The 85-minute documentary has no distributor yet.) (He asked that it be kept under wraps until more than a few hundred people had seen the film. Mamet says the ideas were his own invention.ĭuerr believes he has known the tiler's identity for years, but declined to reveal it except through the film. Similar theories surface in a one-act David Mamet play about a late-night call-in show. An address found on a tile in Santiago, Chile, leads searchers to a South Philadelphia rowhouse whose surrounding streets are scattered with what seem to be prototypes for the Toynbee tiles.Īn item in a 1983 Inquirer column by Clark DeLeon recounts a phone call from a man claiming to represent something called the Minority Association, whose members promote the idea of extraterrestrial resurrection. Resurrect Dead narrows the search to a handful of suspects, although it seems equally possible that none of them may be correct. If I'd made this film, it would be four and a half hours and unwatchable by anyone but me.' 'When I saw them, I'd get really excited about the color choices and the look of them. 'I just had a gut feeling that I had some commonality with them,' Duerr, 34, said in Park City, where he was attending the premiere. In the film, an ex-girlfriend recalls taking what she thought was a romantic jaunt to New York with him, only to realize that Duerr intended to spend the entire trip tracking down and photographing Toynbee tiles. The central figure in Resurrect Dead is Justin Duerr, an artist and musician who has been cataloging the tiles and searching for their source since the 1990s.

Irrational dedication comes with the territory, for the Toynbee tiler as well as those on his trail. He pulled the DVD from his computer, scrawled the film's name on its surface, and hopped on his bike, making it from West Philadelphia to the 30th Street post office just in time.