By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

HBO, Magnolia In Pink With Sundance Doc Tickled

[PR]  HBO has acquired the U.S. television rights to the shocking Sundance documentary, TICKLED, while MAGNOLIA has picked up North American theatrical rights, and world rights outside of North America excluding Australia and New Zealand.  Co- directed by David Farrier & Dylan Reeve and produced by Carthew Neal, TICKLED is about a journalist who stumbles upon a “competitive endurance tickling” competition. As he delves deeper he comes up against fierce resistance, but that doesn’t stop him getting to the bottom of a story stranger than fiction.

Josh Braun of Submarine negotiated the HBO deal and Braun, Matt Burke, Dan Braun, David Koh and Ben Braun of Submarine negotiated the Magnolia deal with SVP of Acquisitions Dori Begley and VP John Von ThadenChristina Rogers of Magnolia International will be representing the film at EFM.

TICKLED premiered to rave reviews in the World Documentary Section (New Zealand) at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. The Hollywood Reporter called the film “captivating and jaw-dropping” while Variety says TICKLED is “An alarming cautionary tale about how easy it is in the Internet age to ruin people’s lives while hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, the pic boasts a humorously titillating entry hook that soon gives way to an engrossing conspiracy-thriller.” The film was financed by the New Zealand Film Commission and MPI.

David Farrier says, “I’m just over the moon it will be on HBO, alongside my favourite shows. I’m tickled pink.” Co-director Dylan Reeve adds, “When we started out on this journey my expectations for the film were very modest. To have the film headed to the big screen in the U.S. is beyond exciting!”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon