Lloyd Kaufman & Troma

[TheVoiceOfNick]

The man has a history of making cheap movies that make money... so he is definetly a personal hero. I met him a few months back at a seminar at a low-budget studio here in L.A. and loved what he had to say. How many people here have been blessed by seeing the reched works Troma? My favorite is Tromeo and Juliet... a modern classic with excellent effects and funny stories!

Nick

[Cecil]

ahhhh i love troma. i like the toxic avenger. anyone remember the cartoon?

[MacGuffin]

A must read for any fan:

[Kal]

I just saw the DVD of "The Best of TromaDance Festival"... It blew me away... its so funny and there are some really clever movies and ideas in there... not to mention the whole concept of the Festival which is hilarious... anyone familiar with it?

[coffeebeetle]

You're being extremely hard on yourself bud.

[Brazoliange]

Also check out "Make Your Own Damn Movie!" - lots of fun for getting a grasp on things early on.

As for film recommends, I'd go with Toxie 1-4, Tromeo, Terror Firmer, and Cannibal! the Musical.

I saw the Des Moines show of Citizen Toxie :D Lloyd's fun to chat with, really open with the fans (though low-budget I spose he has to be)

[Ravi]

Also check out "Make Your Own Damn Movie!" - lots of fun for getting a grasp on things early on.

http://www.davisdvd.com/news/news.html

Legendary filmmaker and Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman brings you Make Your Own Damn Movie, a five-disc crash course in filmmaking for anyone who has ever wanted to make movies but didn't know how. Using real-life examples from Kaufman's own career, the set will show you how to handle each step in the filmmaking process: from scriptwriting and financing (and getting a cast and crew for no money) to marketing and distribution. Also included are exclusive filmmaking secrets and advice from Trey Parker & Matt Stone, George A. Romero, John G. Avildsen, Stan Lee, Eli Roth, Hershell Gordon Lewis, John Badham, Bill Lustig, Larry Cohen and many others.

The box set also includes examples of Making Your Own Damn Movie from around the world, three feature-length behind-the-scenes documentaries: Farts of Darkness and Apocalypse Soon (filmmaking) and All The Love You Cannes (marketing and distribution), a workshop deconstruction edition of Kaufman's 1971 film "The Battle of Love's Return" and bonus lessons an making your own damn video store, comic book shop, movie theater and film festival. The set is due on May 31st with a retail of $49.95. The box set also will be available with the companion book that inspired it for $69.95.

[cowboykurtis]

always saw Kaufman as Corman with worse taste.

i think troma films are pretty shitty and unamusing.

but I do give the guy a little credit for doing what he does - even if the end result is far from interesting.

[MacGuffin]

Lloyd Kaufman is crazy. Not just in that "I direct Troma movies" kind of way but they kind of crazy you don't understand until you work for someone. When I worked on Tromeo & Juliet ten years ago I found that Kaufman can make a strong woman cry. But no matter what happened he was always pleasant to me. I'm not sure why, maybe it was because I make a damn good cup of coffee. But also no matter how bad the shit got while working on that flick I still managed to enjoy myself. Hell I was working on a Troma flick! But this year everyone will know all my good stories from that movie because I was videotaped, along with many others, telling my stories to hopefully, cross your fingers, end up on the Tromeo & Juliet special edition.

I got a chance to talk with Lloyd Kaufman about the recent book he just co-wrote, an adaptation of the seminal horror comedy The Toxic Avenger.

Daniel Robert Epstein: I appreciate you talking to me again.

Lloyd Kaufman: Are you kidding? It's amazing you're willing to talk to me after what we put you through.

DRE: Well soon I'll get to tell it on camera.

LK: That's right. Speak your mind, tell the world.

DRE: I don't know if people want to hear all these stories. There's some that even you might not know.

LK: The world wants to hear them. I may not want to, but it's very important for the world and the students.

DRE: Whose idea was the Toxic Avenger novel?

LK: Me. It's a brilliant business strategy. Most companies would have a novel coming out maybe around the same time as the movie. But the crack Troma squad, the crackhead Troma squad, does it 21 years later and we make sure that nobody knows about it too. Then we spend two years writing it instead of doing it the easy commercial way where you basically take the dialogue and just put it in paragraph form, we have actually written a complete novel. Now we certainly wouldn't put it in the supermarket where it's in easy reach. We'll make it as difficult as possible for anybody to find.

DRE: Would it have been possible to do a novelization back then? Was it a locked script back when you made the film?

