LITERAL REMAINS

When I attended the Nashville Tattoo & Horror Festival, I handed out business cards emblazoned with our site’s name, Literal Remains.  One person I gave a card to was Lloyd Kaufman, the president of Troma Entertainment.  He is also the writer, director, and producer of several Troma films, including such fare as Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.  Mr. Kaufman was generous beyond belief and offered to do an interview about Troma’s 35^th anniversary.

I’m no reporter.  I’ve never really interviewed someone before, especially someone of Lloyd Kaufman’s caliber.  Having made the arrangements, it was mutually decided that Friday May 8^th was the moment of truth.  I sweated.  I paced the floor.

After a near mishap with the time difference, I began talking to Mr. Kaufman, the Lloyd Kaufman, about Al Gore, Indiana Jones, and explosive diarrhea.

Literal Remains:  Is Troma where you thought it would be after 35 years?

Lloyd Kaufman: No.  Because when we started Troma we even expect to last beyond distributing Squeeze Play.  We had a movie called Squeeze Play and we decided after being screwed on two or three other movies that we had better start our own, uh, learn how to distribute our own damn movies because otherwise we couldn’t keep getting investors.  We couldn’t keep taking money from our friends and family and dentists and losing the money, so we figured we’d start a distribution company and figure out how to get into the theaters directly in 1974.  And we figured we’d go out of business real fast.  So we came up with this really crappy name called Troma because we figured that in New York State every name was taken.  It’s an old state and the John Robinson name is taken, and Literal Remains is probably taken if you want to start a corporation called Literal Remains, you probably can’t do it, blah blah blah blah, and here we are thirty-five years later.  So no one is more surprised than I.

LR:  What has surprised you most about the viewing public over the years?

LK:  Well the thing that is clear, I don’t know if it surprises me, but I guess I’m constantly moved by the fact that the viewing public is a lot more discerning and a lot more intelligent than the major media suggests.  The viewing public wants to see good movies, and that’s the only reason we’re still in business.  The only reason Troma still exists is because the viewing public takes the trouble to go and find our movies.  There’s a movie opening today called Star Trek, right.  How many is it, a hundred million dollars in advertising?  Whether or not people go to see that movie, probably the only reason they’re going is that there’s been a certain amount of Kool Aid put in the water and they drink the Kool Aid and they go.  Now in the case of Star Trek, maybe the Kool Aid is good, I don’t know.  But most of these things are baby food movies and fast food movies, you know, they taste good for a few minutes and then you have explosive diarrhea, which was the symbol in Poultrygeist, that’s what the explosive diarrhea is all about in Poultrygeist.  It’s all about the media and how…I’ve said enough about that.  A lot of people don’t get the explosive diarrhea metaphor in Poultrygeist.  So the point is, the public has to find our movies, they have to actually take the trouble to find them, nobody tells them about our movies.  We have no money for advertising.  Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead played in about 300 theaters one at a time with no advertising, and the only reason it’s still around is that the public took the trouble to go and find it.  So that’s what I think the majors don’t realize, you can’t buy word of mouth.  I’m always astounded by the fact that when one of my movies opens, somehow the public finds it and they get there.  And usually my movie does very well; the problem is that it gets kicked out of the theater because Indiana Jones wants to take all the screens, and the independent theaters are very often bullied by these giant conglomerates that control the world of art and commerce.

LR:  There are all manners of trials and tribulations with independent filmmaking.  On those days when it feels like the whole thing, the entire production, could collapse and fall down around you, what keeps you going and determined?

LK:  I love movies.  The only time I get fucked in the head is during preproduction.  Preproduction is the most important part of preparation and we have a long preproduction period.  That’s when I’m crazy, that’s when I’m really crazy, because I can never believe that the movie is actually going to get made.  Because we work on very small budgets and we have a very, very, ambitious movie.  So you seen any of our films?  You can see that for half a million dollars on 35 millimeter our movies look like 20 million dollars and they do that because we don’t just have five people sitting in a room talking about having Ingmar Bergman in our films.  We have thousands of people in our films and they are very complicated with lots of special effects and stunts and fights and singing and dancing and special effects make-up, and in preproduction, that’s when it all looks like it’s going to crash and burn, and that’s when I go nuts.  But if you want to see it upfront and personal, watch Poultry In Motion: Truth is Stranger than Chicken, which is a movie about the making of Poultrygeist it’s on the DVD of Poultrygeist, and you’ll see that I’m crazy.  But I am propelled and I go forward because I love movies.

