Thanks, LADbible, For Discovering Tickled

Seven years late, but it's nice for Tickled to find to a new audience.

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Hi,

Something weird happened last week in that I started to get bombarded with messages about Tickled, a documentary I made with my friends seven years ago.

I’ll occasionally hear about this film when it pops up on a different streaming service — but this mass discovery about an old documentary seemed odd.

Then I realised why: LADbible had written a piece and posted it all over their social media, writing about the film as if it had been released yesterday.

It will always amaze me just how big LADbible is — and explains why I was getting so many tweets and DMs. Tickled was niche at the best of times. LADbible is the opposite of niche:

Founded in 2012 by Alexander “Solly” Solomou and Arian Kalantari, LADbible Group produces digital content aimed at young adults, claiming to reach two-thirds of 18–34-year-olds in the UK.

LADbible Group's media brands have an audience approaching a billion, with 262 million followers worldwide across the major social media platforms and its five websites attract almost 69 million unique visitors every month.

I’m not complaining that LADbible posted about Tickled seven years late. It’s great that people are finding an old thing. And it’s nice for my ego that people that follow my work are discovering that yes, I was the lanky white guy with an accent that they’d watched in Tickled.

I assume people just thought I was Flight of the Conchords this whole time.

I don’t want to be that guy who always bangs on about old stuff, but with this resurgence in Tickled attention — and the fact it’s my last few days in New Zealand surrounded by old archive boxes — I thought I’d share some fun things associated with the film. Sort of like what I did last week with that box of memories.

Are there Tickled spoilers to follow? Yes. But Tickled is seven years old and I think spoilers are allowed!

Working in this documentary about a New York multi-millionaire conman who operated for decades — we ended up with a lot of different formats to dig through. There were old 8mm camcorder video tapes from when David D’Amato had his tickling headquarters in Hawaii. There were the VHS tapes he sent around the world. Then there’s the drive containing about 600 videos we downloaded from Jane O’Brien’s Vimeo site, and David D’Amato’s own hard drive (well, sort of — D’Amato accidentally put his drive online, so we mirrored it and put it on a hard drive of our own).

On another drive I discovered a few old behind-the-scenes shots. First up, here’s the New Zealand contingent at Sundance in 2016.

Back row: Cameron Lenart (sound recordist), Dom Fryer (director of photography), Rhys Darby (star of Wilderpeople), Dylan Reeve (my co-director), me, Carthew Neal (producer of both Tickled and Wilderpeople), Taika Waititi (not sure who this guy is?). Front row: Julian Dennison (star of Wilderpeople), Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, New Zealand icon).

Taika Waititi was there with Hunt for The Wilderpeople — the film that would launch him to superstardom and see him directing Marvel and Star Wars films. Me — I started Webworm! I look chuffed because New Zealand royalty Sam Neill is in front of me.

This was one of our most cramped shoots — it was with an anonymous source who appears in the film for about 20 seconds and drops Tickled’s one and only c-bomb.

The next photo is from one of our less cramped interviews, with the former journalist who’d tracked D’Amato in the 1990s. Some locations are a nightmare to shoot in, but this one was a dream. It was a giant loft in Philadelphia, and our cinematographer Dom lit it beautifully. It’s one of my favourite interview shots in the film.

A highlight of Tickled was that very early on, Stephen Fry backed the project on Kickstarter. From there, he came in as a producer — and by the time it came to release the film he happily shot some promo material with us, basically telling people to see the film. One of the smartest and nicest people I’ve ever met.

Doing what I do, I’m used to getting legal threats here on Webworm.

What gives me a sense of confidence are two main things: First — paying Webworm subscribers mean I can get access to legal help. As in, I can literally afford it.

Secondly, the legal stuff with Tickled was so scary my capacity for legal stress greatly increased. Because with Tickled I didn’t just get legal threats — I got sued.

Twice. In America.

That one was from a lawsuit filed in Utah, and this is from a separate suit filed in Missouri:

This was scary stuff at the time — and there was a lot of legal back and forth as both me and D’Amato prepared for our day in court. Sorry, courts.

I was dealing with stuff I’d really only seen in the movies — preservation of evidence and that sort of thing.

I got to sign a lot of affidavit material that contained scary lines like “I hereby declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America”.

Oh, I am pixelating some details — like my signature — in today’s newsletter, because lets just say I’ve grown a healthy sense of paranoia during my life so far.

