Richard Simmons' family asks Pauly Shore to please stop
The death of Richard Simmons in July is not stopping Pauly Shore’s schtick
Photo by Greg Doherty/WireImage
For nearly a year, Pauly Shore has expressed a desire to portray famed fitness instructor Richard Simmons in a biopic. Over the course of that year, Shore has offered updates on his mission. Usually, those updates took the form of Simmons asking him to stop, which Shore would refuse. This cycle has repeated a few times, and is apparently bound to continue, even after the death of Simmons in July.
When Entertainment Tonight approached Shore earlier this week to ask about the project, the response was disappointing, if unsurprising. “I know he wanted me to do it,” Shore said, adding, without evidence: “I don’t even know if that was him tweeting [disapproval] the whole time, to be quite honest. I don’t know who that was.” If it wasn’t him, there’s a decent chance that it was either his staff or his brother Lenny—two parties who have signed tweets from Simmons’ account since his death on July 13th. Both commented yesterday, for example, to once again denounce Shore’s attempts to use their friend and relative’s life story.
“Dicky absolutely wrote his own posts. He worked on them a week in advance, going over and over them to get the right message,” reads a statement on the social media platform attributed to Lenny. “He would often read them to Cathy and I beforehand. What he has NOT done was to text, email or call Pauly with anything; not even to wish him “Good Luck” as Pauly has stated many times.”
We’d also like to share the following statement from Richard’s brother, Lenny.
“Dicky absolutely wrote his own posts. He worked on them a week in advance, going over and over them to get the right message. 2/3
— Richard Simmons (@TheWeightSaint) July 31, 2024
Aside from the obvious disrespect of the situation, Shore’s insistence also raises questions such as “Why?” and “Who asked for this?” True, the two do have some physical resemblance and bear personalities that have been ripe for parody for decades. But “Pauly Shore as Richard Simmons” sounds like a 30 Rock cutaway joke; even a five-minute SNL sketch on the topic would start to get sweaty. There’s also the fact that Shore clearly intends the project to be a joke, if his ten-minute short film on the subject is any indication. There have been joke biopics before, but something like Weird: The Al Yankovic Story included its subject as an active participant. Now the idea is both unoriginal and insensitive—two facts that probably still won’t stop Shore from trying to make his joke.