Pauly Shore and Richard Simmons look enough like each other that it’s not a stretch for Shore to portray the fitness guru in a biopic.

What is a stretch, however, is Richard Simmons wanting to be the subject of that film.

Just hours after it was announced in a news release that Shore would be starring in a Richard Simmons biopic for a Warner Bros. subsidiary known as the Wolper Group, Simmons issued a message via his Facebook page that said he had no involvement in the movie.

“You may have heard they may be doing a movie about me with Pauly Shore. I have never given my permission for this movie. So don’t believe everything you read,” Simmons wrote in a statement posted to his verified page on Wednesday.

Simmons, 75, rose to fame in the late 1970s/early 1980s by appearing on television talk shows, game shows, and even the soap opera General Hospital, all the while promoting a healthy lifestyle through exercise and nutrition. He hosted the Emmy-award winning Richard Simmons Show and promoted a popular weight loss program called Sweatin’ to the Oldies, which was available to purchase via ubiquitous television commercials. In 2010 Simmons estimated that he had helped humanity lose an accumulated 12 million pounds.

The press release contained few details about the project, but for a look at what it might look like, there is a teaser for a short film called The Court Jester that shows Shore in character as Simmons. The short film, which is not related to the proposed biopic, was written and directed by Jake Lewis. According to The Lewis Brothers YouTube page, the film is coming soon to their channel, after it premieres at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

Shore told Entertainment Weekly that he reached out to Simmons about appearing as him and heard through a representative that Simmons was a fan of Shore’s, but he wasn’t interested in a film. “His people responded and they said that he loves me and he loves my mom…and all that stuff, but at this time he just wants to lay low and not really be involved.”

Shore also said that the short film deal came about after he signed with The Wolper group to do their movie. “[My managers] got another random email from this director named Jake Lewis who did the Robin Williams short and he said he wants to do a Richard Simmons short, not knowing that I had a deal with this production company already. I said, “Send me the script.” So he sent me the script and he knocked it out. He just nailed it.”

The Court Jester is set during an appearance by Simmons on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in the early 2000s, where Richard talks to a production assistant on the show. “There’s this whole monologue that I have — or Richard has — with his fumbling PA by the craft services table where I shine some light on how beautiful he really is and how special he is, and help turn him around a little bit. It starts off kind of fun, and then the last part is Richard’s message.”

The Wolper organization issued a statement defending their project, saying “while we would love to have [Simmons] involved, we respect his desire to privacy and plan to produce a movie that honors him, celebrates him and tells a dramatic story.”

The statement went on to say that, “we know he is deeply private and we would never want to invade that, however he is an amazing person that changed millions of peoples’ lives, and the effect he has had on the world needs to be recognized.”