Dumb and Dumber is a 1994 American road comedy directed by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly, with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels starring as Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne, two spectacularly clueless friends who leave Providence, Rhode Island, and drive across the country to return a briefcase to Mary Swanson in Aspen. The film is built around idiocy, slapstick and escalating bad decisions, but its appeal also comes from the strange innocence of its two main characters. Their road trip turns a simple misunderstanding into a full-scale comic odyssey, and the film became one of the defining broad comedies of the 1990s.
The film was shot across Rhode Island, Utah and Colorado, with several places standing in for other parts of the story. The opening Providence material uses real Rhode Island locations, including the city skyline and the Big Blue Bug, while the road-trip sections move through areas such as Cumberland, Rhode Island, and multiple Utah locations around Salt Lake City, Ogden, Heber City and American Fork Canyon. Although the story’s destination is Aspen, several “Aspen” scenes were actually filmed in Breckenridge, Colorado, and Park City, Utah, while the lavish Danbury Hotel was filmed at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Snowy mountain scenes were shot at Copper Mountain Resort, and Salt Lake City International Airport was used for airport material. The result is a film that feels like a chaotic cross-country journey even though its geography is stitched together from New England streets, Utah roads, Colorado mountain resorts and carefully chosen stand-ins.
The Stanley Hotel
The Stanley Hotel is the inspiration for King’s novel The Shining (1977) and used for The Shining in 1997. The hotel also appears in Dumb and Dumber (1994).
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