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There’s a handful of unique filmmakers who are proud to call Portland their home: Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, and Kelly Reichardt, to name a few. Now the Rose City can add another name to this illustrious list: Skweezy Jibbs, known for his viral persona and stunts, with his pandemic-era efforts to secure two weeks’ worth of Wendy’s chicken nuggets for free being one of the most well known.
His feature debut, Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie, sold out its Nov. 1 premiere at the Hollywood Theatre in six hours. Due to popular demand, the meta movie will show in Ashland, Salem, Seattle and Vancouver, Wash. The showing at Kiggins Theatre on Nov. 19 is also sold out, as is the Clinton Street Theater’s showing on Nov. 28.
For the uninitiated, Skweezy Jibbs is the comedic persona of Tim Savage. An enthusiastic goofball who speaks in ebonics and enjoys, as he puts it, “telling stories and going on adventures and stuff.” Savage has been creating content as Skweezy since 2007 (“longer than most babies been alive”) but didn’t break big until he began posting his journeys on TikTok during the pandemic.
After 18 years of making a living online, however, Skweezy tells WW his biggest takeaway is, “how unimportant the phones and the digital shit actually is as an overall thing, which I know is a crazy contradiction because that’s where all of my success comes from, but I’m serious when I say you realize how important real life is—which seems to be the opposite of where everyone else seems to be going, but that’s a them problem.”
Skweezy’s success led to a cross-country tour in 2024, during which he announced he was going to make his own movie: The Ballad of Ricky Santangelo, written by and starring Jibbs as an exotic dancer who must rescue his son from the Russian mafia. He describes the film as “half John Wick, half Transformers, half Fast & Furious, half Magic Mike.” However, local filmmakers he shared this with had a chillier reaction.
“I thought they would be like, ‘This is the sickest fucking shit I’ve ever seen,’” he says. “Unfortunately, they were like, ‘This is horrible.’ I was like, ‘Is there anything I can do to fix it?’ and they were like, ‘No.’”
Undeterred, Skweezy began filming on Ballad, taking his own unique approach to movie production. In one behind-the-scenes moment, he shared a safety measure he came up with to avoid firearm-related injuries: green-screen all the guns and add them in during post. However, He says there was never any temptation to use generative artificial intelligence to supplement Ballad’s visual effects.
“I’m still trying to get paid to create stuff as a human,” Skweezy says. “I’m not ready for AI to take the reins on that.”
Finding a distributor for the film proved to be a challenge in its own right; it was turned down by both Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. Skweezy decided the best route was to take it on the road himself, starting with an eight-city tour across Oregon and Washington. He cited filmmakers Mike Cheslik and Ryland Tews as inspiration, who self-distributed their film Hundreds of Beavers before it hit streaming.
“I’m lucky enough to be able to do that, and I like doing that,” he says. “I’ve never been really one to play the game anyway so I’m just going to keep doing things my own way and keep hustling.”
One of the things Skweezy’s most proud of is getting to work in Portland, bragging that nearly all of his cast and crew were local artists. WW Funniest Five alumnus Adam Pasi, heavy metal sideshow personality Nik Sin, and actors Abigail Killmeier (Love, Victor) and Kevin Michael Moore (Pig) also make appearances.
“It’s a movie kind of about Portland,” Skweezy says. “That’s why the producers of Portlandia and Documentary Now! got onboard and said, hey, let’s turn this into something.”
Despite his enthusiasm, Ballad struggled with budget issues that threatened to shut down filming before it was finished. Skweezy found a lifeline in producers David Cress and Kevin Sullivan, who agreed to finish financing the movie if they could make their own feature about the difficult making of Ballad. Although initially hesitant, Savage eventually warmed to what became Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie.
“I watched it and I was like, OK, their movie about me making my movie is way better than my movie about four other movies,” he says. “I’m proud of it, I’m excited, even though it makes me look like an idiot sometimes, but that’s just life. Sometimes ants look like they’re the most strong creatures on earth and they can lift their equivalent of a Volkswagen, and sometimes they just get stepped on.”
