American-Gigolo Comedy Series—

The many loves of toby tucker

The hottest project since SpaceX. I call it, with all due modesty, TobyX:

Toby is as charming as Cary,

as seductive as Marcello,

as cheeky as Hamlet, 

as wimpy as Woody,

as clutzy as Lucy,

and outrageously funny,

impossibly funny,

in 19 one-hour episodes,

based on books and videos.

“I've always regarded Europe as more or less of a restaurant.”

                   Bertie Wooster

                   Al Bundy

                   Hank Moody

                   Greek pleasure zones

               +  lazy useless American gigolo

               =  Toby, a lovable cad

Toby is irrepressible and irredeemable, a delightful comic creation whose most exasperating quality is also his most endearing: the more we get to know him the less we expect from him.

                        —The Montreal Gazette

Produced by Bernie Stampfer

It starts in New York, where he slides from Park Avenue kept man to escort service to vagrant—

—and escapes to Greece to teach English (“Dog, cat, cow, what's to know?”), where he is talked into co-hosting a Fat Girls Contest, falls for one of the contestants, and is thrown in jail. 

Danish tour guide Swan, one of his students, springs him so he can take the English-speakers off her hands. What's to know? But he and his group are marooned on a deserted beach—

—and he forms an attachment with a client, who might be able to support him, but decides against going back to America with her when one of his New York ladies shows up and takes him to Geneva. 

Tired of walking her dogs, he returns to Athens and guides another tour. This time he’s sure he’s going back with a professor—so cultured, so sensitive.

“You will do no such thing,” says an old baroness from his New York days. “Do you know how much a professor makes? I hope you like fast food.” 

“Whew! I hate decisions. They compromise my passivity.”

She takes him to an island—and dies in bed with him. What to do but cash in her cards, write himself a check and hang around waiting for it to clear?

The owner of their hotel, long in mourning herself, despises him for his frivolity, but when a developer threatens to foreclose on her mortgage Toby, who gives nary a poopoo, slides him a stack of cash. “And here’s a little something for yourself. Get something decent to wear or something.”

She weeps. So much for mourning. But when the developer dies “accidentally” his widow, who holds mortgages on the hotel and on several island properties, buys Toby from her. It's a sad moment but—life is life.

As they’re boarding the ferry, however, Marcie Harding, Park Avenue widow cum dumb blonde who has loved him since ever, gets off and has a knock-down-drag-out with the new owner, while he boards and watches, till Marcie downs her and makes the boat. “I was rooting for you,” he says.

She kidnaps him into a life of fun and luxury—except for “the child,” her nine-year-old daughter, an evil genius and smarter than both of them put together.

She disapproves of this “A-word.” “What's an A-word?” “You told me not to say asshole.” “Andrea!” And except for Marcie’s father-in-law and purse-holder, Hazelton Turnbull “Hard Turd” Harding IV, who loathes this freeloader, and considers having him killed.

Toby accidentally sits on, or rather into, a painting Haze is bidding on and bursts it. It's not his fault!

And when Haze tries to have himself adopted by an old count to acquire the title, Toby screws it up by sleeping with the countess.

Haze manages to separate him from Marcie and arrange her marriage to an English lord, and Toby is groped by the gay family ghost. But Andrea, reluctantly—“What a poop-head!”—sorts things out.

It never ends.

“He had set himself to the study of the aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.”—Oscar Wilde

PROPOSED:

THE TEAM:

Bernie

Dan

Andreas

Chiltern

Central Athens Film Productions

40% of the budget in advance

THE BOOKS:

THE VIDEOS:

In Bed with the Girls

Toby Gets Un-Stupid

Jaws

Trying It On

The Tipping Point

Shoot the Baby

Champagne and Ice Cream

On Amazon

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“Like all that is best in life I am quite useless.”

In Bed with the Girls

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film reviews: Hillbilly Elegy

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean