Circa 1909, Moe appeared as a child actor in a handful of shorts made at the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn. These films no longer exist, and no existing documentation includes Moe in the credits. Other than Moe's recorded recollections, which are scant, there is nothing to support a filmography entry.
Reportedly, Honus Wagner appeared in one of those 1909 Vitagraph comedies, and reportedly filmed a scene teaching a youngster (Moe?) how to swing a bat. Again, no documentation, just an off-hand comment that Moe made at one time during one of his 1970s interviews.
1982, The Three Stooges Scrapbook includes a brief comment written by the Lenburg brothers that Moe appeared in a series of Honus Wagner shorts filmed in Pittsburgh. In the early '90s at one of the Philadelphia Conventions, Joan Howard told me she did not know where the Lenburgs got that information; as co-author, it did not come from her, and she was not aware of anything in her father's papers that may have sourced the information.
Most likely... Jeff and Greg had Moe's comment about the possible 1909 short, discovered that Wagner reportedly made some shorts in Pittsboigh in 1919, and combined the two pieces into an undocumented, and probably inaccurate statement.
Skip to the book that the Benjamins of C3 commissioned Fleming to write in 2000. Fleming added Shemp to the story, presumably because Moe and Shemp were playing the blackface vaudeville circuit in Pennsylvania in 1919.
Ref the imdb entry for SPRING FEVER (1919). SPRING FEVER (1919) was a Harold Lloyd comedy filmed at the Hal Roach Studios in Culver City PA, costarring Snub Pollard. Honus Wagner, Moe Howard and Shemp Howard are not in that film, nor was it filmed in Pittsburgh. The usual imdb problem... anyone can register to submit data, imdb does not check or edit data, and makes it difficult for corrections to be submitted. So that imdb entry continues to fuel the bullshit.
Rich Finegan has looked into the 1919 Wagner tales about Moe, and after a couple years, not one piece of corroborating information has been revealed; his research includes the Library of Congress, Vitagraph files at The Vitaphone Project, various silent film repositories like UCLA, etc.
- Moe's memories tell us about a handful of 1909 Vitagraph shorts he was in; probably true, but no documentation.
- The 1919 Honus Wagner stories about Moe (and Shemp), pending proof, have no basis.
