she walked out of the room, we all agreed that we didn’t need to see any more people and we offered her the part.”
“I instantly loved April,” says Mendes. “She’s not a rocket scientist, but she’s really good-natured and ambitious. April thinks it’s cool that Walt and Bob are conjoined twins because they’re unique. She may look like a typical L.A. floozy, but she’s quirky and likes the same in her friends. The Farrellys always have that lovable sweetness in all of their characters know matter how screwed up or different they are.”
Through April, the boys meet hoary, out-of-step agent Morty O’Reilly, played by Seymour Cassel. “In Bob and Walt, Morty sees two good-looking guys and thinks he might be able to make a quick buck,” says Cassel. “He takes them on because they make a hell of team.”
Morty books Walt his first acting job – unfortunately, it’s on an “adult” film. But Walt’s fortunes take a turn for the better when a chance encounter with Cher leads the diva to cast him as the costar of her new television drama, “Honey and the Beaze.” Cher’s motive for selecting Walt? She wants to kill the show and get out of her contract. When her plan backfires and the show becomes a hit, Cher tries to bring Walt’s rising star plummeting back to earth.
In early script drafts, the Cher role was a fictional film star. “At the last second we decided to cast a real person and have her play a comical version of herself,” says Bobby Farrelly. “The first person we thought of was Cher.”
“Cher really responded to the script, but I was a little nervous when we first called her,” says Peter Farrelly. “What was written on the page was a comical and bitchy version of her that is nothing like the way she is in real life. Having grown up with Cher and knowing her from a distance, she always struck me as one of the coolest women of all time. I had a feeling she was also the kind of person who would love to poke fun at herself and let us really push the envelope.”
Another woman who enters the twins’ life is Bob’s Internet girlfriend, May Fong, played by newcomer Wen Yann Shih. After watching Bob court May online for three years, Walt thinks he is doing his brother a favor when he secretly sets up their first face-to-face encounter. Much to his surprise, Walt quickly learns that Bob has left out some “minor” details – like being a conjoined twin – in his correspondence with May.
May, as scripted, is prone to panic attacks and she’s anything but self-assured. “The actors we auditioned were wide-eyed and gorgeous,” says Bobby Farrelly. “Everyone we saw seemed to have the world by the tail, which would make it hard for audiences to believe that the character would be anxious about meeting Bob. So we decided to have her be foreign-born and uncertain of how she fits into a different culture. We looked at different nationalities, and Wen came in and hit all the right notes for us.”
For the unknown Wen Yann Shih, finding herself cast in STUCK ON YOU opposite Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear was a surreal experience. “I was absolutely shocked when I was cast,” she says. “I couldn’t get a sitcom to save my life – and here I was about to co-star in a Farrelly brothers movie.”
Rounding out the supporting cast is Pat Crawford Brown as Mimmy and Ray Valliere as Rocket, who are Walt and Bob’s longtime waitress and busboy at the Quickee Burger; Jackie Flynn as Howard, Cher’s beleaguered manager; and Terence Bernie Hines as Moe, manager of the Rising Star apartments.
With casting completed, the filmmakers began to lock in the shooting locations. Since much of the story is set in Hollywood, they filmed the first three weeks in Los Angeles – a first for the Farrellys, who opt to shoot on location.
From Los Angeles, the production headed east for a week of filming in the New England area – a Farrelly tradition – before traveling to Miami, where they shot “There’s Something About Mary.” Cher joined the production in Miami, where she spends much of her time, and she was delighted to show cast and crew around the city.
Eva Mendes returned to Miami for this, her fourth consecutive movie shoot. “Miami is a great city,” she says, “but having recently spent so much time working there, I might have preferred another locale, had it not been for the chance to work with the Farrellys.”
Tony Gardner, the Farrelly brothers’ longtime special makeup effects supervisor, had the responsibility of joining Damon and Kinnear together – literally – at the hip.
Gardner created a prosthetic that held the two actors together when they were clothed, and another that worked when the script called for the characters to be shirtless.
“When I first spoke to the Farrellys about the film, it was all about technically proving the concept was viable,” says Gardner, who in 2002 turned Gwyneth Paltrow into a 300-pound woman in “Shallow Hall.” “Peter and Bobby said, ‘Show us that we can make this movie.’ The logistics of two connected bodies moving different ways, and attaching all of the muscle groups together, made this the most difficult makeups we’ve ever done.”
Gardner created a series of harnesses that held the actors together while still allowing them freedom of movement. “Once we decided to go the harness route, the first issue was who would be on what side and what was going to be their body posture,” says Gardner. “We put them in different conjoined configurations and tried different connective shaped masses. Ultimately, we had Bob and Walt face away from each other with one body moved slightly in front of the other.
“With the body positioning finalized, we did body casts in the posture of the way we wanted them to stand, to see how their bodies would impact one another. From the body casts we made duplicate fiberglass bodies, then made the harnesses that would hold them in a specific pose.”
