The Director of 'Tickled' Found Another Wild One
I wrote about New Zealand's "carpark terrorist," the documentary about him from David Farrier, and how Farrier's greatest story soon became his biggest headache.
“Unhinged sociopath goes buck wild” continues to be my favorite genre of story. Virtually every great serialized podcast is about one, and that goes double documentaries and docuserieses. The wilder the lies the more irresistible the story.
I’ll admit, one of the things I’ve rarely considered in all my consumption of sociopath content is the danger the storyteller has put themselves in in order to tell that story.
David Farrier’s latest documentary, Mister Organ, is another spell-binding tale of a colorful sociopath, but it’s one of the first to evoke the danger of being in a sociopath’s orbit. Farrier’s previous documentary, Tickled, was about the mysterious impresario of a tickle fetish video empire. Having watched Tickled, it seems impossible that Farrier could top himself with another bizarre-yet-strangely-relevant tale of a bullying sociopath who seems to derive psycho-sexual thrill from perverse forms of character assassination.
And yet in Mister Organ, Farrier has. Only rather than it being his triumph, it feels like Farrier has bumbled into a nightmare of his own creation. I won’t spoil it too much here, but suffice it to say, Farrier’s latest foil/muse is named Michael Organ, and he turns out to be every bit the formidable adversary as Tickled’s fetish video svengali David D’Amato. Maybe even more so.
I profiled Farrier’s struggle with Organ for GQ, in conjunction with Mister Organ’s recent release in New York and LA before it goes wider. I called the film “A Kiwi In Cold Blood for a carpark Truman Capote; you’ll come away glad someone told the story, and relieved it wasn’t you.”
No the film is not streaming yet. I’m sorry about that. I will update you when it is. Paid #Content Report subscribers can listen to my full interview with Farrier below.
Other Stuff:
-We have a new Pod Yourself The Wire (that’s our The Wire rewatch podcast, the follow-up to our Sopranos rewatch podcast, Pod Yourself A Gun) episode available for early download, with Princeton historian Kevin Kruse. Our first historian guest!
-We have a new Frotcast with Steve Bramucci and Andy Wood, discussing Katy Perry’s strange history of real estate disputes and other stuff.