“I wanted to be a social worker and make the world a better place. I started to go see movies and I caught the virus.… The point is I realized that I didn’t want to just teach the people with hooks for hands; I wanted to film them. And I wanted to film the bums painting happy faces on beads and stringing them together.” – Lloyd Kaufman
I have to admit that I thought the interview with the head of Troma would go slightly different than it had. I thought this jokester that wears a little tie and makes movies about a toxic waste superhero, would be all fun and games. But instead I found Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman to be very intelligent, serious, and insightful.
Troma is preparing to release “Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead”, (Watch Music Video) their most ambitious film to date, and for some reason appears to be struggling. After being in business for 40 years and distributing over 1000 films, how could this company possibly be floundering? Critics and studio profits show that HD filmmaking, and low budget direct-to-DVD sales are up and booming. So why is the King of independent cinema barely scraping by?
The answer is that the media wants you to believe in independent filmmaking. Why? Because it makes THEM money. A studio used to have to make a $200 million picture to make a blockbuster. Now they have the luxury of creating “sleeper hits” where they only spend a paltry $5 million and yet easily gross over $200mil now. The little people still pay the same ticket price, no wait, a higher ticket price and yet the studios are making cheaper films which in turn makes them more money. The magazines that these studios own support “low budget filmmaking” (i.e. support the movies their owners are selling). Troma, which founded low budget cinema, seems to have been left out of the loop somehow.
This interview is the real deal. It is dirty, nasty and most importantly, it is the truth. People do not want to talk about what really happens behind the scenes, but like a Troma filmmaker, I remain fearless. Some people view Troma films as b-grade sludge contaminating the planet. But I beg to differ. I view Troma films as b-grade movies exposing the planet’s sludge. And the only people trying to prevent the release of these films are the ones too scared of looking at their own filth.
HorrorYearbook: So have you been keeping busy with all your promotion for Poultrygeist? I see your bulletins all over MySpace.
Lloyd Kaufman: Oh good, that’s great. We need all the help we can get. You want to know about promotion? That’s Robert De Niro’s job with “The Good Shepard” and “James Bond.” That’s promotion. I’m trying to cling on with my fingernails. We’ve got nothing in terms of promotion. I’ve been making movies for 40 years and I’m treated like absolute… I don’t exist in terms of the media and promotion. “James Bond,” that’s promotion.
HYB: Yeah, Well that’s millions and millions of dollars going into advertising to beat it into our heads to go watch the film. That doesn’t mean its any good.
LK: That’s brainwashing promotion.
HYB: So, Why can’t I find any of your DVDs at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video?
LK: Because of Economic Blacklisting. They are pawns of the major conglomerates. Blockbuster used to be owned by Viacom, the same company that owns Paramount and MTV. So they want to put us out of business and Blockbuster is a vassal of the major conglomerates. Or our movies suck and no one wants to see our movies.
HYB: Ah see, I don’t think that’s true. I struggle to find your movies.
LK: Quentin Tarantino doesn’t think that’s true. Peter Jackson, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noe`, don’t think that’s true. There are major, major directors that owe us a huge debt. They don’t think that our movies suck. The only thing I can think of is Economic Blacklisting. In the Fifties, there was another kind of Blacklisting that the studios did that ruined many careers….If you are not apart of the club, you do not exist.
HYB: So even after all this time you get no respect from the media or critics?
LK: No respect? We get no attention. Absolutely. How many books have I written? Three. Has the NY Times said one word about my books? No, but they did give a front page of the Leisure and Arts section puff piece on Jenna Jameson’s book. You know who she is right?
HYB: Yeah, she wrote “How to make love like a Porn Star.”
LK: That’s right. The media has been promoting that. She is a woman who makes a living receiving the male semen on her face. And her book of course, because it is published by one of the conglomerates, gets a front page in the NY Times. And my three books, even though I have been making movies for over 30 years, even though Troma has a building in NY city, even though we created the Toxic Avenger, has been the birthplace of Samuel L. Jackson and a host of other famous people, we don’t exist. Even though I’ve written a novel; not one peep. Even when we had our 30th Anniversary, not one NY newspaper said one word.
HYB: This is similar in what the conglomerates did to Howard Stern; trying to quiet him because he didn’t fit in and follow their rules too.
LK: Well, Howard Stern is always talking about Troma like we are intellectual and esoteric. And he is hugely successful.
