David Farrier has made a successful career working as a reporter for a small TV Station in New Zealand looking at the weird and bizarre side of life. He thought he found a perfect subject for his program when he came across a website a couple of years ago from Jane O’Brien Media asking for men 18-24 to submit head shots to be considered as potential contestants in a competitive tickling contest. If they were selected to participate in the filmed competition, then they would be given $1,500, flown to Los Angeles and put up for a lavish all-expenses-paid weekend.
Farrier reached out for more information and possibly an interview and was somewhat astounded that the reply not only refused his requests, but went on to add that they didn’t want to talk to him as he was openly gay and that their ‘sport’ was a strictly heterosexual activity. Points they kept making in a series of emails that followed in the next few weeks in which they made no attempt to turn down their vitriol or disguise their blatant homophobia. When he shared this on his social media, others picked up what they thought was a funny subject (the tickling, not the homophobia) and all this interest led Farrier into thinking that maybe there was a potential documentary film in this.
He was right to think that, but it very soon turned into one that was so unbelievably bizarre that Farrier and his co-director Dylan Reeve could never ever have imagined in their worst nightmares. It started with a threatening letter from Jane O’Brien’s lawyers telling them to desist or face severe legal consequences, followed by a team of three people actually flying in to Auckland from L.A. following up with more threats.
This only served to intrigue Farrier even more. He had thought at worse this was some sort of fetish company that exploited young men in their homoerotic ticking videos, but what they would eventually uncover was an intricate web of sites, domains and companies spread over the globe to disguise both who the real ‘O’Brien’ was, and what their real motives were. He and Reeves were fearless as like so many of the young men who wanted to escape their ‘tickling video’ past, the O’Brien Company set out to ruthless destroy them. They succeeded quite often with the ex models, but never with the filmmakers.
Each layer of intrigue that Farrier peeled away brought more threats, legal and otherwise, but no real clue as to why a company, or an individual, would want to go to such elaborate lengths at running an expensive business from which they appeared to get no financial return whatsoever. After many false starts and dead ends that took them right across the US, they would eventually find out.
Most of the very best documentaries, just like Tickled, are the ones that start a journey with a very simple concept but then events evolve…… or in this case almost explode …. shaping it into a whole different, and much more exciting tale than either the filmmakers, or we could have possibly have imagined. In his excellent gripping movie Farrier ensures that we share every fraught single step of the way that keeps us completely invested to the very end, which for us is when the credits role. However he is still being threatened with yet more lawsuits, so he may still have to wait for it to all be over for him.
Labels: 2016, documentary, New Zealand, Sundance