After weeks of trial and error, Gardner and his team were ready to test the apparatus. “We put Matt and Greg in the everyday harness they would wear underneath their clothes, and applied the prosthetic make-up over the sub-harness which was made of fabric and netting gear. We put them together with a five-piece overlapping giant torso prosthetic make-up piece. Matt and Greg were watching it all go down in a mirror, and the process fascinated them.”
Gardner continued to refine and improve the harnesses, while Damon and Kinnear trained their bodies to move as one efficient unit. Prior to the start of principal photography, they rehearsed at the home of actress/author Carrie Fisher. “We strapped ourselves to a stunt man and practiced our movements,” says Damon. “We went through all the physical tasks we had to perform in the film including working the grill, which we did in Carrie’s kitchen.”
From the first day of production, Damon’s and Kinnear’s creativity impressed the STUCK ON YOU cast and crew. “You could see the wheels turning and they came up with character nuances and tics we never would have thought about incorporating into the story,” says Peter Farrelly. “They really opened up a whole new aspect of the movie.”
Adds Bobby Farrelly: “Matt and Greg could have played it where they’re sort of the same person and are finishing each other’s sentences, but instead they played Walt and Bob as completely different guys whose whole is better than the sum of the parts.”
“We determined that after 32 years of being conjoined, these guys would have figured out a way to acknowledge and respect each other’s personal space,” says Damon. “Therefore, when one of them needs a moment to think about something and needs to pace, the other brother is respectful of that and just kind of follows along. Our presumption was that although they were always physically together, they figured out a way to respect each other’s privacy.”
For Damon and Kinnear, being attached at the hip was made bearable only by the fact that they became close friends. “Matt was totally abusive,” laughs Greg Kinnear. “Actually, he’s about as good a person as you’d want to have physically attached to yourself for three months. That was part of the job we signed up for – show up for work and crawl into a harness contraption that I jokingly referred to as a fitted medieval torture piece. When people visited the set, the one thing they couldn’t resist asking us was, ‘You guys must really get along.’”
“I realized quickly that I was going to like Greg,” says Damon. “He’s a funny and interesting person to talk to, which was such a relief because we were stuck together fourteen hours a day. If we didn’t like each other, it would have been miserable because we had to do everything together – including going to the bathroom. We actually had a bet on who was going to crack first, rip off the harness and never come back.”
STUCK ON YOU’s climactic set piece, set in Martha’s Vineyard, is a musical version of “Bonnie and Clyde,” starring Walt Tenor (Greg Kinnear) and Meryl Streep, who makes a special, uncredited appearance in the picture. “We thought it would be great to send audiences out of the theater on a high note,” says Bobby Farrelly. “Peter had a song in his head for the end of the film and he asked me, ‘How about a musical number?’”
The filmmakers brought on choreographer-turned-director Adam Shankman, who helmed the hits “Bringing Down the House,” “Maid in Manhattan” and “A Walk to Remember” to conceptualize and choreograph the sequence.
Shankman was happy to slip back into choreographer mode. “Working on STUCK ON YOU was a great opportunity because I love comedy and I’m a big fan of the Farrellys,” says Shankman. “People don’t ask me to choreograph anymore, so it was a privilege to choreograph a musical sequence that involved Greg Kinnear and Meryl Streep.”
With Kinnear, Streep and Shankman flanked by fellow cast members and eighteen dancers in period costumes, “Bonnie and Clyde: The Musical” was filmed over two days at The Manuel Artime Community Theater in Miami’s Little Havana.
“The musical was bad dinner theater turned into ‘Chicago,’” laughs producer Bradley Thomas. “Adam Shankman, a fine filmmaker in his own right, did a tremendous job and took it to a level that we never dreamed possible. He made ‘Bonnie and Clyde: The Musical’ look and feel spectacular.”
Greg Kinnear acquits himself well in his motion picture singing debut. “I want people to know that I really sang in the scene,” says Kinnear. “I actually went into the recording studio for six hours and sat there in my isolated little birdcage trying to sing. I probably made our sound engineers suffer as they watched, with a look on their face that said, ‘Greg, let’s try it again, please.’”
Production designer Sidney J. Bartholomew, a longtime Farrelly collaborator, and art director Arlan Jay Vetter supervised the transformation of a Miami community theater stage into a Broadway set.
“When Peter and Bobby came up with the idea of the musical sequence, I began to research speakeasies and came up with a conceptual crude drawing for the theater set,” says Bartholomew. “We decided on going with a speakeasy kind of feel because that translated well into having an old jazz band and big dance number. We were trying to make it look like a production on Martha’s Vineyard, but with almost the scale of a Broadway Show. We took those elements and combined them into a fully functional set.”
Directed by : Peter and Bobby Farrelly
Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Cher, Eva Mendes, Terence Bernie Hines, Jackie Flynn, Skyler Stone, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson
Screenplay by: Peter and Bobby Farrelly
Production Design by: Sydney J. Bartholomew Jr.
Cinematography by: Daniel Mindel
Film Editing by: Christopher Greenbury, Dave Terman
Costume Design by: Alexander AD, Deena Appel
Set Decoration by: Scott Jacobson
Music by: Charlie Gartner
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, and some language.
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: December 12, 2003
