Pretentious Pictures Presents
A Comedy Series about an American Gigolo
in Europe
Toby
travels with rich blonde
bubble-head
He's got it made, except
that her 9-year-old
daughter Andrea
is smarter than
he is.
Bertie Wooster
Al Bundy
European 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.
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.”
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.
Toby accidentally sits on, or rather into, a painting Haze is bidding on and bursts it. It's not his fault!
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.
As charming as Cary,
as seductive as Marcello,
as seductive as Marcello,
as sarky as Oscar,
as klutzy as Lucy,
as wimpy as Woody,
as gullible as Goofy,
and outrageously funny,
impossibly funny!
as klutzy as Lucy,
as wimpy as Woody,
as gullible as Goofy,
and outrageously funny,
impossibly funny!
THE BOOKS:
Toby Moments on YouTube:
Jaws
Shoot the Baby
In bed with the Girls
Trying It On
Toby Gets Un-Stupid
The Tipping Point
Champagne and Ice Cream
On the blog:
Toby's Marriage Tips for Men
The Child in Its Swiss Classroom
The Child Annoys Me, and I Annoy It Back
On Amazon:
Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, 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, lives Greece, Irish citizen. He is of towering intellect but, as is often the case with such people, not that bright. Here’s a little more about this splendid fellow.