LR:  Is there a dream project that has yet to see the light of day?

LK:  I’d like to make a good version of Pal Joey, but I don’t think I’ll ever do that of course because it’s a Rogers and Hart musical, and people keep fucking it up.  It recently played on Broadway and it got fucked there too, and the movie of Pal Joey sucks.  But I don’t think the estates of Rogers and/or Hart want me to make a movie of Pal Joey.   But it’s a great musical, I like musicals. 

(It was at this point in the conversation Mr. Kaufman and I discussed our brief meeting at the Nashville Tattoo and Horror Festival and he had the following to say about the importance of fans.)

LK:  The only reason that Troma is still around is that you and the underground, I mean that in a good way, I’m in the underground, but we support each other and we would not be here were it not for the bloggers and the websites and the real underground.  Real visionary, forward looking, Andy Warhol underground kind of stuff.  You guys spread the word.  Poultrygeist has been very successful because of people like you and bloggers and word of mouth and the mainstream major studios, no matter how much money they spend–Speed Racer was a bomb, as much money as they spent, they were able to brainwash people into the theaters the first weekend, but after that, nobody.

LR:  Having seen movies like Scary Movie and Date Movie, and others in that vein, I couldn’t help but think that Troma was there first, and that Troma did it with a lot more intelligence.

LK:  Well, John, thank you for saying that, that is in fact the truth, and I don’t want to be arrogant, but Peter Jackson, and James Gunn, Eli Roth, and Quentin Tarantino…there are directors all over the world who are younger and a lot more mainstream, like Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who suggest that I’m the one who created the slapstick gore movie.  But I agree with you; I think the problem with a lot of these movies today that try to be funny and combine, uh, to do what I do, is that they don’t really have anything to say.  Other than maybe making fun of the horror genre they don’t, and I think that’s the problem with a lot young people making low budget movies, they try to make zombie movies that are funny, it’s all well and good but getting someone’s leg chopped off does not make it funny, and it doesn’t make it meaningful.  You have to have something to say.  And I think the problem with these big budget, so called comedy gore movies, is most of them have nothing to say, they’re just totally forgettable.  Again, they’re fast food movies.  You eat them, they feel good going down, and then you have diarrhea.  Again there’s a lot, without tooting my own horn, there’s a lot going on in Poultrygeist, and the public has found it out.  The different themes of why the fast food industry is not terribly productive, why it’s a disgrace; the limousine liberals who want us to have…what was that Al Gore movie?  An Inconvenient Truth.  The time to make that movie was when we made The Toxic Avenger, when no one was talking about the environment.  Talking about the environment today, that’s like saying don’t smoke.  It’s ridiculous, it takes no courage to do that.  That’s what these guys do, these limousine liberals, they get on something that’s already proven to be in the public’s favor.  You know they get on these things where the public’s already agreed.  It’s okay to be gay, we know that, we don’t need a documentary convincing us it’s okay to be gay, that should have been done twenty years ago.  We know smoking is no good, what we didn’t know in 1982 is that the environment is fucked.  The Toxic Avenger was the first movie to deal with it.  And what we didn’t know in 1985 was that AIDS is out there, and it should be shoved in peoples’ faces, and not swept under the carpet like Ronald Reagan was doing or what’s even worse was that the establishment was suggesting that AIDS was punishment for gay people, that they deserved to get AIDS.  Troma’s War pushed that thing right in peoples’ faces and we were vilified for it.  So Poultrygeist makes fun of the limousine liberals, the inconvenient truth of Al Gore who’s telling me I’m not allowed to drive a car, and that I should turn my fucking air conditioner off, but he’s got a jet plane using up more fuel unnecessarily than I will use in a lifetime.  For one trip!  He’ll take one trip in a private jet and use up more gas than I will with every Mexican lunch I’ve ever had.  And what about the hair cut guy?  John fucking ambulance chasing, what the hell was his name?  John Edwards! ‘Don’t drill for oil because of blah blah blah,’ meanwhile he’s got twenty-four rooms all running air conditioning, all running heating, God knows what his energy, his so called inconvenient truth is.  That’s all part of the hypocrisy, basically.  A lot of my movies I think can be boiled down to pro-underground, pro-underdog, and anti-hypocrisy.  But they deal with different themes; in the case of Poultrygeist I detailed it maybe too largely.

