If one can leave aside the billion dollars that their films have earned, it’s possible to think of the Farrellys as industry outsiders. Jeff Daniels has compared them to “lottery winners cut loose in Hollywood.” They are easy, open company. Both are married to women they knew before they were rich; they fill their films with friends from home. On a recent long drive through the Rockies with the Farrellys and Mike Cerrone, the conversation was about Rhode Island school friends who had died in freak accidents or lived lives of spectacular deceit; about the comparative virtues of bathrooms in roadside hotel chains (“Holiday Inn, maybe, but Holiday Inn Express? I don’t need the pressure,” Peter said); and about the casting for “The Three Stooges,” which is likely to have a budget of between fifty and seventy million dollars.

“Until Russell Crowe says no, we can’t go to anybody else,” Bobby said, and the others agreed. Peter and the Farrellys’ longtime producer, Bradley Thomas, had recently met with Crowe in Sydney. “He’s the best actor working today,” Peter told me, “and he’s got a bit of a chip on his shoulder, and a block-nosed Moe look. All you have to do is put prosthetic bags under his eyes and give him a haircut.” Crowe initially said that he was not interested; then they had a big night out that ended at Crowe’s apartment in the early hours, and when Peter got up to leave, at 5 a.m., to appear for an interview on Australian morning television, Crowe called him a “despicable pussy” for breaking up the party. But Crowe did say, “Send me the stupid script.” When Crowe later spoke with him, Peter said, “He said he laughed his ass off but didn’t like the ending. So now we’re going to send him the new draft.”

“The Three Stooges” is due to start shooting in mid-October, and you can hear in Bradley Thomas’s voice an urgency about settling on a cast. “If you do this, you’re a Stooge,” he said. “You can’t just turn up and be an actor. If you’re going to be Curly, you’ve got to learn how to be Curly.” Bobby added, “They are going to have to spend a few weeks together, learning how to slap each other. Nobody has done this since the Stooges.” He knows of no specialists to hire. “It’s not like there’s a bunch of guys somewhere still poking each other in the eye. We’re just going to have to slow the films down and study how they did it.”

If the Farrellys still sounded relaxed, “it’s because we have a Zen approach to casting,” Peter said. “Here’s the thing. If you get everything you want, then it’s going to be as good as you wanted it, but if you don’t get what you want, then it could be better. If I think of all the women I might have married before I met my wife . . .” He said that Jim Carrey was “our two-hundredth choice” for “Dumb & Dumber”; Ben Stiller was their eighth for “There’s Something About Mary.”

Warner Bros. has asked the Farrellys to choose a Moe before they cast the others. The Three Stooges were short men, and will appear short in this film. (“If they look bigger, then the hitting is ‘The Sopranos,’ ” Peter said.) It will be easy to cast very tall actors around fairly tall actors like Russell Crowe, but it would be best if the Stooges were all the same height. “If Russell doesn’t want it, then we should go straight back to Benicio,” Peter said from the passenger seat; the Farrellys had spoken with Benicio Del Toro, but Warner Bros. had balked at his asking price. “That could still work—Benicio . . . and Sean Penn as Larry.” The Farrellys have envisioned other casting scenarios. Peter later told me, “I’ve asked Larry David to play Larry maybe twenty-five times. He whines, ‘I don’t want to leave my family.’ Now I talk to him as if he’s in. It gives him a little panic each time.” The Farrellys have also entertained the idea of Mel Gibson as Moe—Gibson is an admirer of the Stooges, and was the executive producer of a Stooges bio-pic in 2000. “He’s a good actor, and he could use a movie like this, just for his own health,” Bobby said. “Just do a dumb comedy.”

"Look at those colors,” Peter said as we drove across high desert: tumbleweed, distant mountains. “Pfff,” Cerrone said, in mock disdain. Bobby, in the voice of Moe, said, “Ya like colors? How about black and blue?” Peter initiated a simple game: naming a type of vegetable, in turn, until none were left. This lasted for a hundred miles, and involved controversies about rhubarb and tomatoes, and ended when Cerrone was caught reading the back of a vegetable-soup can at a gas station. Reviving a form of schoolroom torture, Peter now and then grabbed at his fellow-passengers at a point just above the knee and held the leg for a moment in a crushing grip. When CDs were played, he mimed along to songs with the wrong instrument—violin for guitar, flute for piano—following an old family joke that has found its way into the script of “The Three Stooges.” At one point, Cerrone performed a favorite party gag: a five-minute impression of someone using a vibrator.

Late that night, still beset with anxiety about the risks of an hour and a half of slapstick, Bobby and Cerrone had a breakthrough: What if they split “The Three Stooges” into four episodes? The script would still tell the same story, but each of its acts would almost stand alone, at the approximate length of a Stooges short. The movie would fade to black, then fade up again, with Stooges theme music and a new title. The audience would get its bearings—and a sense that slapstick had been contained in its proper length. The Farrellys and Cerrone discussed this over breakfast the next morning. “I tell you the truth, I think it’s a really smart idea,” Peter said. “You know, this may interest Russell Crowe.” He added that he had already thought of a title for the first episode: “More Orphan Than Not.”

Every morning in Sun Valley, the Farrellys and Cerrone went to the gym and ate a late breakfast. Then, in Peter’s room, they would begin a four- or five-hour conversation that covered, for example, whether “orphanage,” when spoken by the Stooges, was spelled “oiphanage” or “oyphanage,” and whether Curly’s trademark chuckle could follow an accidental pun. (“No, ‘nyuk, nyuk, nyuk’ is only when he knows he’s kidding,” Peter ruled.) A new draft began to appear, incorporating the episodic structure—“How about this for the second title: ‘Cocks and Balls’?” Peter suggested. “It fades up, and they’re kicking a soccer ball and there’s a chicken around. And then it just goes on.” The others laughed.

In an afternoon session, Bobby said, “The scene we don’t have is where they sit down at some dinner table with fancier people.”

“We have a party at the end,” Peter replied, adding, “I don’t like the dinner-table bit. The Stooges did it to death; it’s kind of hard to beat it.” He paused. “One thing we don’t have here is the ultimate hit fest. Where it’s whoosh, ding, bong, bing”—he was miming punches. “And then, when you think it’s all over, there are a couple more. Boom, dong, bing, whoosh. It’s always funnier the further it goes. Those last two kill you. You think it’s over and then you get a whoosh, boom. We’ve got a lot of hitting but not one set that goes beyond normal. We need one real long one.”

Mike Cerrone began miming, too: “It goes, you know, bang, then whoosh, whoosh—right?—and then he goes whoosh. ‘Hey! What’s the big idea?’ ” Cerrone, who is a talented Stooges mimic, a sometime actor in Farrelly films, and a possible Curly in the movie, demonstrated Moe grabbing at Larry’s hair, then trying to do the same with Curly, who has none. He had Moe looking at his empty hand.

“You know, you could do one where he puts his hand down Curly’s pants,” Peter said. He stood up, and mimed Moe grabbing some pubic hair inside Curly’s pants, and then, with a crunching sound, pulling it up: “Yeaww!”

They laughed at this perfect synthesis of Farrelly and Stooge.

“Yeaooooow!” Bobby said, holding an imaginary fistful of hair. “You could have a bird flying out of it . . . ”

“Yes, it’s a little nest with birds in it,” said Cerrone, fluttering his wings.

“Yeah, there you go!” Peter said, in the tone of a man who has done a good day’s work. “There you go.” ♦