By John Noonan
When New Zealand TV news reporter, David Farrier, stumbled across Jane O’Brien Media and its competitive tickling videos, what started as an innocent request for an interview turned into something much odder and darker than he could have expected. In his documentary, Tickled, he and co-director, Dylan Reeve, travel from New Zealand to LA to investigate the often strange world of tickling contests and the outrageously aggressive and hotly litigious company that exploit it.
When you first reached out to Jane O’Brien Media, the subject of your film, what were you hoping to do? “It was going to be a two-minute piece. I have always done, for the last ten years, these stories on our late night news. The last break in that show is a wacky story from me. I was going to Skype with Jane O’Brien, and I was going to talk to a New Zealand competitor who had gone over there and done it. It would have been those two interviews, with footage of the tickling, plus my voiceover, a news reader intro, and that would be it. Very simple. And it would have been a great story! ‘You think ultimate frisbee is crazy? This is even crazier…it’s ultimate competitive tickling!’ It would have been this voiceover, ‘So and so make $2,000 cash. Guess how?! Tickling!’ It would have been an entertaining story, but it wouldn’t have been a 90-minute feature.”
Had your subjects in the film not heard of The Streisand Effect [the effect of drawing attention to something that you wish people to ignore]? “[Laughs] I think Jane O’Brien is one character who has never heard of The Streisand Effect. Because all the way through from the first Facebook response, through to them sending three representatives to New Zealand from America to talk to us, everything they’ve done since the film’s release has amplified the whole thing! I don’t know why they’re doing it.”
They have a website as well. “Yeah, they have a site, tickledmovie.info, that they’re using to discredit the movie.”
Which is something that Scientology and WikiLeaks have done in the past. “It’s funny because I’m quite obsessed with Scientology. I joined The Church Of Scientology in New Zealand so I could write about them maybe six years ago. I love cults, and I find them fascinating. A lot of the behaviour from Jane O’Brien Media is very similar to Scientology. They send representatives to screenings. They’re tweeting at journalists. They’ve made up a website to discredit the film.”
You co-direct with Dylan Reeve. Do you think that you would have pursued this project without him? “Dylan is really ballsy, and I’m a big wimp. We didn’t know each other before this started. We were friends on Twitter and Facebook, and we’d met in person once before. But I started blogging about it. He saw my posts about it, and he started blogging about the websites involved with the company. And then we both got threats from lawyers. So one night I said, ‘Come over for pizza at my house’ and I floated the idea of doing a Kickstarter campaign to do a documentary. From that point on, we made the film.”
You interview Richard Ivey, who has a tickling fetish, which seems like a counterbalance – a way to ensure that you didn’t look like you were poking fun at a fetish. “Very early on, we were confident that the material that we were looking at was fetish related. So we went on a lot of tickling forums, and we got to know the ticking community. We were aware that the story was going to be fairly crazy, and we didn’t want everyone that watched the film to assume that the whole tickling community was like this. We got Richard on board because we wanted a window into that world that was very open and clear. Richard is very transparent. He pays models to come in and be tickled, and he puts the videos on his erotic website. And everyone knows what it’s about. So it was important to have him involved because the last thing that we wanted to do was demonise the whole world of tickling. Richard is a good counterbalance for other characters in the film who are less open about what they’re doing.”
“Tickled: The Documentary” sounds so light, and yet… “That’s the idea. I want people to go into it thinking that it’s going be a whacky look at a subculture. I want people to think that it’s about this crazy sport and then, as they discover fairly early on, it goes somewhere else.”
The emails that you received at the beginning were very strongly worded, and the people that turned up in New Zealand were also strong in their words. Were you surprised by how much deeper it got when you arrived in America? “We honestly didn’t know where it was going. We did a Kickstarter campaign that got us there for maybe three weeks, and we learnt that the scope was bigger on that trip. So, we came back and had to get funding to go back over and shoot more. As we investigated further and further, it was a matter of being on the ground. There’s only so much that you can do from New Zealand emailing and talking to people on skype. People forget that when they’re writing stories from their desks in a newsroom when there are a million things that you’ve got to cover. So the world kept getting bigger and bigger, and Dylan and I didn’t imagine how big the story would get. I still can’t believe it.”
Well, it’s still kind of going on… “We’ve been told that we’re going to get sued again shortly. There have been two defamation lawsuits already. Jane O’Brien still has their Facebook page active. My friends now like that page. [Laughs] I think that’s just to annoy me. And the website for Jane O’Brien Photography is still active. So, yeah, it’s still going.”
You had these people throwing lawsuits at you, so when you were putting the film together, did it stop you from wanting to include certain things? “No. The threats made us super aware that we were careful that we were doing everything within the law ourselves, with regards to the way that we recorded and where we filmed. I wasn’t trespassing anywhere that we didn’t have clearance for. But there was never a point when we didn’t include a scene because we were fearful how Jane O’Brien Media might see that. We were all in. We had a lawyer look over everything before we submitted the film to The Sundance Film Festival. We had it looked at very carefully. It wasn’t like we were making our educated calls from what we read in law books in the library. And Simon Coldrick, our editor, was a very important part of this project. He made something beautiful out of a bizarre and strange story.”
And what’s been the reaction from the tickling community now? “The tickling community has been really vocal. They knew about the film. If you’re into tickling, and there’s a feature film being made about tickling, then you’re going to be interested in what it’s going to be. And the reaction has been really positive, which is great. Richard is really influential in the tickling community. I hoped that he would like it, and he did. The only negativity that we’ve had has been a couple of people who really love Jane O’Brien’s videos and were scared that they’d stop being made. But they also acknowledged that what happened in that world is not great.”
There is a heavy vein of victimisation and bullying in the film. “Big time! That’s why we made the film. Not only were we coming under attack, but we found that a percentage of people working for Jane O’Brien Media were subject to these huge online harassment campaigns that tore lives apart. Shedding a light on that was a good thing to do.”
Has the whole project lit something in you to do more documentaries? “I’m not obsessed with making another documentary. I just like telling stories. So whether I’m blogging about something or I find something that justifies being made into a film, I’ll do that. I’ve never really had a set agenda. It’s good to know that I’ve got a team around that would want to make something else. And I’d love to make something else with them, but it depends on whether the story is good enough.”
And finally, how is Dylan and his family doing after all this? “He’s good. They’re all still alive and breathing. [Laughs] I’m really lucky that Dylan got involved in this. It’s like the film exists because I found it at the right time. Dylan came on board at the right time. All these things fell into place. If we hadn’t found this, it would have kept going indefinitely. And maybe no one would do a story about it, because it’s so weird. I mean, where do you start?”
There are also the lives that it would continue to affect. “Completely! It’s my hope that people who see the film will at least think twice before going on a competitive tickling shoot. And when people find out about this tickling contest, which has got great money and sounds fun, they can google ‘competitive tickling’ or ‘Jane O’Brien.’ Then they’ll find out about the film and read about it.”
Tickled is released in cinemas on August 18.
