Some perspective...
Over a year ago, Warner Brothers dropped its option to produce the movie. As far as I know (specifically, as of three weeks ago when I was in LA and had ocassion to speak with a couple WB execs), the studio has no intention to pick it up again. The last official news, from the Farrellys themselves in a recent interview, they are shopping it around and cannot interest another studio; they're exploring financing it themselves, maybe.
Imdb information is prone to misleading information from inventive publicists and licensors, and the ocassional jokester who sneaks bogus information past some clueless imdb editor. The imdb entry contradicts last year's New Yorker Magazine article about the Farrellys' Stooge project, and it incorrectly lists WB as the producing studio.
Until I read some official publicity verification, I will presume this latest imdb entry to be as full of it as it appears.
Something struck me as strange about the idea of casting a female Curly, as I said. This does have the earmarks of a hoax; I don't know what kind of fact-checking procedures are in place at IMDB (if any), but to give you another, parallel example, pranksters have slipped some phony, made-up entries into Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, because
anyone can submit or edit an entry, and there's little or no vetting of the contents before they go online. The web is not like a print newspaper or magazine, where every effort is made to ensure accuracy— but even they still get caught short sometimes, as the New York Times did a couple of years ago with reporter Jayson Blair, who was phoning in completely bogus stories, lounging around in hotel rooms at company expense when he was supposedly out covering them.
I wondered if my leg was being pulled there, but then I thought, "Hell, there are so many unbelievably lousy movie ideas around these days— and a lot of them get produced— why
not a woman playing Curly Howard?" I went back and forth on this, first thinking that it was totally absurd; but then I looked at the actress's picture, and she has kind of a chubby face, so if you shaved her head... hmm...
So I couldn't totally rule out that this was for real, especially coming from the Farrelly brothers. If this is a prank, it's a pretty good one if it even had ultra-skeptical
me going for a while!