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Lloyd Kaufman (Part 2) Go back to Part 1 of this very long interview
"Kabukiman was the big one for us, the biggest we've ever done: nearly $3 million. But a big Japanese company called Namco who have an arcade here in Soho, a multi-million dollar company, they put up some of the financing. So that's the biggest. Tromeo and Juliet was about £500,000. Still minute compared to Hollywood standards, although it's a lot of money." Are you happy with that level or would you like to go up to big multi-million pound pictures? "No. I have no interest in going up; I have interest in attracting better writers. I think the young man with whom I'm working now is one of the best we've ever had. It'd be nice to have a touch more money so we could get some better actors. But Tromeo and Juliet, I couldn't ask for better acting. The acting in Tromeo and Juliet is superb, absolutely brilliant. I don't know if you've seen Othello. If you see the Shakespeare that's coming out of Hollywood that they're spending 15, 20 million bucks, it's absolute trash. Othello was just like a student film. It was absolute pure ego. That wasn't the worst, but it was just horrible. Kenneth Branagh was good, and Richard III, with Ian McKellen, but all the other Shakespeares have just been garbage. Because these people have no education. How can they possibly do Shakespeare. What does Lawrence Fishburne know about Othello? What has he done? Has he lived anything? Has he experienced anything? Has he read Shakespeare? Obviously not. He knew as much about Othello as I know about... James Joyce." Do you think Shakespeare needs updating to make it relevant for today's audiences? "Definitely not. Kenneth Branagh proved it. His movies are sensational. Shakespeare is something that one achieves over a lifetime. I may be Troma, but I've studied Shakespeare for 30, 40 years. I can't say I've studied it as a professor but I have read it and read it and read it and lived with it and enjoyed it and seen it performed over and over and over again. And I would say that I - and my partner also - we both love Shakespeare and we know more about Shakespeare I would say than any other American, saved people who have had the Royal Shakespeare Company experience. Obviously we cannot compare with British Shakespeare. I can't recall any decent American Shakespeare. There's some stuff that's done in New York in the off-Broadway theatres and that occasionally isn't bad. Pacino's pretty good, he did some good stuff. And Elizabeth McGovern did a Shakespeare that was very good. Obviously she's had some education - you can see it." Troma films have a cult reputation in the UK but they're so hard to get hold of. Why has it taken so long to set up Troma UK? "That's exactly why Harvey Goldsmith and Ed Simons decided to take the Troma plunge. They're major mainstream music impresarios. they bring the Three Tenors to Wembley and they do Madonna and the Smash Hits awards show and everything. They're 100% mainstream. They found that, first of all, they love Troma. They've loved Troma for years. They're sort of my age so they've seen Troma for 25 years. And they started to do some research. They would go to universities and say, 'Hey, you ever hear of Troma?' And they would go up to women because usually those kinds of movies appeal to men. And they'd find every time when they asked a student, male or female: 'Troma! Oh, Combat Shock! I love Combat Shock!' "And the one complaint they found was people can't find our movies. The demand and the following for Troma has outstripped the supply. So what Ed and Harvey are planning is to get the Troma brand name and do what Troma has done in the States, which is to increase the profile. Get video shops to have Troma sections. Have theatrical runs on a regular basis. Obviously they won't be many many prints, but a small number of prints and run them at 30 or 40 venues around England, so that people can see the movies up on the big screen. And then create Tromaville Cafe which is a Troma TV show. "We have Tromaville Cafe running in Europe now. It runs once a week in most of Europe. It's a 15-minute scripted show featuring Toxic Avenger and Kabukiman and the Tromettes and Melvina. Tromaville Cafe is a restaurant and has all of our characters. The presenter is a waitress-cum-action-news-reporter. So she's wearing the Tromaville waitress outfit but she has a microphone. That's running in Scandinavia, the Low Countries - which were the High Countries before Tromaville Cafe - central Europe, South Africa. It's got a big reach. Harvey and Ed, rather than using Tromaville Cafe, they are going to create a British version of it and have famous people appear on it as guests. So that's part of the plan. We're going to shoot part of Toxic Avenger Part 4 here, and we're probably going to be doing some other movies here. It won't be immediately, but it's part of the plan. We're writing The Toxic Avenger Part 4 now for filming in the UK. We might do a segment of the American Tromaville Cafe in London anyway. We have to do 15 more for filming. So if we did one or two of the episodes here, it'd be fun. The nice thing about Troma is this: I majored in Chinese Studies and taoism teaches you the way to be one with nature and it works."