LK: Most of the Toxic Avenger was totally rewritten several times and then that was thrown out. But what's interesting is that over the 21 some odd years, the fans came up with concepts. I had those other two books Make Your Own Damn Movie and James Gunn and I did a book called All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic Avenger. When I'd go on the book tour for those movies, the fans would invariably ask questions about Tromaville. Where is Tromaville? What is it? Is there a history behind Tromaville? So the novel goes into the back story of the Troma Indians and the settlers who interacted with them and how Tromaville developed into the toxic waste dumping capital of the world. It wasn't just automatically that. It went through different stages. Then of course people want to know more about Toxie's lineage, so they learn about Toxie's mom and how she managed to survive and bring little Melvin up. We also had some guest authors.

DRE: Yeah, I saw that J.D. Salinger took part.

LK: Yes and Oliver Stone, who went into movies because I did. He is obviously very grateful because he's written his own chapter.

DRE: He made a Troma-like film himself, Alexander.

LK: Yeah. He did indeed. After he saw Tales From the Crapper, I believe, he put in the Chicken and the Ass scene in Alexander. But Oliver did get into movies because I did. We grew up together and he was writing that crappy novel and because I was making movies, he got drawn into it and hung out and worked in the Battle of Love's Return and then Sugar Cookies. It turned out he had a lot of talent and he put that crappy novel away until about 1996. Then that crappy novel was in store windows while All I Needed to Know About Filmmaking, which James Gunn and I did, was hidden in the far recesses of the bookstores.

DRE: Since it took so long, did you miss your deadline or anything like that?

LK: Nope. The nice news is similar to our movies nobody wanted it, nobody asked for it. Since nobody wants it so we can take as long as we want. That may be one of the secrets to the 30 some odd years of Troma. Since we are economically blacklisted for the most part, we don't have to get our movies ready for Christmas. That's Peter Jackson's job. In all seriousness, Adam Jahnke has written this novel. Other than ideas and some editing, it was Adam Jahnke's work. I even went on Larry King to admit that I wrote some of it. Then Adam said that he didn't want his name on it. It was sort of the opposite of the James Frey thing. I'm forced to admit that I did have a hand in it.

DRE: One of the things that Troma is famous for with their movies is taking away money, food and sleep from the cast and crew to end up with a movie, but how is that possible to do with a book and still keep the Troma spirit?

LK: Since it was done over a couple of years, you can come up with something good in that time. When you don't care about the audience and doing it out of a love for what you're doing, it'll find an audience. I think even Van Gogh sold one painting during his entire lifetime, of course he only lived to be 38, but he did what came out of his heart and he painted for the sincere soul and inspired reasons and bingo, eventually an audience appeared.

I think this is a really great novel and I think that Adam Jahnke is a really talented writer. Obviously he had to confine himself to my style and to my state of mind and to what I wanted. But within those confines, I think it's a really good novel. Though it's got two things going against it, one is that it's a Troma novel and two, my name is on it. I think if they called it The Poisonwood Bible or something, it would be reviewed by The New York Times. But The New York Times boycotts me for some reason. Even though Janet Maslin, the head film critic there suggested that they do something about Troma and my book, but they still refused.

DRE: How did you find Adam Jahnke?

LK: I did not have any concept that Adam was a writer. I don't think he did either. He worked out in Los Angeles for us and whenever I was in the car with him somehow we'd get into conversations about books. It was quite unusual. He had actually heard of John Hawke's Blood Oranges and stuff like that. I asked him to write an essay for the Troma website but I can't remember what the subject was. It may have been on the V chip or the MPAA or something but it was great. It was funny and it got the points across. Then we got a contract to do a TV show called Troma's Edge TV for Channel Four in the United Kingdom. Adam wrote the episodes and his episodes were very amusing. It's probably the only time in my career where the finished product was not as good as the script. In the case of Troma's Edge TV, the people that we entrusted to produce it did a shitty job. Adam's scripts were a lot funnier and a lot better than the TV show although the TV show lasted two or three years in England. Then I forced Adam to work with me on Make Your Own Damn Movie and then we started writing the novel together and he threatened to kill me if I didn't leave him alone and let him write it. So after about Chapter Three, he would talk to me and take my suggestions, but he did not want me to write anymore. The other books were collaborations, but this one was an Adam Jahnke creation.

