The Devil's Pleasure Garden: Pretentious Pictures Presents:

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

Trials of a gigolo

Seven feature-length movies

and the next Pink Panther:

light classy international humor,

based on

The books and the videos

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

An outrageously funny series of stand-alone movies based on an outrageously funny series of stand-alone books.

Bertie Wooster

Al Bundy

Hank Moody

European pleasure zones

+ lazy useless American gigolo

= Toby, a lovable prick, in an

exquisite blend of refinement and vulgarity.

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

Foreign Matter

“I was beastly but never coarse. A high-class sort of heel.”—George Sanders

Toby travels with a woman who pays, sweet blonde bubblehead Marcie, who adores him. He’s got it made. Trouble is, her nine-year-old daughter Andrea is his mental superior, and sees him for what he is.

Marcie’s father-in-law, billionaire bully Haze, holds the purse strings and loathes Toby, but he loves his little granddaughter, and she's where the power lies.

She’d get rid of Toby but she knows her mommy loves him, and keeps him around for amusement, solves his problems for him.

Haze takes them to a Greek island to bid for a painting, with Toby along as Andrea's “tutor,” and on his best behavior.

But Toad, Toby’s pal from Paris, has followed their host's impossibly beautiful niece Darleen there, and compromises Toby by shooting one of the house dogs and sticking him with it.

Toby is raped by a lady guest and threatened by her husband. To keep Haze from spending Marcie's allowance on the painting, Andrea organizes Toby and Toad to steal it—

—and Toby is mistakenly swung through Darleen's window and found in bed with her.

TOTAL MOISTURE

“Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.”

—Henry James

In the south of France Haze is having himself adopted by an elderly count so he can pass the title on to Andrea—who sniffs a scam, and uses Toby as her pawn in the game.

The countess has her eye on Toby, and he can’t really blame her.

Toad and Darleen, on their honeymoon, get glued together in the act, which is all of marriage she needs, and the moment she's free she runs off to the count.

“Well, Toad” I said, putting my hands behind my head, “I’ve sure learned my lesson. I’m not going to be so conceited anymore!”

AIN’T IT AWFUL?

“There is no happiness that is not idleness and only what is useless is pleasurable.”

—Anton Chekhov

At Marcie’s house on a Greek island—Haze says it’s his house—Toby tries to sleep but Darleen keeps climbing in his window.

Haze has come to shoot a commercial for his shampoo and when the actress sees Toby, she has an orgasm on the spot. Very expressive.

Her bodyguard / boyfriend has it in for Toby, and steals Haze’s shampoo formula. Andrea electrocutes him in the bath.

A Paris chambermaid arrives, claiming Toby has made her pregnant. He rejects her because she’s fat, and she makes attempts on his life.

The Woman of a Certain Age doesn’t even exist. She’s a nightmare Marcie has about somebody stealing Toby.

The cad

“How sweet it is!”—Jackie Gleason

Tour-guide Toby winters in Geneva with a client, and in spring escapes dog-walking duties to return to Athens—

—where his boss seizes his passport and assigns him a group of Americans and a Japanese banker, on whom his Swedish colleague and sometime squeeze has her eye.

Toby is groped by a teenage nymph, cruised by a gay priest and seduced by a lady professor who wants to take him home. On Crete the nymph rustles a lamb scheduled for the table, the Hatfields and McCoys show up and shoot, everybody goes to jail and Toby is fired.

Should he go back with the professor, face his creditors, shelve books at the library? “I certainly feel like a cad.”

an awkward moment

“If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.”—Marilyn

Tourist Beverly, getting older, whisks Toby off to an island hotel where, blissfully in love, she dies.

The hotel owner, Ariadne, a widow still in mourning after a year, disapproves of this grasshopper, but he helps her with a guest who's threatening to foreclose on her hotel. And she is lonely...

She goes to Athens for a bank loan, and leaves Toby in charge. Mistake. When she comes back without the loan the hotel is half destroyed and there's a corpse to get rid of—the forecloser's.

The forecloser's widow will let Ariadne have the hotel if she, the forecloser's widow, can have Toby. It's an offer Ariadne can't refuse. But just as the papers are signed, Marcie arrives, and lays, so to speak, her own claim.