Tickled’s subjects confront a co-director in Los Angeles.

The Subjects of Documentary Tickled Confronted One of Its Directors on Opening Night

The Subjects of Documentary Tickled Confronted One of Its Directors on Opening Night

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Slate's Culture Blog
June 19 2016 10:05 PM

The Subjects of Documentary Tickled Confronted One of Its Directors on Opening Night

tickled
Dylan Reeve and Kevin Clarke at the opening night screening of Tickled.

Magnolia

Tickled, David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s documentary about the underground world of “competitive endurance tickling,” has had very few screenings pass without incident. At Sundance, one of the film’s subjects was reportedly scribbling notes at a screening. At the True/False festival in Missouri, two private investigators were removed from a screening the day before Farrier was served with a summons for a defamation lawsuit. And on Friday, at the film’s opening-night screening at the NuArt, both Kevin Clarke and David D’Amato, two of the film’s primary subjects, showed up at a screening and Q&A.

Magnolia Pictures, which is releasing the film with HBO, posted the video above to their Facebook page, which shows a lobby altercation between Kevin Clarke, an associate of David D’Amato who is featured in the film, and co-director Dylan Reeve, as well as the Q&A which followed the film, featuring exchanges between Clarke, D’Amato, and Reeve. Clarke wants Reeve to release the unedited tapes of conversations he had with the filmmakers on a trip to New Zealand, which he claimed will show that he’d been promised that their conversations were off the record. D’Amato, on the other hand, offered legal advice, encouraging Reeve to “obtain criminal counsel sooner rather than later.” Magnolia also posted a video with just the Q&A portion of the confrontation:

Both men offered their opinions of the film: Clarke called it “a piece of garbage full of lies,” while D’Amato’s review was more mixed:

I do have to credit you, that while your facts are very discordant, some of the effects in the movie, the music, the choreography, it was done very well.

Clarke has set up a website to address his side of the story; his headline on his post about the confrontation at the NuArt reads “Dylan ‘Tool’ Reeve whines like a naughty child.” Slate’s Dan Kois interviewed co-directors Reeve and Farrier about their film and their encounters with Clarke and D’Amato before these latest developments; “It’s a real treat,” Reeve said about follow-up emails from Clarke. Tickled is in theaters now.