Though they may not be the first amateur filmmakers to film a feature-length movie on an iPhone, the Peoria suburb of Squats, Illinois are indeed making groundbreaking strides towards answering the question of what to do with local creep Toby.
‘We originally started filming Toby in an effort to make him go away,’ reported child director Latisha. ‘He was always hanging around the skateboard park and ice cream truck and mall and cinema, places that aren’t I guess off limits for adults, but definitely more hang-outs for kids, and he tries to start casual conversations, and he wears that backwards baseball cap.’
Creepy. And needless to say, Uncle Toby would not go away: the movie is a documentary-style feature cut down from more than 120 hours of original footage.
‘The movie is about a man, obviously, who is playing a teenager in a movie so he decides to go down to the skate park and hang out with the kids to try and find out what is cool,’ explains Latisha on the Blu-Ray director’s commentary. ‘Of course this draws the attention of local cops, parents, and eventually Toby is issues a restraining order and loses his role in the film.’
‘All this,’ the commentary giggles, ‘after having devolved into an actual teenager, so that now his girlfriend Baaaaarbara leaves him, his friends don’t know how to talk to him, he is an emotional wreck, he is broke, and is completely unemployable because he can only talk with gum in his mouth.’
The movie won the Audience Watched It Award at the prestigious Peoria Can! Movie Festival this March.
Toby when asked about whether he had been chased off a playground by kids filming his creepy behavior, denied all knowledge of ever having been on TV.
Photo by Parker Gibbons on Unsplash
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