DRE: I read this book, The Sleaze Merchants, a few years ago by John McCarty. He wrote some pretty nasty things about Troma. Is it because Troma's films are made so cheaply and do so well that people don't like Troma?

LK: Most people like us. I think the ones who are nasty, like [Michael] Gingold from Fangoria, can't get over the fact that we do what we believe in and that we've been totally independent for 30 some odd years. We keep making movies that are imitated and have influenced people like Quentin Tarantino and Peter Jackson and Takashi Miike. Miike, who is everybody's darling, wrote a huge piece about Citizen Toxie in the Japanese papers defending it and saying what a brilliant director I am and how I'm one of the few, perhaps the only, American auteur film director. I think that they can't get over it. It upsets them that I've been able to succeed on my own terms. That I've been able to make movies like Tromeo and Juliet which promotes incest and not sell out and stay independent and be boycotted economically by HBO and Blockbuster and everyone else. They haven't figured out that Stan Brakhage is the way to go and Troma is the Stan Brakhage of independent, low-budget movies.

DRE: I know James Gunn walked in to get a job or something at Troma and he ended up co-writing Tromeo and Juliet.

LK: He was drafted to be my personal assistant. A friend of mine at HBO was the boss of James' brother. He sent me over James' resume and I noticed on the resume that it said James was a performance artist who vomited on stage. When I saw that, I knew that he could write Tromeo and Juliet because we had gone through three or four other writers prior to that and I was unable to get what I was looking for. They didn't get it. James not only got it but he made it even darker and sicker than I ever could have imagined.

DRE: Gunn's Slither was a disappointment at the box office, but it will become a big hit.

LK: Its going to be huge on home video for sure. One of the problems Troma has is that comedy and horror are not as popular as straight horror. The reason we're still around is that we have this incredibly loyal fan base and they go after people who go after us. Every once in awhile somebody might badmouth us and the fans jump all over them. Some of them are now 50 years old too. We have this built in cult following, which keeps us going and since our budgets are low we don't have to sell $100 million of tickets. I think Slither may have suffered from that same problem of people that prefer straight horror than horror comedy. I also think Universal did not do much of a job in selling it. I think they chickened out if you pardon the Poultrygeist reference. But I noticed they had no television ads. They had little or no radio and they stopped advertising immediately over the weekend and when they did advertise, they didn't even use quotes. Slither has the best reviews of any horror movie I've ever seen in my life. In fact most of the big critics like Ebert and New York Times referenced Troma during those reviews too.

DRE: Is James going to come crawling back?

LK: Are you kidding? I acted in that movie. I got paid. He put a Toxie in the movie too. In fact, I sat in on one of the showings and when they saw me they clapped. When the people saw a mother and a little baby watching The Toxic Avenger on television, the audience clapped. So James is definitely looking out for us.

DRE: I saw there's also going to be an anniversary edition DVD of Cannibal! The Musical as well.

LK: Yep. I've done a big interview with Trey Parker about two weeks ago and now this week I'll get together with Matt Stone. Also Matt and Trey are drawing new artwork for Cannibal! The Musical DVD. I'm going to do a little documentary on behind the scenes of how they're creating the new box art for Cannibal! The Musical 11th anniversary DVD.

DRE: What extras do you have?

LK: I've got a lot of archival footage that we didn't really use the last time around. It has the people the people in Cannibal! The Musical who are still living in Colorado and are not really in the movie industry. Also the big project coming up is Poultrygeist. It's got singing and dancing in it and it's a very complicated project.

DRE: It's about a ghost chicken, I assume.

LK: Poultrygeist is a kind of a poke a finger in the eye of the fast food industry. It is about a fast food establishment that is built on the ancient Indian graveyard. The Indians were exterminated and the chickens are being exterminated in a horrible fashion for the fast food industry. So those two spirits combine and go into the fast food place and Indian chicken zombies are created. There is a massive Poultrygeist. There's singing and dancing and Ron Jeremy and the usual.

DRE: Do you like SuicideGirls?

LK: Yeah. They very often help us out. I've had a lot of different SuicideGirls on my book tour who'd come out when we were in Portland Oregon. Troma was on the Warped Tour about four or five years ago and a lot of SuicideGirls would hang out with us.

[fayetroma]

"POULTRYGEIST: Night of The Chicken Dead"Pre-release work-in-progress to screen at USC; director Lloyd Kaufman to host Q&A workshop. FREE ADMISSION.


