Busy Buddy (1955 (?) 1956) -
You will never see this film, though a print exists. When Buddy Hackett claimed he had turned down the third-stooge job because they were hitting each other with real tools and other dangerous implements, it was taken as a comedic story and disregarded, but one print, and one only, exists which verifies Hackett's story. On his deathbed, before many witnesses, Buddy related that he had had a formal readthrough of a script with the entire stooge team assembled, and his reading was so good and so youthfully sparkling that Jules White and the other assembled execs went wild and hired him on the spot. Moe and Larry were furious, knowing that Hackett would make them look washed-up and downright elderly, so they decided on extreme measures, and since this was going to be a remake of The Sitter Downers, a construction film, they would use actual tools and actual accidents and actual dynamite to discourage this upstart. Hackett, not knowing any better, went along with the slapstick, taking hits from real iron crowbars, sledgehammers, nailguns, etc. sucking up the pain as best he could, hiding the bandages and trying to walk until the effort became utterly impossible. If you could see the one print, which was so grotesque and bloody as to be utterly unreleasable to the public ( and which no one outside the one collector's immediate family ever will see ) you would see that Buddy starts out the film acting like a youthful, joyous Curly, and ends it looking like Steven Hawking. Columbia lawyers realized that this was ruinously actionable, and settled quickly with the Hackett family ( Buddy recovered eventually, at least to the extent that we all remember him ) and, under threat of a separate lawsuit, settled money and the one existing print (they'd burned the negative but forgotten the one positive) on the Spike Jones organization, with whom it remains, since they had earlier contracted Buddy for Fireman Save My Child.
