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That’s because Kennedy, who produced and is featured in the film, gets heckled during his act, and got berated by film critics when his 2005 film Son Of The Mask, the sequel to the Jim Carrey hit, was released.

But rather than cry in his beer, Kennedy decided to chronicle all of the negative response. The final result is Heckler, a funny and insightful real-life view of how artists deal with bad responses and bad reviews. The project features archival footage of hecklers in action, interviews with such comics as Lewis Black, Tom Green, Kathy Griffin, and Bill Maher, as well as commentary from Carrie Fisher, George Lucas, Larry Flynt and Rob Zombie.

The final form of the film is not at all how Kennedy envisioned it when he began shooting in 2005.

“It was like Capturing The Friedmans,” says the 38-year-old Philadelphia-area native, speaking from L.A. where he’s working on an episode from the new season of the TV show Ghost Whisperer. “That was the movie where they started to tell a story about people performing at birthday parties, and it turned into this story about something else. Mine started as a documentary about heckling and the history of heckling. Then I started reading reviews (for Son Of The Mask) from bloggers and realized it was a new form of heckling. I started looking into this stuff.”

Kennedy, who had found screen success playing a movie geek in the Scream series and an assistant to filmmaker Steve Martin in Bowfinger, and on TV as the host of the WB’s Candid Camera-meets-Punk’d cult hit The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, took his act to the stand-up comedy circuit turf. His experiences there inspired the Heckler project, as on any given night, he’d face loud and obnoxious comedy club patrons who disrupted his act by making their thumbs-down opinions public.

Are some people more apt to be a heckler than others?

“They’re usually drunk women who get really aggressive and think they’re helping the show,” says Kennedy. “They’re usually pretty harmless, but they think they’re funny.”

Hecklers, says Kennedy, “are kind of intimidating, especially when you first start doing stand-up. You get better dealing with them as you go along. I think unemployment would actually be scarier.”

Part of Heckler deals with Kennedy gauging the terrible reviews for Son Of The Mask, in which he plays a cartoonist who impregnates his wife while wearing the mask of Loki, the Norse god of mischief. The baby that’s born possesses odd powers, like those wielded by Carrey in the original. Brutal reviews—often quite personal in nature—led Kennedy to TV film reviewer Richard Roeper and several Internet scribes who ripped the movie and his performance. The film received an alarmingly low “5%” on the www.rottentomatoes.com meter, eliciting such comments as “In the five years I’ve been co-hosting this show, this is the closest I’ve ever come to walking out halfway through the film, and now that I look back on the experience, I wish I had” (Roeper) and “How far down the Hollywood food chain do you have to go before you get stuck with Jamie Kennedy as the star of your movie? Did Ben Affleck turn down Son Of The Mask?” (Internet critic Willie Waffle).

Kennedy claims he was genuinely “hurt because everybody blamed me, like it was all my fault and I was the face of this massive failure.”

“I don’t mind shouldering blame, but then give me final cut. Well, I didn’t have that.

“I worked on the film for eight months. We made one movie and the studio changed it and made it one big, messy cartoon. Before that, it had texture and subtlety, if you can believe it.”

Kennedy, who has also appeared in Kickin’ It Old Skool, Malibu’s Most Wanted (which he co-wrote), Three Kings and Boiler Room, says his experiences with Son Of The Mask didn’t effect his opinion of newspaper critics, just bloggers and web-based naysayers. “Several critics are very helpful and informative—Manhola Dargis, Elvis Mitchell, Kenneth Turan. It was the bloggers who said I should die and get AIDS. It made me realize that nobody cares about the whole story. They just want to run a smear campaign.”

Kennedy attempted to get the aforementioned film critics on record in Heckler, but they declined his invite. He also tried to get Don Rickles to discuss hecklers. But “Mr. Warmth” nixed the idea three times. “I’m a big fan of his, but his people blocked it. He’s still hilarious, no matter how many times he turns me down.”

Still, Heckler features an impressive cross-section of talent and material. Along with all of the interviews, Kennedy and director Michael Addis include footage of the late comic Bill Hicks berating a heckler at one of his shows, Barbra Streisand going ballistic at a heckler for her anti-Dubya remarks during a concert, and director Uwe Boll boxing a few of the critics who panned his films.

One of the more curious interviews in the film is with Lucas.

How did Kennedy land that one?

“I was shooting a video on Hollywood Boulevard with Bob Saget, and they were also shooting a CSI episode at the same time,” recalls Kennedy. “George and his daughter had eaten at Musso & Frank’s (a Hollywood landmark) and we were using special high end cameras. George must have noticed them, so he came over.

“Everybody was asking ‘Why is Michael McDonald on the set?’ I said, ‘That’s not Michael McDonald, it’s George Lucas!’ He was fascinated with the cameras and was talking about the aperture, but he thought we were the CSI set. I told him about the video and getting to direct, and that’s when he talked about films and critics and creators and naysayers.

“You know, he was the first guy I got a release form back from. I asked Oprah if I could promote the film on her show, and she wrote me back right away—they were overbooked—but she got back to me immediately. I try to get Dustin Diamond, and he takes two months to get back to me.”

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