HYB: So what about Fangoria or Rue Morgue magazines? I do not think I have seen anything in there about Troma films.
LK: I agree. What is that all about? They put plenty of stuff in about 20th Century Fox. Maybe they’ll do something on Poultrygeist.
HYB: Have you tried talking to their editors? To get them to cover your feature films or review them?
LK: Sure, of course. Well, it’s not like people don’t know about us.
HYB: Well, Fangoria seems to be too commercial and studio-based now. I am sure they get paid a lot of money to write what they have been lately.
LK: Well, that is the problem. I started making movies in the 60s, and there were regulations that prevented people from owning the movie studios and radio stations; they prevented monopolies. But over the 33 1/3 years, Molly, the rules that prevented monopoly have been done away with, and Bill Clinton of course got rid of the rule that prevented Fox from owning…You see Rupert Murdock, who owns Fox which is News Corp., Clinton’s watch did away with the rule that prevents the networks from owning the content. And also there were rules that if you own a newspaper in a town, you also couldn’t own the TV station. All the rules that prevented the cartel or monopoly, and all the rules that used to encourage independent art, have also been done away with. As a result the playing field has become perpendicular to the independent artist.
HYB: You strike me as incredibly intelligent and I read that you attended Yale and later decided to get into the film industry. Was that because you saw this as a real challenge?
LK: Well, I went to Yale because it was one of the best universities in the world. But it was the 60s, I didn’t know anything about movies. I wanted to be a social worker and make the world a better place. Teach people with hooks for hands to fingerpaint, teach bums how to paint happy faces on beads and string them together. And it happened through kismet, that I was roomed with a movie nut that ran the Yale Film Society. He invited me to see some movies. I have never heard of the term film director, I never knew that Charlie Chaplin was a moviemaker; I thought he was just a clown. I never heard of Stanley Kubrick, Andy Warhol, etc. I started to go see these movies and I caught the virus.
HYB: Do you remember which films influenced you?
LK: I remember the movie where I made the decision to make movies was Ernst Lubitsch’s “To be or Not to Be”. The actors are all dead now, otherwise you could throw an apple at their head and blame them for Troma. I couldn’t stop watching movies: Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, Preston Sturgis… The point is I realized that I didn’t want to just teach the people with hooks for hands; I wanted to film them. And I wanted to film the bums painting happy faces on beads and stringing them together.
HYB: So you want to tell me a little about Poultrygeist? How you would describe the film?
LK: Well, Poultrygeist like all my other films is a social satire like the Toxic Avenger.
HYB: Yes, I noticed that. Did you see my review for the Toxic Avenger?
LK: Yes, that was great. You got it. I think it was pretty spot on.
View my The Toxic Avenger review HERE
HYB: I think what is interesting is that you tend to bring attention to all the little guys: poor people, other races, and homosexuality. There were issues you were touching on that were pretty much ahead of your time. So I was surprised after I watched Toxie after all these years and I picked up on so many things I never noticed as a kid. I just viewed it as a goofy film, but now I see what you were trying to say with it. And that was why one of my joke questions (from “Lloyd Kaufman: The Interview that Never Happened) was that I thought that Toxie was a Black man. It was a joke, but I meant that he represented someone fighting a stigma in society, whether it is based on looks, being poor, being little, picked on, and bullied.
LK: I am a big advocate of the underdog. Tromaville, NJ is where all my films take place and NJ is an underdog. NJ was in the shadow of the big city and the big World Trade Center. Well, the World Trade Center doesn’t exist anymore.
HYB: But Troma still does.
LK: Poultrygeist like all my other films has a political theme and this deals with the evils of the fast food industry.
HYB: Yeah, It reminds me of the book and movie Fast Food Nation that came out recently.
LK: The book really knocked me out. The movie is very pretentious. Hopefully, Poultrygeist will not be as stuck up and pretentious as that movie. But what happened, Molly, is that McDonalds opened a store right next to the Troma Building and they were very arrogant. The McDonalds sign was too big. They decided they would chop a piece of our building and embed their sign into it and they didn’t patch it up, so all this rain water would go in. And finally we got them to put some glue in it.
They were very rude. They would put their garbage in front of our building because they didn’t want it in front of theirs and what happened was our basement became infested with rats the size of raccoons. Rats from McDonalds would come over and spend the weekend in our basement. And I had to fight the rats. No one would go down there. We couldn’t even get Rat Busters to go down there. So I had to go down myself and fight the rats and clean up their disgusting refuse. And my second book, “Make Your Own Damn Movie” begins with me in the basement of the Troma building fighting off these rats as a metaphor for being an independent filmmaker doing unpleasant things including fighting off rats the size of kielbasas.
