At a certain point during the making of his film about tickling, “I knew it wouldn’t be a film about tickling,” says David Farrier, co-director of “Tickled.”
The New Zealand journalist thought he’d found intriguing subject matter when he stumbled on some videos online showing “competitive endurance tickling,” in which buff young men are restrained and then tickled by other young men.
“Initially, I was trying to just do a minute-and-a-half news story for a New Zealand news bulletin about this crazy sport,” Farrier says.
He contacted Jane O’Brien Media, the company behind many of the videos, and asked to do a story. After initially appearing receptive, an employee followed up with a personal, homophobic attack and veiled legal threats against Farrier. Which only piqued his curiosity.
“That response kind of elevated it into something beyond the tickling,” Farrier says. “They’re trying to cover something up; why are they responding like this? And then we had lawyers turn up and that was another layer — OK, they’re sending three people to New Zealand; they’re definitely hiding something. So, from pretty early on I saw it was going somewhere else.”
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The resulting film, which opens locally Friday, goes somewhere else, all right — a lot of somewhere elses. It follows Farrier and co-director Dylan Reeve as they discover that the Jane O’Brien of Jane O’Brien Media doesn’t seem to exist, and that the tickling videos are all tied to an American with endless money and lawyers.
Share this articleShareWorse, many of the young men who appear in the videos find their lives destroyed when they want out of the tickling game. Though the tickling videos are not sexually explicit, some of the participants find their names, pictures and contact information — including their home addresses — turning up on dozens of websites, including pornographic ones.
As the discoveries got more and more twisted, Farrier and Reeve had no choice but to see their quest through to its conclusion.
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“The main motivating factor was the injustice that in our minds had taken place,” Farrier says. “Once Dylan found all those websites that had been used to harass and derail people’s lives, it was just a case of ‘What can we do about it?’ Being able to make a film — that is a weapon, in a way. And this company hadn’t come up against that before. It seemed like a worthy cause to chase.”
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