This Is Why the Farrelly Brothers Couldn’t Tell Anyone That John Hughes Was Involved With ‘Dumb and Dumber’
A lot of different elements went into making Dumb and Dumber a huge hit — from the burgeoning superstardom of Jim Carrey, to the existence of industrial strength laxatives.
But as the film’s directors, Peter and Bobby Farrelly, recently told The Guardian, one of Dumb and Dumber’s key contributors was, in fact, legendary director John Hughes. They just weren’t allowed to tell anyone at the time, thanks to an ill-defined legal threat.
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According to the Farrelly Brothers, the project originated with Hughes, who was “planning a movie called Ski Nuts about two dumb guys in Aspen. That’s all he had.” As the film’s co-writer Bennett Yellin once told Cracked’s Brian VanHooker, Hughes asked for a meeting with the writing trio after reading their unproduced script for a sequel to the disastrous Tom Hanks/Dan Aykroyd comedy Dragnet.
Yellin specified that Hughes handed the writers 50 pages worth of material about “Harry and Lloyd,” who were just “two idiots running around a ski resort.” There was no plot to speak of; it was just a series of loose set-ups and gags, such as a scene in which one character jumps into a swimming pool that’s frozen. The writers were told to mine Hughes’ work for inspiration and then pitch him a more cohesive movie idea.
“We pitched the first act of Dumb and Dumber, and (Hughes) literally fell off his chair laughing,” the Farrellys recalled. “‘This is it,’ he said. ‘And you’re directing it.’” After banging out the script in just three weeks, the studio never responded. Then Hughes left Universal, reportedly “without telling a soul,” and moved to Fox where he worked on some massive movies that in no way involved wacky ski vacations.
But without Hughes developing the project for Universal, Dumb and Dumber was abandoned. So the Farrellys asked Hughes if he could ask the studio for the Dumb and Dumber rights back, so they could try and pitch it to another studio. “He did, but said we could never use his name when selling it. If we did, it was a million dollar fine,” the Farrelly Brothers confessed.
How exactly Hughes would enforce such a steep financial penalty is unclear, but it was enough to keep the Farrellys from bringing up the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off director while discussing Dumb and Dumber, even though it meant completely obfuscating their movie’s origin story once it was finally made. “When promoting the movie, we wanted to say it was John Hughes’ idea, but we didn’t have a million dollars,” the Farrellys revealed. “Now, though, we finally thought we’d tell. We think he’d be happy for people to know the truth.”
Hughes, who passed away in 2009, might be happy to now be associated with Dumb and Dumber, but presumably he wouldn’t be thrilled to be even tangentially connected to Dumb and Dumber To or Dumb and Dumberer.
