'Billion Dollar' put-on

PARK CITY, Utah - Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who met as Temple film students in the mid-1990s, last week prepared for the world premiere of their first feature, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, at the Sundance Film Festival.

But just before Sundance began, terrible news broke: They'd been Rango'ed. "Sundance gang," Heidecker posted on his Twitter feed, "B$M [Billion Dollar Movie] got Rango'd (large portions of our movie replaced with Rango outtakes) please ask #sundance to take out the Rango!"

Sundance had not, in fact, adulterated the movie with clips of an animated lizard - nor did Robert Redford break into Heidecker's room to watch him sleep, as he posted in a subsequent tweet. But within hours, word of the duo's faux predicament spread across the Internet, sparking outrage from fans and film buffs. Most were playing along with the absurdist humor of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, which in five seasons on the Adult Swim network has won Heidecker and Wareheim a substantial and fiercely loyal audience.

"People just latched on and got what was funny about it, and there were people who didn't," Heidecker said in an interview after Billion Dollar Movie's Rango-free premiere. "It's unbelievable after all this time that there are still people who don't know if it's serious or not. I'm not ever going to be serious, so let's just get that over with."

In addition to Billion Dollar Movie, which is available on demand beginning Friday and in theaters in March, Heidecker and Wareheim also played parts in another Sundance entry, The Comedy. In spite of its title, that film is a dark and frequently disturbing exploration of the disaffected and amoral lives of Brooklyn hipsters. Wareheim is part of an amorphous onscreen clique that also includes former LCD Soundsystem singer James Murphy. Heidecker plays the lead, an idle trust-funder who's fond of challenging the unwary with his utter lack of intellectual restraint. While flirting with a pretty liberal-arts major at a party, he argues that Adolf Hitler was "an incredible cheerleader for his people" - apart, that is, from the whole genocide thing.