Pretentious Pictures Presents:

The many loves of toby tucker
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Toby is as charming as Cary,
as seductive as Marcello,
as cheeky as Hamlet, 
as klutzy as Lucy,
as wimpy as Woody,
as gullible as Goofy
and outrageously funny,
impossibly funny.
I give you the next Pink Panther 
in nineteen one-hour episodes,
based on The books and the videos. 

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

                   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
It starts in New York, where he slides from expensive kept man to escort service to homeless— 
escapes to Greece to teach English, is talked into co-hosting a fat girls contest, falls for one of the contestants, and is thrown in jail. 
Tour guide Swan, one of his students, springs him to guide English-speakers, and he and his group are marooned on a deserted beach.
He falls in love with one of them, 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. 
He gets tired of walking her dogs and returns to Athens where he guides another tour. This time he’s sure he’s going back with a professor who falls for him, but she backs out. “Whew! I hate decisions. They compromise my passivity.”
He and his group are arrested and he is fired, but then a baroness he’d known in New York picks him up—and dies in bed with him. He cashes in her cards, writes himself a check and hangs around on the island waiting for it to clear.
The owner of their hotel despises him, but when a developer threatens to foreclose on her mortgage Toby, who doesn’t really give a poopoo, slides him a stack of cash. “And here’s a little something for yourself. Get something decent to wear or something.”
She falls in love with him, but when the developer dies accidentally his widow, who holds mortgages on several island properties, buys Toby with them. She's not his dream girl but, as they’re leaving, Marcie, a wealthy dumb blonde who had fallen for him in New York, and who's been tracking his whereabouts, shows up, has a knock-down-drag-out with the widow, and kidnaps him into a life of luxury—
—except for her nine-year-old daughter Andrea, an evil-genius who disapproves of him and gets him into and out of trouble at will; and Marcie’s father-in-law and purse-holder Hazelton Turnbull “Hard Turd” Harding IV, who despises him and threatens to have him killed.
Toby accidentally sits in a painting Haze is bidding on
—and frustrates Haze's plan to have himself adopted by a Belgian count, so he can pass the title on to Andrea, 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 sorts things out.
It never ends.

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

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His recent The Light Touch is on Amazon PrimeTubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.


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

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film reviews: Poor Things and Napoleon

Exquisite Pleasures

4 comments:

  1. Toby is the Covid vaccine we need NOW! On screen for all. Please make it happen.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Max. Wonderful to hear from you.

      Delete
    2. Max! Are you D.C.? Will I ever understand?

      Delete
    3. Sometimes I'm Micco when I'm not Max but I'm D.C. when I need to be.

      Delete