LR:  So do you appreciate your detractors, the people who rail against you, as much as you do the people who herald your work?

LK:  I don’t get railed against.  At least I don’t know about it if I do.  Most of the big time critics understand what I’m trying to say, they get it.  It’s very seldom that somebody doesn’t get it.  What I rail against is being ignored, because after forty years of making movies I’ve written five books that, Troma Studios is in New York City, the New York Times did not say one word about the books, not one fucking word.  No one fucking word about the thirty-five year anniversary of Troma Entertainment, you know the studio that brought you the South Park guys, Samuel L. Jackson, the Toxic Avenger, Marisa Tomei.  Our libraries contain Vincent D’Onfrio’s first movie.  So I get pissed off about being ignored.  If people genuinely don’t like one of my movies, I’d rather see that or don’t like one of my books, the problem is the medium is controlled by a small number of giant and devil worshipping media conglomerates and they basically just freeze out, they economically blacklist the independents.  They ignore them, hoping that if the public doesn’t know you’re there they can’t support you.  But the thing that always surprises me is that somehow the public finds out.  So the New York Times, fuck’em.  But that pisses me off more, being marginalized. 

LR:  Do you ever think of retiring, or do you plan to keep going until they have to pry a camera from your cold dead fingers?

LK:  [laughs] I think I’ll keep going because everything I do is fucked.  And if I blow my brains out, I’ll fuck that up too, and I’ll probably accidentally shoot the guy next to me.  So my guess is I’ll keep fucking things up as long as I can.  And the nice part of it is, you don’t need money to make movies anymore.  The making of the movies has become democratized. You don’t need a lot of money.  When I started, Battle of Love’s Return, in 1971 which was Oliver Stone’s debut in the movie industry, that movie cost eight thousand dollars, 1970 I guess it was, and eight thousand bucks in 1970 would be the equivalent of about a hundred thousand today.  So that’s a shit load of money.  But today you can make a movie for zero.  Guiseppe Andrews, one of our producers Troma distributes for, he makes these movies for a few thousand bucks and we put them out, and they’re great, they’re masterpieces.  Touch Me in the Morning, Trailer Town, they’re fantastic.  And then Chris Watson who made Zombigeddon and Slaughter Party, these are not masterpieces, but they make money, the budgets are very low, but he’s doing alright and he doesn’t have to go to work in Hollywood.  So that’s the big upside, I could probably make my own damn movies until I’m dead, which hopefully will be soon.  And I’m just starting to write The Toxic Avenger Part V, which will about the Toxic Twins, and I’m finishing up a new book called Produce Your Own Damn Movie.

LR:  Thank you sir, very much, for this interview.

LK:  Thank you, and if you’re ever in New York visit Troma Studios.

LR:  If I make it there I certainly will.

LK:  At least I got to meet you in Nashville, and I hope that I get invited back to that convention.  Tell those guys to invite me back, I had a blast, it was a lot of fun.  That was a great place.  The fans were really interesting and great, and intelligent…they were just real fans.  It’s so much fun when they’re real fans; in L.A. the fans are not really fans they just want to get acting jobs.  But in Nashville the fans were real, and they knew so much about my world.  So I thank you.  And thanks to Literal Remains. 

And there it is, my conversation with Lloyd Kaufman.  A fascinating man.  A gentleman and a scholar.

John Robinson, the_novacula

special thanks to, not only Mr. Kaufman for the interview, but also to Scott at Troma Entertainment, Matthew Sadler, and James Phillips