HYB: So is this the basis of Poultrygeist? Did it stem from this incident?
LK: That is where the idea came from and my editor Friedman gave me Fast Food Nation to read. He had been a fast food worker. And the book really opened my eyes. It was extremely entertaining, but educational as well. It exposed the industry which does nothing good. The people who eat there become obese, the workers are taken advantage of, and the animals suffer. Millions of chickens are kept in tiny containers and never see the light of day. The filthy waste is polluting the rivers and water levels around the world.
HYB: You said this is a “fromage” to Takashi Miike.
LK: It is because we have some singing and dancing in the movie. We have about 5 or 6 songs. I always wanted to do a musical, but Poultrygeist could never be a musical. And Miike made a musical called “The Happiness of the Katakuris” which is sort of a zombie movie, but it has random songs it and that gave me the courage. When you write a musical, you time out when the songs appear and the story revolves around the songs.
Miike, by the way, is a huge, huge Troma fan. He wrote a defense of Citizen Toxie in the Tokyo newspaper when the movie came out and other people slammed it. He made a big deal about how important I am as a director.
HYB: Wow, that’s an honor. But its true You influenced so many directors, actors, and writers and I have seen many people that got a start in your films moving on to having great careers in Hollywood. No one really acknowledges where their start came from.
LK: Well, Eli Roth (Cabin Fever) showed one of our movies at his bar mitzvah. (Laughing) And did you see “Slither”?
HYB: Yes, directed by James Gunn.
LK: He was my personal assistant for years and we wrote Tromeo and Juliet together a movie which promotes incest and his career move after that was to write the beautiful children’s screenplay “Scooby Doo”… Did you like Slither?
HYB: Yes.
LK: I think it’s great. It is sort of like a big time Troma movie. Oh, the critics loved it. Did you see my big part? James cut my lines out. I am there as a sad drunk.
HYB: Oh, you play a drunk in a lot of films.
LK: Yeah, I wonder why.
HYB: So what about the other A-List actors- Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Costner…
LK: No, they don’t want anything to do with us. Jackson, his movie would never have existed if it wasn’t for us. He has been totally useless. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, they are very nice to us. They were on the cover of Newsweek magazine and their next strategy was to act as a hermaphrodite couple in Terror Firmer for a no pay, nonunion movie.
HYB: This is because you helped them get their start in “Cannibal! The Musical”?
LK: Yeah, but they are good guys. They’re not afraid. That is what life is about. I remember Jackson went on the Jay Leno show and they showed a clip of “Death by Temptation”. I had nothing to do with it other than me and my partner put up the money. But it’s a very good movie, but it wouldn’t exist without Troma money. And they showed the clip as a sort of a “Ha ha, look where you started” to make fun of it. And instead of standing up for it and independent filmmakers, he said “Oh yeah, yeah they still owe me money.” Which is not true, he has been paid in full, we owe him nothing. He is just a jerk.
HYB: That is shame, but I think it speaks of his character and not the movie. Why would he do a film that he wasn’t proud of?
LK: Hey, you gotta start somewhere. But he had a moment there where he could have helped independent cinema. Troma put up that money when no one else would. It is an all black movie for fuck’s sakes and 2 white boys put up the money for it. He dismisses it, so to hell with him. He tries to duplicate what Troma does by making “Snakes on a Plane”. It has a stupid title and a big buzz on the internet. The only thing it doesn’t have is a good movie. It was a big bomb.
Part of Troma’s crusade is to help independent cinema, so I act in all these movies for free. So you can let people know that if they need me, I am available.
You know about the TromaDance Film Festival?
HYB: Yep, you run it at the same time as the Sundance Film Festival.
LK: Yes, the same time, same place, and it’s all FREE. It is warm and loving and idealistic. Submit movies for free, watch films for free. If people volunteer, we have a condo available to house them.
HYB: Did you start that because Sundance rejected one of your films?
LK: Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and I went to Sundance and we were shocked at how rude the staff was and how elitist it was. And the fact that they charged poor filmmakers to submit their movies. It is a rich festival. They have Mercedes as a sponsor. They have diamond companies as sponsors.
HYB: Yeah, I know they are giving out swag to stars.
