A Fake Shemp or, simply, Shemp, is the term for someone who appears in a film under heavy make-up, filmed from the back, or perhaps only showing an arm or a foot. Although use of the term is limited, it is frequently used in connection with Sam Raimi's movies.
The term refers to the comedy trio the Three Stooges. In 1955, Stooge Shemp Howard died of a sudden heart attack. At the time, the Stooges still had four shorts left to deliver, by the terms of the trio's annual contract with Columbia Pictures. By this point in the trio's career, budget cuts at Columbia had forced the trio to make heavy use of stock footage from previously completed shorts, so the trio was able to complete the films without Shemp. New footage was filmed of the other two Stooges (Moe Howard and Larry Fine) and edited together with stock footage. When continuity required that Shemp appear in these new scenes, they used Shemp's stand-in, Joe Palma, to be a body double for him, appearing only from behind or with an object obscuring his face. Palma became the original Fake Shemp, although the term was not officially in use at the time.
It was aspiring filmmaker Sam Raimi, a professed Stooges fan, who coined the term in the movie The Evil Dead. Most of his crew and cast abandoned the project after production went well beyond the scheduled six weeks, so he was forced to use himself, his die-hard friends Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert, Josh Becker, assistant David Goodman, and brother Ted Raimi as Fake Shemps, and the term stuck.
To this day, Sam Raimi's productions, both in feature film and TV work, use the term to refer to stand-ins or nameless characters. However, the description is sometimes modified in the final credits. For example, in Darkman, Bruce Campbell's quick cameo in the final scene is credited as Final Shemp, and Campbell also was credited as Shemp Wooley (a pun on singer Sheb Wooley) when doing the voice of Jean-Claude the Carrier Parrot in the short-lived TV series Jack of All Trades.
