There’s no idea like a really bad idea

When it comes to having stupid ideas, Hollywood is the movie-industry equivalent to Einstein. How else do you explain D.W. Griffith’s heroizing the Ku Klux Klan in “Birth of a Nation”? Charlton “Moses” Heston attempting to portray a professional football quarterback in “Number One”? The five sequels to “Police Academy”? Any Ben Affleck move that doesn’t co-star Matt Damon? Cindy Crawford saying lines such as “I was hoping to demo your unit.” Bo Derek ?

Yet the other night I saw a trailer for a movie that has to be the worst idea that has ever come out of Hollywood. “White Chicks” features Marlon and Shawn Wayans playing two FBI agents assigned to protect two young socialites bearing obvious resemblances to Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. For some reason, the two black comic actors find themselves doing a Jack Lemmon/Tony Curtis and dressing as women. In this case, they dress as the two white women they’re supposed to be protecting.

And if the trailer is any indication of what’s to come, this is bound to be bad even by Hollywood standards. The makeup that the brothers wear makes them look like supermodels from the planet Zongor, and the result is about as funny as a bad case of dysentery on prom night. What I wonder is why director Keenen Ivory Wayans didn’t write a part for Ben Affleck.