Farrier: Innocent story ‘gets dark really quickly’
NEW YORK — “Tickled,” from a determined New Zealand directing duo, rates as a “has to be seen to be believed” documentary.
The Sundance sensation tracks a bizarre investigation into an internet-driven enterprise no one really knew existed.
David Farrier, 33, is a well-known New Zealand TV journalist who specializes in the weird and offbeat, like interviewing Justin Bieber at 12 or a man who swallowed live frogs whole.
“My whole job was to do two-minute crazy stories,” he said, sitting next to his co-director Dylan Reeve, 36.
On an internet search in early 2014, “I found this tickling endurance competition in Los Angeles where, once a month, young men between 18 and 23 would be flown to L.A. for a tickling contest.”
Figuring he had a fun story, “I reached out to the organizers and got a response on their public Facebook page. Their response was, ‘We don’t want to deal with a homosexual journalist.’ Then it escalated over emails.”
“That response David got to this innocuous inquiry,” Reeve said, “was so disparate to what we were seeing, it didn’t make sense.”
“I started blogging on my news site about these crazy personal attacks I and then Dylan were getting,” Farrier said.
“The next thing you know,” Reeve added, “we’re getting legal threats and letters from private investigators: We should shut up or face destruction.”
Instead, with a Kickstarter campaign, they funded a documentary and found themselves facing lawsuits in New Zealand and America.
“We’re investigating this story about tickling,” Farrier said, “which seems really innocent, and it gets dark really quickly. And it gets expensive really quickly. It’s the strangest thing.”
Events got stranger as the trail led from L.A. to Florida, where they met a benign full-time tickling professional; to Muskegon, Mich., a crime-ridden city on Lake Michigan, where every young recruit except one was afraid to go on camera; to New York.
“Part of this film was figuring out why this was happening,” Reeve said. “Right from the beginning, with that intensely homophobic litigious response, it didn’t make sense. By the end of the film a whole lot makes sense.”
“I believe,” Farrier added, “the audience will leave floored by the whole thing.”