LK: Yeah, they gave diamond earrings to Jennifer Aniston, so the fact that they take $100 from some poor bastard who made a movie in his basement. I think that is really insane, especially since it is fixed in my opinion. All the big media is at Sundance and they are all bored because most of the Selects are already going to be distributed. The movies they select are HBO films or divisions of studios. And Parker was totally in agreement, so about 8 years ago we started TromaDance. And there is no snobbishness. Everyone waits in line and even in Angelina Jolie showed up, she’d wait too. And we have been able to finance it for 8 years and it looks like we are okay this year even though business has never been worse and the big conglomerates have never been more powerful.
HYB: Sorry to completely change the topic, but do you know if there will be a sequel to “Mother’s Day”?
LK: My brother (Director Charles Kaufman) is not too interested in doing it. Producer Brett Ratner called us a few times about it.
HYB: Why Ratner? What does he want with it?
LK: He is a big fan. He told me he loved it. He was OBSESSED with Mother’s Day. And my brother said, “Well, if you are obsessed, then fork over some money.”
HYB: Well, I just hope he doesn’t screw it up if he does make the sequel.
LK: I don’t think it is going to happen. I think our bar is pretty high. People don’t know about “When Nature Calls” which was also directed by Charles and is brilliant. It is not horror, but a comedy. It is the debut film of David Strathaim who was in that really crappy, pretentious movie….
HYB: “Good Night and Good Luck”?
LK: They stole our title. Poultrygeist was originally going to be called “Good Night and Good Cluck”. George Clooney stole our title, god damn it.
HYB: Of all the low budget films you ever made or distributed, what was your favorite?
LK: Poultrygeist by far is the most ambitious, most risk taking, most original. I think on every account it is the best.
HYB: You asked people to call up theaters to ask them to play Poultrygeist, so if someone wanted to help, how would they do that?
LK: They just need to tell their local theater that they want to see Poultrygeist. We have 35mm trailers that are ready to go and the feature is available Feb. 2007. The theaters just need to hear it. They won’t return our calls. They want to show Michael Bay’s next movie.
HYB: So if we get a theater to agree to show it, would you send the trailer?
LK: Yeah, they can play the trailer for free for forever.
And this is the end of my brief (phone) love affair with Troma. I have to say there are about 20 minutes more of conversation missing from this, but that is between me and Lloyd.
* For more info on Troma movies, Please visit the extensive and all-consuming website at www.Troma.com. Don’t forget to check out the “Make Your Own Damn Movie!” book and DVD set. And while you are at it, why not browse the Tromette section?
* For more info on Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, visit www.poultrygeistmovie.com. And don’t forget to add them as your friend (and preferably Top Friends) at the following pages:
www.myspace.com/poultrygeistmovie
www.myspace.com/chickenzombie
www.myspace.com/tromateamvideo
Buy Poultrygeist Stuff
* To participate at the TromaDance Film Festival, Please visit www.tromadance.com to submit a film, watch films for FREE, or Volunteer.
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“Call to Action” – Support Independent Horror Films
While Lloyd has made his own “Call to Action” on his MySpace page, I am requesting my own “Call to Action- That low budget film fans support low budget films. Seem easy enough, right? Well, I mean the fans need to actually go out support the film industry. Make a New Year’s Resolution to not be a better person, but to be a better movie fan. When you are done checking off your laundry list of things to change, Why not include some of these below?
- Contact Blockbuster Headquarters at Phone: 214-854-3000, Fax: 214-854-4848.
- Contact Hollywood Video (Hollywood Entertainment Corp.) at Phone: 503-570-1600, Fax: 503-570-1680
- Contact Movie Gallery, Inc at Phone: 334-677-2108, Fax: 334-794-4688.
- Contact AMC Theaters Phone: 816-221-4000, Fax: 816-480-4617.
- You can also request Troma films to be added to the online DVD libraries of Blockbuster.com, NetFlix.com, and Greencine.com by simply sending an email to the DVD Request email address provided on the sites.
So why not try to be a better movie fan in 2007? If you have any problems contacting these places or would like to request the 35mm trailer to be shown at your local theater, contact Troma. If you are still having problems, contact the HorrorYearbook and we will personally help you.
[Editor’s Note: WIL’s Call to Action: If you order a Troma movie from Netflix watch it then break it. Tell them it came to you broke but you don’t want another one. If we break all their Troma movies they will have to keep buying new copies and Lloyd can make more money.]
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