The Farrelly brothers relax on the set of Mary with star Cameron Diaz.

The dream motivated Farrelly to quit his job and join with a boyhood friend to launch a new product—the round beach towel. Marketed as the “Sun Spot,” its concept was simple: rather than move your towel as the sun moves, you just move your body.

Meanwhile, brother Peter, who’d earned his undergraduate degree at Providence College and a master’s in creative writing at Columbia University, had relocated to California to try his hand at writing books. What started out as Bobby giving feedback on Peter’s stories has turned into a highly successful collaboration between the brothers.

“I would just give him some ideas on how to make his stories better—you know, more of this guy, less of that one,” Farrelly says. “After a while, we started thinking that we should try to write a screenplay together. We sat down and wrote one, and we’ve never stopped.”

After nearly a decade of collaboration on a dozen scripts, the pair had yet to have a movie made. “The rule of thumb is that the studios will purchase or try to develop about 30 different screenplays for every one they make,” Farrelly explains. “And we were one of the 30. We’d have an idea, get ourselves into the studio and pitch the idea, and they’d give us enough money to go off and write it.”

In addition to screenplays, they sold scripts for television series, including two episodes of Seinfeld.

In 1994, the brothers decided to take the plunge and make Dumb and Dumber into a movie. Part of the difficulty in getting a picture made, Farrelly says, is getting either a director or a “name” actor to come on board. Once you have one, it’s easier to attract the other.

So the Farrellys named themselves the directors. “We’d never made anything—not a commercial, an MTV video, we never even made a home movie!” Farrelly laughs. “But we had written the script, so they couldn’t take that away from us.”

Perhaps because of their persistence, they attracted enough financing to create a small budget. “A lot of good breaks happened right at that point, not the least of which was that Jim Carrey read the script and wanted to make the movie. All of a sudden it went from a low-budget independent movie to the studios becoming interested because Jim Carrey was getting hot,” Farrelly says.

Dumb and Dumber was a surprise success, earning more than $340 million.

Scene from Dumb and Dumber (after Lloyd trades in the duo’s van for a moped):
Harry (Jeff Daniels): “Just when I thought you couldn’t do anything dumber you do something like this…and totally redeem yourself!”

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