Inside The Fetish, Fun And Controversy Of Competitive Tickling With NZ Director David Farrier

It might sound funny, but that’s exactly what New Zealand journalist and first-time filmmaker David Farrier thought when he discovered Competitive Endurance Tickling. What started as mere comical fascination over a deeply niche, unintentionally homoerotic and fetishistic activity eventually spiralled into a confusing and controversial investigation.

Farrier started looking into a shady, cash-rich company known as Jane O’Brien Media (suggested to be a front for a wealthy heir David D’Amato) and found they were recruiting young male ‘fitness models’. The men were being flown to Los Angeles, all-expenses paid, to film tickling videos that were then used to systematically destroy the participants’ lives if they chose to leave.

The resulting film is Tickled, co-directed by Farrier’s friend Dylan Reeve, and has been dogged by controversy since its premiere at Sundance earlier this year. Farrier was recently served with papers claiming defamation after a screening in Missouri, and one of the film’s subjects has started a website (Tickled, The Truth) that aims to discredit the film. At another recent screening, D’Amato himself told the crew they need to “lawyer up” and “get criminal counsel”.

Farrier recently premiered Tickled at the Melbourne International Film Festival and we spoke about just how real this funny yet shocking documentary actually is, the legal battles that have sprung forth because of it, and his own experience of being strapped into the tickling chair.

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Junkee: Have you been fielding a lot of questions about whether Tickled is real or not? It seems to have gone the same way as Catfish — another is-it-or-isn’t-it-real documentary.

David Farrier: [Laughs] Yeah, it feels like the Catfish comparison happened at some point after Sundance and it’s kind of latched on, which is both good and bad, I think. I’m a big fan of Catfish, but obviously it has that whole discussion and debate about how much of it is real and how much of it isn’t. As an aside, I think a lot more of Catfish is real than people realise.

But, I mean, a lot of people think Tickled is fake. The people commenting under the trailer on YouTube, a lot of them are convinced it’s fake. And we’ve had a lot of people showing up at screenings from Jane O’Brien Media who are yelling at us during Q&As. People think they’re actors that were hired. But it’s all real, it all happened, and it’s all still happening. It’s exciting to have that buzz, I suppose; people having that discussion in the first place. But it can be frustrating at times because for me it’s all been very real and I don’t have the intelligence to make this stuff up.

To be honest, the idea of this tickling thing, sexual fetish or otherwise, didn’t surprise me in the slightest. I mean, as a gay man I’ve seen far more shocking taboos…

[David laughs]

Did you ever think in your wildest dreams that the investigation would lead you here?

Not really, no. Well, yes, when I think about it in hindsight, everything’s a fetish, right? You can fetishise anything and I think the first time you see the videos there’s something sexual there.

What was puzzling to me, and still is, these videos weren’t obviously sexual. I mean, the way everyone was in Adidas gear and the way it was shot in a photography studio, it seemed like it could be someone’s weird idea of a sporting league. And obviously there was so much money being poured into it — these models were being flown from all around the world into LA — it seemed like more than just a fetish. Just because of the sheer amount of money involved. I’ve never seen a fringe fetish that was so well-funded.

The whole thing is super unusual. [The videos] are an hour long, there’s no sex, just clothed tickling with a lot of seemingly straight, young, athletic men. So the whole set-up was very unusual and it’s what got my attention very early on.

Were you aware that David D’Amato and the Jane O’Brien Media people were going to begin to appear at screenings for the film? Had they reached out prior or was it a big surprise?

No, no, it was a surprise. Right from Sundance when [Jane O’Brien staff-member] Kevin Clarke showed up, it was a real surprise. We knew that we were expecting possible lawsuits, but I wasn’t expecting people to start showing up at screenings. It’s been a bit like what I’d expect if I made a documentary about Scientology or something where they’ve gotten very vocal and very active.

Again, people think they’re hired actors. It’d be so convenient, right, because it would be good publicity for us. But it’s all just happened very organically and strangely. There hasn’t been a moment in this entire journey that hasn’t been weird in some way or another.

You have already been served by some of the film’s participants, but what had you done before screening the film to assure you were going to be free and clear, legally?

We basically had a lawyer check the entire film to make sure we hadn’t done anything naughty [laughs]. Before we submitted to Sundance, we were obviously dealing with a very litigious company so we wanted to be really clear that what we were submitting to the festival was all legally a-okay. The lawyer looked, the lawyer gave notice and we released the film.

And are you still confident nothing will come from the lawsuits that have come forward?

