Dito Montiel’s ‘The Clapper’ Offers Ed Helms And Amanda Seyfried 15 Miserable Minutes Of Fame
There is something eminently watchable aboutEd Helms, who has spent a significant portion of his career suffering onscreen for our amusement. With his role as a regular correspondent onThe Daily Show, her perfected the act of playing a buffoon lacking any and all self-awareness. InThe Office, he elevated his oblivious blowhard persona to the next level, often facing all sorts of painful repercussions for his actions. And then he appeared in the newVacationand theHangoversequels, which is punishment enough for ten comedians.
Now, he’s looking to play another sad-sack punching bag inThe Clapper, which will team him up withAmanda Seyfriedand writer/directorDito Montiel.
The news of Helms and Seyfried joining The Clapper comes to us viaDeadline, who describe the project thusly:
The Clapperis about a professional clapper for infomercials who gets plucked by a late night talk show host to be on his TV show. The notoriety that his 15 minutes of fame brings ends up costing him his job as well as a budding relationship with a girl who works at a gas station.
Although the original article doesn’t confirm anything, we can safely assume that Helms will play the lead and Seyfried the love interest. Montiel will direct his own screenplay, which is based on his own novel,Eddie Krumble Is the Clapper. Deadline describes the film as a “passion project” for the filmmaker, who has previously helmedA Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,Fighting, andEmpire State. His latest film, the post-apocalyptic thrillerMan Down, made the film festival circuit last year.
Deadline describesThe Clapperas being in the same vein as Martin Scorsese’sThe King of Comedy, which is the exact kind of comparison that draws our interest. Scorsese’s 1982 dark comedy flew under the radar at the time of its release, but it has since been rightfully recognized as one of the filmmaker’s best and most prescient films. It plays like the comedic inversion ofTaxi Driver, with Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin embodying the selfishness of the modern media landscape a few decades before the internet gave maniacs like him a platform.
Additional details aboutThe Clapperremain unknown, but with Helms and Seyfried attached, the rest of the cast should start to build around them fast enough. Although Montiel’s work has been hit-and-miss in the past, these leads and that concept certainly make this sound like something we can get behind.
