Among this summer's comedies, none has a more improbable, zero-to-hero backstory than The Foot Fist Way. Shot three years ago on a shoestring, put-it-all-on-credit-cards budget with no-name actors, this rough-around-the-edges comedy about a hapless strip-mall tae kwon do instructor (Danny McBride) started out as almost a lark for fellow film school grads McBride, Ben Best, and Jody Hill. All three wrote the film, and all three star in it. Hill directed it. ''We shot it in 17 days, and no one was paid,'' McBride says. ''At night, when we'd come home from shooting, we'd get drunk and break boards and cinder blocks in the parking lot and go back to work the next morning.'' But after the film debuted at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, copies began circulating in Hollywood, picking up high-powered fans like Judd Apatow, Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, Patton Oswalt, Michael Cera, and Jonah Hill — like the old Breck commercial goes, they told two friends and so on and so on. ''We kept running into random people who'd seen it,'' McBride says. ''It was nuts.'' Still, Foot Fist Way could easily have remained a comedy-insider's inside joke if it hadn't landed in the hands of Will Ferrell and Anchorman director Adam McKay, who used their clout to get the film a theatrical release. ''It's definitely weird,'' says McBride, who has already parlayed Foot Fist Way into breakout roles in Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express. ''It's like we have a cult hit that no one has even seen.'' Not for long, sensei. (May 30)

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