I don’t know. I stand behind the film. I don’t know what will happen if things go to court. Either way, every time you’re served with a suit is does cost money to defend yourself whether there’s anything substantial in the suit or not. That’s the joy of the American justice system [laughs]. So, you know, I stand by all the content in the film. All things are true. Where it goes from here is as much a mystery to me as it is to everyone else.

At what point did you realise this was a film and not just a piece of investigative journalism?

Jane O’Brien Media were telling me they were gonna send three people over to New Zealand and I didn’t really believe them. Then they set the date and told us when they were arriving and so that’s when I realised there was something here that could sustain a film. By that point, Dylan and I had enough clues to other things that were going on in the background that made it seem like there was enough story to justify a feature film.

And how did you go about getting it made through funding given its particularly strange subject matter for a New Zealand documentary?

It was all incredibly organic. I invited Dylan around for pizza a couple of weeks in and suggested start a Kickstarter campaign so that we could get to America and start following the story on the ground. By that point we had just been blogging about it and we had a lot of interest and I just thought with the number of people reading the blogs that those people would probably support us on Kickstarter.

That funded a trip for about two-and-a-half weeks and then we came back with a bunch of footage and a bunch of new information. We took that to the New Zealand Film Commission, who are a government funding body, and then they came on board.

What was it like discovering what one of your subjects describes as ‘tickle cells’, which exploit typically poor young men? In spite of everything else in the film, it sounds unfathomably outrageous.

Yeah, the idea of a tickle cell — these organised recruitment cells set up all over the world — it was just another example of the scale of this scene being bigger than we originally imagined. It seemed like this monthly tickling competition in LA that was really well-financed was a really big deal, but when you looked at tickle cells being set up all over the world whether it’s in the UK or the US or Australia it was just another surprise of the scale of it all.

Just the words — much like “Competitive Endurance Tickling” — there’s something about that phrase that’s really entertaining. And I think “tickle cell” is another set of words that makes you do a double take and say “what?”. I am still blown away by this whole thing.

Did you get the sense that the few very cagey D’Amato family members and acquaintances that you spoke to really wanted to talk more, but that they were just too afraid?

It’s really hard to tell. I’ve never encountered any people as cagey as this lot in any story I have don — and I have worked on strange stories before. I’ve done stories where someone’s been murdered and people are more open to talking about a case or a situation than this. The cageyness really surprised me. They were cagey to the point that I didn’t know whether they really wanted to talk or just wanted to get the hell away from me.

Is filmmaking something you might want to do more of now or has the experience scared you off?

I’ve always just liked telling stories, whether it’s writing a blog or a long-form feature. This is my first film, but it definitely hasn’t put me off. It’s been scary, but I’ve found the entire thing incredibly rewarding. I’d love to make another film. Whether I do or not remains to be seen. I’m just interested in people doing interesting things. How my next story is told is unsure, but it certainly hasn’t put me off making other documentaries.

Now, why didn’t you include the footage of you getting tickled in the final film? The footage is quite something!

[Laughs] We shot it with the intent of putting it in, but it was that old story that it just didn’t help the film. There’s that scene where Richard is tickling his model and that kinda gets across what tickling is about. People can see what the appeal is and an insight into what the fetish is. Having me being tickled would just be rehashing that and it’s almost a bit self-indulgent. I was sad to see that footage go — it’s incredible embarrassing for me to watch it, but I think it’s quite entertaining. Probably.

What has it been like seeing not just your film, but this broader story of competitive tickling, reach the mainstream? What’s it like being on the other side of the journalist table?

It’s been really weird. It’s been weird because I’ve been on the other side of it for such a long time. I worked for Nightline in New Zealand, so to be interviewed by Nightline on the ABC in America is surreal, funny, and I find myself over-analysing my answers too much. Am I giving them the sound-bites they need? It’s been funny seeing what other journalists enjoy about the film. On a whole it’s been a really positive, fun experience and I never imagined it would be screened as widely as it has. It’s fun to make a film, then having people watching it is this whole other fun bonus on top. I feel really grateful.

The great thing is, the tickling community who we’ve been in touch with a lot throughout this, they’ve been really supportive and super into it. I was in New York and this gay tickling club came along, they all had their t-shirts on, and they were just super excited about it. And afterwards they were just really grateful that the fetish itself wasn’t shown in a negative way. We kind of celebrate the fetish, but it just happens that the story takes a very serious, dark turn. It’s not demonising the whole group. It’s kind of cool getting that response from the festival.

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Tickled has just played at MIFF and will be released nationally on August 18.

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