Fake Shemp
Shemp Howard
‘The Original… Shemp’
(March 11, 1895 – November 22, 1955)
Born Samuel Horwitz, Shemp Howard, as he was known professionally, started his career in the 1920s when he joined his brother Moe Howard and Ted Healy (Moe’s childhood friend) on stage for a "roughhouse" act. Shemp then joined the group’s act known as "Ted Healy and His Stooges" with Larry Fine joining in 1928. The act consisted of Healy singing and telling jokes with the Stooges often getting in his way and Healy reacting with physical and verbal abuse.
After the Stooges' first film, Soup to Nuts (1930) and a contractual dispute, Moe, Larry and Shemp left to launch their own act, "Howard, Fine & Howard," on the vaudeville circuit. Despite their past differences, the Stooges would work with Ted Healy again in 1932 for the Shubert’s Broadway revue "Passing Show of 1932", as Healy by that point was nationally known; yet Shemp, tired of Healy's domineering handling, would soon end his partnership with him after the latter walked out of the middle of the Shubert's revue during rehearsals. Shemp was immediately replaced by his and Moe's younger brother Jerry “Curly” Howard.
When Curly became gravely ill, Shemp replaced his brother in 1947 for what he thought was a temporary gig. After Shemp’s own death in 1955, Moe planned for the Stooges to disband, yet due to a contractual obligation with Columbia Pictures, they were required to make four more films. To fill Shemp’s absence, the production studio used old footage of Shemp and a voice 14 over to complete certain shots. When continuity became an issue, actor Joe Palma stood in as a body double using costumes and elaborate camera angles to obscure Palma’s face.
The “Fake Shemp”
Director Sam Raimi coined the term “fake shemp” when he ran far behind schedule in his film production of The Evil Dead and several actors walked off. To create the footage needed, Raimi used stand in actors— or “shemps”— when needed.
Today we define the “fake shemp” as someone who appears in a film as a replacement for another actor or person with their appearance disguised using methods of heavy make-up (or a computer-generated equivalent), filming them from behind, dubbing in audio and past footage from the original actor's previous work, using a sound-alike voice actor, or using partial shots of the actor.
The “Fake Shemp” in Other Films
The “fake shemp” was originally used, though not at the time so named, before Shemp Howard’s death in the 1937 film Saratoga when lead actress Jean Harlow died of kidney failure and the studio used actress Mary Dees to play Harlow by shooting Dees from behind and using costumes. When actor Bela Lugosi died when the film Plan 9 from Outer Space was being made, the director used old footage and his wife’s chiropractor (though he looked nothing like Lugosi) to fill in missing pieces. Even Superman II used a “fake shemp” for actor Gene Hackman when he refused to shoot certain scenes. When Harrison Ford injured his back during the filming of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Stephen Spielberg used the actor’s stunt double (who looked remarkably like the actor) to complete shots. However, the use of “fake shemps” became forbidden after the 1989 production of Back to the Future II when actor Crispin Glover refused to return for his role from the previous film and actor Jeffrey Weissman was cast in the role using a prosthetic mask of Glover’s face; Glover subsequently filled a lawsuit against the studio for violating the original actor's personality rights.
Nevertheless, the use of “shemps” can still be seen today when studios replace actors who have previously died using CGI to create an artificial digital “shemp”. Such examples of “CGI shemps” include films and shows, The Sopranos, Brandon Lee in The Crow, Gladiator, Paul Walker in the Fast and the Furious franchise, Poltergeist 3, and the Star Wars franchise to simply name a few.