There’s another thing that makes me feel confident with legal threats: I make sure what I am publishing is correct. Everything I write here on Webworm — from Zuru allegations to crypto floggers to the Arise church saga — I imagine it all being before the courts. And I want to be confident that I can defend myself with the best thing possible: the truth.

I learnt of a lot of this while making Tickled — where every line and scene in the movie had to come with packaged evidence. Oh, the spreadsheets. With Tickled we had reams of A3 paper printed with scene numbers and timecodes relating to both the audio and video, and how we could back up what viewers were both hearing and seeing.

Every story I’ve done since, I have a legal spreadsheet in the back of my head.

There was also a lot of stuff we discovered along the way that didn’t make it into the film. I’ve written about some of this before on Webworm, like the tickle cells in the US military (I know that is a very weird sentence) or the letters David D’Amato sent to students at the time (gross).

But here’s another thing I just re-stumbled across — a NYPD police report about D’Amato, where he attempted to jump the queue at Starbucks by pretending to be a NYPD police officer. He presented a badge and everything.

I found the whole Starbucks thing kinda funny, because that’s where I ended up meeting D’Amato back in 2015. I guess he just really loved Starbucks.

I also love that those police officers who told D’Amato off for impersonating them had no idea what he was getting up to after hours. I wonder if any of those cops ended up watching Tickled?

I received this cute card from Marko Realmonte. Marko was one of D’Amato’s lackeys that he flew to New Zealand to convince us to stop making the documentary. “Under other circumstances we would be good mates,” he wrote somewhat unconvincingly.

“I hope for the benefit of both our financial futures that you let this story go.”

There’s nothing quite like a veiled threat, and one followed by a… bribe, I guess? “These small tokens are to thank you…” Marko knew I liked Jurassic Park (who doesn’t) so had included a hardcover copy of The Winston Effect: The Art & History of Stan Winston Studio.

Thanks, Marko. Needless to say, the bribe didn’t work.

The final thing I wanted to share was some of the audience research done before Tickled came out. Basically when we had the film 95% cut (thanks, maestro editor Simon Coldrick), we showed it to an audience to get feedback. You can get lost in an edit and miss obvious things, so it’s great to show a film to a generic audience to get their take. Everyone does this.

It can be a positive exercise, and a frustrating one. If you have financial backers that are panicky with no faith in a director, audience notes can be treated as the voice of God. Those big Hollywood films you see that are a mess? Chances are, too many focus groups tore those films apart and they couldn’t quite put them back together again.

We got lucky with Tickled in that our audience feedback was pretty good. People dug it, and many of the criticisms made sense. We could take them on board and gently tweak things. A feeling of a lack of closure could be fixed with some end-card text that answered a few simple questions left lingering. A scene that puzzled everyone could be fixed with a few quick edits.

But there were a few things I found amusing from our audience research. First, the way in which I (a real person) was treated as a character. They polled the audience to see what they thought of me.

1% hated me. 7% had no strong feelings either way (this is worse than hate imo, at least hate is an emotion!).

My favourite bit — 1% “didn’t remember the character.”

Then there was the “bad” guy — D’Amato. 41% hated him, which in this case is good I guess. 44% disliked him. 7% liked him.

And — 1% didn’t remember him.

That 1% stat for me and D’Amato will always stick with me. You have audience members who watch a whole film and none of it really goes in. It’s remarkable and I think about it often when making stuff.

Finally, my favourite section of the report included verbatim comments from viewers as they left the screening. Viewers who just absolutely hated the movie. They despised it.

One line in particular has stuck with me. A line about a story that was 100% true. A story that I lived through. I think this comment is probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received: “Too far-fetched, no storyline, not entertaining.”

Put that on the movie poster.

Anyway, if you want to see Tickled (again, or maybe for the first time ever if you’re a LADbible reader) the easiest thing to do is probably to rent it off iTunes, Google Play or Amazon. I think in some countries (but not all) it sits on Netflix. We directed a short follow up called The Tickle King which you might enjoy too.

It’s real. I have a pile of legal documents to prove it.

For anyone asking “why can’t I watch it on [insert favourite platform here]: Well, in an effort to get some of our money back, we sold the movie back in 2016 to Magnolia Pictures and HBO. From there Tickled moves about without me getting any say in the matter.

We get the rights back in 2031.

Until then — it’s out of my hands!

David.

PS: As always, I’m in the comments taking any questions you might have — in this case, about Tickled. Ask away. I’ll be checking in.