Richard Simmons' family asks Pauly Shore to please stop

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.”