| Lloyd Kaufman |
| Is one half of the founding fathers of Troma |
| Studios. While his partner in creative crime Michael Herz has always shunned the limelight, Lloyd Kaufman has always been the very public face of Troma (along with The Toxic Avenger of course). I was fortunate to interview Lloyd on a chilly morning in Feb. down at the Troma building in Hell's Kitchen. Here is the complete interview verbatum. Most of the issues discussed that morning were too important to edit here in any way. I hope you find this interview as informative as I did. |
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| BLAKE : |
| Lloyd, Troma's most recent dvd release is Citizen Toxie :The Toxic Avenger part 4. Toxie is more popular now than ever. What's the key to his success? |
| LLOYD : |
| It's very hard to understand why the Toxic Avenger is so popular, but women like him very much. Most monsters in horror and science fiction films are very male orientated, and Toxie for some reason attracts lots of females. So that doubles the audience. |
| BLAKE : |
| You've just written your second book entitled Make Your Own Damn Movie. What sort of helpful hints will aspiring filmmakers find inside? |
| LLOYD : |
| Well, they'll learn how we raise our money... for 30 |
| years we've been raising our own money. They'll learn how to develop and write a screenplay that will look like fifty million dollars but cost a half a percent of that. How do you get locations, how do you get actors to work for nothing... what do you do about music to make sure you don't get sued. How do you do the famous Troma special effects... How do you sell your own damn movie. We've got a lot about distribution. And how anybody who's made a movie can distribute his/her/its movie. Basically it's kind of a guerilla filmmaking textbook. The kind of textbook a filmmaker will want to carry in his ditty bag, or his little briefcase to refer to on set. You know. What happens when the police come? What happens when you need to get a permit, or change the permit? How do you deal with a certain piece of equipment? It's all there in the book. It's a very useful, and hopefully amusing textbook. And at the end I commit suicide. |
| BLAKE : |
| Of all the countries the Troma team has visited, which is home to the most rabid Troma fans? |
| LLOYD : |
| Well, I think our biggest audience is in the United States, but I think we get more television time in Europe. France, England, and I think even down in Australia. There seems to be less economic blacklisting of Troma, which goes on in the United States. It seems to be less of that in Europe. For example, Troma's Edge T.V. our half hour t.v. show was on channel 4 in the U.K. for two years, and I believe it's been in Australia on some channel for a while. |
| BLAKE : |
| It's on The Comedy Channel in Australia. It's getting more popular. |
| LLOYD : |
| Well, Troma's Edge T.V. is now on The Comedy Channel in Australia. In the United States it's on nothing. We are economically blacklisted in the United States. |
| BLAKE : |
| Can you elaborate on that? |
| LLOYD : |
| Well, due to the Nixon / Reagan / Clinton axis, the artworld has been disembowelled and the control of how art is distributed to the people has been put in the hands of fewer and fewer giant devilworshipping international conglomerates. They want to eliminate competition, so the more they control the paths to the consumer, the more independant movie studios go out of business. And Troma is nearly thirty years old, and there are very few independant movie studios that are more than two years old. You won't find too many. You'll find virtually none that are more than five years old. The system favours AOL Time Warner, who have sixty billion dollars in debt and are allowed to cook their books, and God knows what else. At least that's my opinion. |
| BLAKE : |
| In recent years, mainstream cinema has become increasingly bland, and basically unwatchable. Has this overall level of mediocrity been advantageous to Troma ? |
| LLOYD : |
| There is economic blacklisting , and the power's in the hands of fewer and fewer giant devilworshipping international conglomerates. So the fact is that there are more multiplexes being built in the United States, and fewer choices of movies. This is the land of five hundred t.v. channels and only two t.v. shows. So there's no advantage, because we are shut out. Independant art is over. It's toast. It's finished. And the only hope is that young people continue to use filesharing on the internet. Well, old people too for that matter, but old people are pretty much dead. So the way to do it, the only way to get a variety of art is take it off the internet, and hopefully the filesharing will continue , and hopefully we will be able to get a variety of better films and better music using new technology. And we should all be fighting to overthrow this plutochrisy of the artworld, which includes of course, the movie business. Disney, Sony, Fox, AOL Slime Warner, and Viacom... they control everything we see, and they're producing crap. But that's the way Russia used to operate. Russia used to force Pravda, the government newspaper down peoples throats. But Russia's going the other way. Russia's permitting more freedom. I've written an essay by the way, on http://www.troma.com , if you go to the section called Lloyd's 'Roids. There are a number of essay's I've written on these issues. I've written one recently about piracy... that piracy may in fact be good. May be good for the people, and good for the artists. Then perhaps check out the essay about piracy. Because the artworld is controlled by ass pirates, so piracy can help fight the ass pirates. |
| The Troma building. The Mecca of truly independant filmmaking is rather ironically jammed between an Amish market, and McDonald's. |