      Thurs. July 20th from 6-9pm, a special focus group screening of Lloyd Kaufman's "POULTRYGEIST: Night of The Chicken Dead" will be held at USC's Norris Theatre/Sinatra Hall and will be followed by a focus group and Q&A session with Mr. Kaufman himself.  Kaufman's recent book, "Make Your Own Damn Movie" (St. Martin's Press) is a big hit with film students around the world.

"POULTRYGEIST: Night of The Chicken Dead"
Focus Group Screening and Q&A with
Lloyd Kaufman

July 20th, 2006.  6-9pm.

Norris Theatre/Sinatra Hall
University of Southern California
850 W. 34th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211

The event will be presented by The USC School of Cinema-Television Summer Program and CTPR-428: Transnational Nightmares in conjunction with Troma Entertainment.

Participation in and feedback from this focus group will help in the final editing stages of "Poultrygeist" and will allow aspiring filmmakers and students a unique opportunity to be a part of the Troma system by helping Lloyd and the Troma Team "Make Their Own Damn Movie" a better movie!

FREE ADMISSION!!! Those present will be asked to fill out a short survey following the screening. Seating is VERY LIMITED.


Make your reservations at:

https://cntvcommunity.usc.edu/resources/events/event.cfm?event=362

[fayetroma]

San Diego Comic-Con to host Making Your Own Live Action Comic Book (that means movie!) panel discussion featuring Lloyd Kaufman, Steven Paul, and Batton Lash.

Legendary Filmmaker and Troma president Lloyd Kaufman will be leading a panel discussion with "Ghost Rider" producer Steven Paul and comic artist Batton Lash (The Supernaturals) on Making Your Own Live Action Comic Book (that means movie!), Sat. July 23rd from 6:30PM - 7:30PM.

Kaufman will also be screening never-before-seen selections from his newest film "Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead" and giving away Comic-Con exclusive "Poultrygeist" teaser DVDs.

Kaufman and Lash will examine the art of making your film into a live action comic book the Troma way during panel discussion moderated by Will Eisner Prize-Winner Mimi Cruz of Night Flight Comics.


Making Your Own Live Action Comic Book (that means movie!) panel discussion
featuring Lloyd Kaufman, Steven Paul, and Batton Lash.

Sat. July 23rd from 6:30PM - 7:30PM

San Diego Comic-Con
San Diego Convention Center
Room 6B
111 Harbor Drive
San Diego, CA

More info can be found at: http://www.comic-con.org/cci/ or at www.troma.com.

[fayetroma]

Legendary Indie Filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman to teach "Make Your Own Damn Movie" Master Class at USC on July 21st, 2006.

          Legendary indie filmmaker and cult icon, Lloyd Kaufman, will present his acclaimed "Make Your Own Damn Movie" Master Class on the The Troma System of Filmmaking, on July 21st, 2006 from 10:00AM - 1:00PM, at University of Southern California.

The event will be held at:
The Ron Howard Screening Room (RZC 111)
University of Southern California
George Lucas Building
Room 108
850 W. 34th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211

For over thirty years, Lloyd Kaufman has been the President of Troma Entertainment, the oldest continuously operating independent motion picture production company and distributor in the world!

Since 1971, Lloyd has directed, written, financed or produced about 100 films, including fan favorites like SGT. KABUKIMAN NYPD, TROMEO AND JULIET and TERROR FIRMER, as well as all four films in the worldwide phenomenon THE TOXIC AVENGER series! He is one of the few genuine American auteur film directors, and his work has influenced numerous major filmmakers all over the world.

The Master Class is an informative, interactive and highly entertaining crash course on filmmaking based on Mr. Kaufman's second book, "Make Your Own Damn Movie", now in it's fifth printing from St. Martin's Press. 

Using real-life examples from Kaufman's own experience in the business, "Make Your Own Damn Movie" illustrates the entire independent filmmaking process from how to raise the money to how Troma self-promotes and markets.

Lloyd Kaufman is also the author of "All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger" (Penguin Putnam) and the newly released "Toxic Avenger: The Novel" (Avalon Publishing).

Admission to the Master Class is $20.00 per person. For more information, please visit. https://cntvcommunity.usc.edu/resources/events/event.cfm?event=366 . Seating is very limited. 

The "Make Your Own Damn Movie" book and companion "Make Your Own Damn Movie" five DVD box set can be purchased at www.troma.com

[RegularKarate]

Oh, no you don't.

Listen... I know you're on some street team or something, but this all can go into the same thread. 

[Weak2ndAct]

DIE