'The Foot Fist Way' star fits the season

In a summer of unlikely movie stars _ fighting pandas, drunken superheroes, aging archaeologists _ Danny McBride is a perfect fit.

He's at the awkward center of "The Foot Fist Way," the first movie from Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's production company. After that, the 32-year-old from Virginia pops up in two high-profile August comedies, "Tropic Thunder" and "Pineapple Express."

And before the theater-going public has even figured out how to pick his curly hair out of a crowd, he's sweating away on the desert set of his next film, a big budget "Land of the Lost" remake, alongside Ferrell and computer-generated tyranosaurs.

Just don't think it's gone to his head.

"My assistant still puts my pants on one leg at a time," McBride deadpans.

McBride studied filmmaking at North Carolina School of the Arts and dreamed of being a director. Upon graduation in 1999, he and fellow classmates made the sojourn to Hollywood.

They waited tables and landed jobs as production assistants on an "American Gladiators" ripoff called "Battledome," cleaning up sweat and blood.

Though he served as second unit director on classmate David Gordon Green's acclaimed arthouse film "George Washington," nothing else materialized. McBride settled into a production house gig doing motion control for video of photographs.

"After the first year, half the people we came out here with went home, and after the second, more," McBride said. "It was definitely seeming like it was time to throw the white flag up. We were getting beat down. It wasn't too hard to convince us to go out to North Carolina to shoot something."

That something was "The Foot Fist Way," shot in 19 days in the summer of 2005 on a $70,000 (45,140) budget financed by credit cards. Written by McBride and former classmates Jody Hill and Ben Best, it tracks tae kwon do instructor Fred Simmons through marital woes and a climactic showdown with his low-budget action film hero, Chuck "The Truck" Wallace. Hill directed and Best co-stars as Wallace.

The film won over midnight audiences at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006, but only landed a UK distributor. After the fest, DVDs were passed around Hollywood talent agencies. The dark, twisted laughs won its creators high-profile advocates.

"We really didn't have a tap on how much the film had been circulated," McBride said. "Then next thing you know, Judd Apatow is asking us to come by the set."

Ben Stiller became a fan. Tom Cruise had a sit-down meeting with Hill, who is now shooting his second movie, "Observe and Report," in Albuquerque with Seth Rogen and Ray Liotta. Eventually Ferrell and his producing partner McKay purchased "Foot Fist," for distribution through Paramount Vantage.

"Danny's a really talented funny guy who everyone's kind of slowly discovering," Ferrell said. "Hopefully this will be kind of the first thing that sets him up. I have a whole Web site that's dedicated to letting people know that I discovered him first."

Despite the star wattage behind the film, marketers asked McBride to promote the movie with in-character red carpet appearances and interviews. He declined all _ except an apparently disastrous Andy Kaufman-esque turn as Simmons on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien."

"We kind of knew that we had to generate a lot of our own buzz for the movie," McBride said. "There was no climax to it or punchline. We just went on there and blew it."

McBride gets to blow things up as the movie-within-a-movie's special effects coordinator in "Tropic Thunder," due out Aug. 15. In "Pineapple Express," out a week earlier and directed by former classmate Green, he plays a drug dealer that James Franco and Rogen turn to for help.

He runs an amusement park in "Land of the Lost," which was adapted from the TV series but drops the family dynamic. Ferrell plays a scientist and McBride said they've been able to improv some scenes despite the focus on high-end CGI.

"I haven't seen a comedy that is this sort of humor but on this scale of production," McBride said. "The vibe is really laid-back and chill. It reminds me of the vibe on 'Foot Fist,' believe it or not. At the end of the day, it's a director and a few actors trying to make something funny."

And by the end of his career, McBride doesn't necessarily want to be one of those few actors. He wants to write and direct, and is working with Green on an epic fantasy inspired by Laurence Olivier's 1981 "Clash of the Titans."

What will his well-placed fans say to that?

"You just have to kind of step up," McBride said. "Let's not disappoint 'em."