"Well, the purpose of Troma movies is to entertain. Our movies appeal to couples who want to have fun. They want to be challenged. The problem with Hollywood movies; you've just seen at the Oscars - it was the worst group of movies that I can remember. I'm going to show you the typical submission I get. We get millions of things, but this guy tracked me down. Toilet of Terror. This comes through the Troma solicitors too. They act like I'm nuts. I don't think this is what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in Toilet of Terror. Well, maybe, but there's no script. Where's the script? If the guy's serious, there should be a script in there. "See, when we do a movie... We financed a movie called Bugged - we're going to show it at Cannes - it's an Afro-American Troma movie. Young kids who are trying to be their grandparents. A young guy who's brilliant, absolutely talented, he wanted to do a Troma movie from somebody else's perspective. Obviously it's going to be different from somebody else's perspective. So he did a movie called Bugged; it's got insects, and the fun of Troma, yet it's profound. This is this guy's first film. He's in a league with Peter Jackson - absolutely top of the line." Do you watch other people's movies? "Yeah, all the time. I love movies. And we get hundreds. We have acquisition stuff and an incredible number of movies." There seems to be only you and Full Moon working on this kind of stuff. What do you think of their output? "Charlie Band is a genius when he directs movies. But he hasn't been directing them, he's been hiring a lot of hacks. They've been more formulaic. I can't say I've seen anything good for a while. They seem to be following what Hollywood does then doing something similar for a tiny little budget. Of course, we made A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell ahead of Jurassic Park." Do you think there's room for kids at college today to do what you did and follow in your footsteps? "I think it's much harder, because of the conspiracy of the labour, bureaucratic and corporate leagues to control the minds, hearts and pocket-books of the little people of Tromaville. I think it's very very difficult. We are literally the only movie studio left consistently making movies. Roger Corman and Troma - that's it. There's nobody else out there that's got any longevity. And it's a disgrace, very sad. You're looking at the dodo bird. No, the dodo bird's extinct. I'm more like a passenger pigeon." That's extinct as well. "Is the passenger pigeon extinct?!" You're like the Mauritius kestrel. There's 20 of those left. "The vicious testicle, you say? I've got vicious testicles." What about spin-offs? Ironically, one of the highest-profile things that Troma's had over here has been the Toxic Crusaders cartoon series. "Toxie's huge. A toy company wanted to do an environmental toy, and they loved Toxie, and then we did the cartoons and the merchandise and all that. But that was not part of the plan, believe me. That was just luck." Why was it changed from ‘Toxic Avenger’ to ‘Toxic Crusader’? "Because we wanted to separate the two. We didn't want grandmothers of children buying the Toxic Avenger tapes and having a heart attack. Some stupid grandmother did buy one once and made a big stink about it. How anyone can be that stupid! The Toxic Avenger cassette says right on the front. You'd have to be a total idiot to bring it home for your kids. There was an idiot somewhere. I think she just wanted publicity or something. The director's cut says, 'Warning: This movie contains gross and disgusting footage. If you don't find it gross and disgusting, you need a shrink!' It says that on the package, and this woman somehow manages to bring it home to her grandchildren. Then it turns out she's head of some league of decency. But the point is they yanked Toxic Crusaders and Toxic Avenger from a whole chain of drugstores because of this stupid situation." Was that a one-off or do you get much trouble from 'the moral majority'? "No. We've had virtually no problems. Once you look at our stuff, it's pretty good. The New York Times gives us good reviews. The good critics like our stuff. Women like our movies. Once you see our movies, people realise 'These are pretty good.' You see a movie a like Die Hard; hell, that's much more violent than anything that Troma does. Schwarzenegger, Stallone, all that kind of stuff, that's serious violence, so our stuff, going to see it, people go, 'That's interesting stuff.' And as a result all these archival institutions - the French Cinematheque, the American Film Institute, the Kennedy Centre - have major Troma film retrospectives. In order for anyone to cause any trouble they have to at least look at the movie. Once they look at the movie, they go, 'Hey, it's kind of fun!' After all, Braveheart, which is considered the best movie in the world right now, has head-crushing in it, has torture, has many of the elements that Toxic Avenger pioneered. Toxic Avenger has the famous full head-crushing scene. When Toxic Avenger came out in 1983, I remember we had a screening for our investors and two or three of them never talked to me again. They walked out during the head-crushing scene. Eventually they got it, they got the gag. But here it is in Braveheart - people say it's high art."
