How Sundance Almost Killed ‘The Foot Fist Way’

The opening on Friday of “The Foot Fist Way” marks the closing chapter of a surreal journey for filmmaker Jody Hill and star Danny McBride, whose unlikely ascendance may be the first true bootleg success story.“It’s definitely insane, what’s happened, but it’s also sort of fitting in a way,” Mr. Hill said of the past three years, during which “The Foot Fist Way” made a shaky premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and was promptly shelved for two years. “We made this thing totally off the radar, and it’s almost better that things happened this way, better than if we had made some big splash at Sundance and it had been bought for all this money and then we’d have all these large, unreasonable expectations. Something about this is more organic.”In the summer of 2005, Mr. Hill applied for every credit card he could find and promptly maxed them out. With a total of $70,000 in hand — less money than most Hollywood productions spend on catering — he returned to the same North Carolina tae kwon do school he had opened at the age of 17, betting everything on an idea he had for a feature-length comedy.In more ways than one, this school served as an inspiration for the project, a fictional film about an arrogant instructor (Mr. McBride) at a rural tae kwon do school who makes up for his floundering marriage and career by acting big in front of his students. Filming the action in the same school he once owned, Mr. Hill said he found himself improvising at every step. He cast actual students as extras, edited the footage at home, worked on the script with Mr. McBride and Ben Best (who co-stars in the film and helped with the soundtrack), and then dropped off the final cut at the Sundance Institute with less than an hour to spare before the deadline for the 2006 festival.“It’s hard to even describe the scene, but I was all excited to have my film ready for the festival, and then I get to the parking lot, and it’s a mob scene,” Mr. Hill recalled. “I mean, it looked like there was a Phish concert or something going on, and I just thought, ‘No way is this happening.’ But then a few weeks later, I get this e-mail in my inbox that we were accepted, and then all these messages from agents and producers — literally all the guys you would ever want to talk to.”But on the night of the film’s opening at Sundance, Mr. Hill watched in horror as various studio representatives walked out midway through his movie to participate in a bidding war for Michel Gondry’s “The Science of Sleep.” Mr. Hill left Utah without a deal, but in the next several months, news of “The Foot Fist Way” spread online. DVDs of the film were being circulated behind closed doors in Hollywood among distributors, agents, and filmmakers alike. Suddenly Mr. Hill was fielding calls from players like Judd Apatow.“Will [Ferrell] and myself, we weren’t at Sundance, but we were starting up [our production company] and so my manager gave me a DVD of this movie that we might be interested in,” said director Adam McKay, who co-founded Gary Sanchez Productions, the company that has joined forces with Paramount Vantage to release “Foot Fist Way.” “The movie laid around my house for three weeks, but my manager kept bugging me about it so I popped it in my computer. I had never seen anything like it.” Messrs. Ferrell and McKay took “The Foot Fist Way” to various studios that had passed on it at Sundance. Meanwhile, the bootlegged DVDs continued to circulate. Before their passion project had even earned a distribution deal, Messrs. Hill and McBride were being noticed in offices and home theaters throughout Hollywood.Thanks to that incredible momentum, the pair will scarcely need audiences to turn out in droves this weekend. Mr. McBride is already involved with a laundry list of projects, chief among them this summer’s “Tropic Thunder” and “Pineapple Express.” Mr. Hill, having caught the attention of Mr. Apatow, is currently filming “Observe and Report,” starring Seth Rogen and Anna Faris. And Messers. Hill and McBride have begun work on a project for HBO, tentatively titled “East Bound and Down.”“We came from the gutter, and we made the movie with nothing, shooting it in backyards and begging for everything we could,” Mr. Hill said. “So it feels good that there’s this sort of cult following that has pushed the film ahead because there’s nothing phony about that kind of success.”

How Sundance Almost Killed ‘The Foot Fist Way’

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