"I cannot, no. If it ever happened, that would probably put me over the edge. I would go up to that microphone and I would totally flip out. That's so far from my universe. I think I would crack up. That would probably be the thing that would cause me to blow my brains out, and I would probably do it right on stage at the microphone: bang!" Troma films have this image of gross and disgusting but funny. "Even with the cartoon of Toxic Crusaders: 'They're gross but they still get the girls.' That was the line." What is the level that is too gross, too disgusting for Troma? "Well, it's not a matter of the grossness. It's a matter of what the movies say. I don't want to hurt people. I would not deliberately do something that is hurting people's feelings. Our movies are uplifting, I think that's why they're so popular. They basically are decent, they have a decency too them. Troma's War: we're patriotic. The movies have a very good value system. I certainly wouldn't do a movie that might make fun of somebody's disabilities. We have a shock-jock in the States and he makes fun of cripples and he makes fun of homosexuals on the radio and he's making millions. I don't like that, and I really don't care for it. People are hurt - people are unhappy - deliberately. Yes, I imagine 99% of the people are laughing, but to deliberately hurt the feelings of even 1% - why do that? I would not do that." What's the way forward for Troma beyond Tromeo and Juliet, which will obviously be the biggest film this year? "We plan to have more new directors. The notion of being the independent studio, that is a very sincere goal. Clearly my own writing and directing cannot possibly appeal to the youth and the Troma fans. Troma fans want Troma and we have to give it to them. I write and direct movies and I love doing it. I'm lucky enough at the age of 50, having done 20-something movies, to keep going. But from a business point of view we want to give more opportunities to young new directors, to real talent. That is a major part of what we're going to be doing, and what we are doing, what we have been doing for the past seven or eight years. We have been empowering more new young directors and hopefully out of that group will come the next wave of Tarantinos and Oliver Stones. So that is a very important part of what we plan. In terms of what we're doing I want to do Toxie 4 and I want to deal with the abortion issue in that. We've got a project called The Beaster Bunny which is being developed, and there are one or two other ones. The Congressman project with Stan Lee has been going on, but Stan does not want that to be a Troma movie. He wants it to be bigger; he wants that one to be a really first class production." Are you going to expand into comics like Roger Corman's doing now? "We have a big presence at the comic book convention in San Diego called Comic Con. But I don't see us doing comic books. Roger's doing it well, and if I had to I'd give it to him to do. We're good buddies. Comic books are a tough business right now because the market's saturated. I know everybody in the comic book business. If I have anything good, I usually do it the other way round. When I go to the comic book conventions I try to acquire comic books to make into movies. We have a movie called Frostbiter. We acquired the rights to that movie; it was a comic book. At the comic book convention we have a big presence for good will and we're looking for comic book properties to acquire and make movies out of." Go back to Part 1 of this very long interview where Lloyd Kaufman discusses the origins of Troma and Tromeo and Juliet Official website: troma.com | ||
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