Lloyd Kaufman Interview!
To hear Lloyd Kaufman tell it, Troma is in the business of making art. I like to believe that’s true. Just because something is meant to be offensive, or gross or funny, doesn’t mean that it can’t be a vector for a powerful message. Lloyd and I have known each other for about ten years now, which might explain why this interview seems to start mid-conversation. It is also probably worth mentioning that the interview took place several years ago and was too long for the last magazine, also, Lloyd was recovering from a horrible flu when we did the interview. No...I really didn't edit much.
Tristan : You’re going to be adapting Shakespeare’s The Tempest?
Lloyd: Yes, indeed. We’ve got a script that’s not too bad, and we’re in pre-production working heavily, full-time, on casting. So if any of your people are interested, we’re looking for wonderful young people, who don’t need to be paid a lot. We’re doing it for the art, not for the money.
Tristan : How did you guys get around to doing the 1990’s Toxic Crusaders cartoon? Was it in-house?
Lloyd : No… No. It was totally out of house. I mean, we wrote some of the cartoons, and we had the approval of everything, but we can’t take credit for any of it. The cartoon company Murakami Wolf did a great job. Aside from letting us write a few of them, they hired very, very good writers, and my favorite one… it has a little insect in it that buzzes around, but in the personality is a caricature of Rosanne. As you probably know, Rosanne has come back big-time.
By the way, you can see the Toxic Crusaders cartoons for free on Troma Movie’s channel on Youtube when we hit 40 years of Troma, we decided we would give our library away to our fans, who are the only reason that we still exist. So all the movies we made, or distributed, during our first forty years, are going up slowly but surely on Troma Movies on Youtube. The cartoons are already there, at least some of them. You can also see about 400 of our movies for free. Many of our classics are there on Troma Movies. As well as Cannibal the Musical and many of the movies that we helped make or just distribute. Like… The one with Klaus Kinski is quite good… Nightbeast. If the fans want to support Troma, want to support the James Gunns, Samuel Jacksons, Eli Roths and Oliver Stones of the future, they can go to Troma Now, which is our hot new streaming service. That shows the movies that we’ve made recently, in the last 2 years, and that we’ve acquired for distribution in the last 2 years. And many of them are made by young talent that will be the James Gunns or Samuel Jacksons of the future. You’ll help Troma and you’ll help these new, young, frisky talents. They’re wonderful movies but we don’t have any money to advertise. Go to watch.troma.com.
Tristan : You’re always doing giving away your time and services for free…
Well…sometimes I get paid. If they’ve got a budget I wanna get paid. But most of the movies I’ve done are by underground filmmakers. You know, just younger versions of me. So I like to help them, and you know, keep independent filmmaking alive because it gets harder and harder to make a living doing that with the current conglomerate cartel.
Tristan : Do you have any downtime? You work like a crazy person.
Lloyd : I’m the hardest working man in the underground. (laughs) Yeah, I have down time. I’m depressed all the time. Plenty of down time. (laughs) You must know how hard it is. You’re an independent entrepreneur and in the arts. You know it’s not easy. It gets harder and harder and harder.
Tristan : Yeah… not that we were ever trying to be a part of it, but the music industry is virtually non-existent these days.
Lloyd : Yeah. And with the current clown-car administration trying to get rid of net-neutrality, that’s going to hurt you and Troma. Because they want to build a super-highway that will give the public good service, but people like us probably won’t be able to pay to get on that one, so we’ll have to stay on the bumpy dirt road. And they’ll throttle us. The idea is to get rid of the competition. The angry video game nerd gets 4 million eyeballs a month…four million eyeballs an episode, and Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like that. They don’t want competition to the small number of devil worshiping international media conglomerates and their vassals. So Troma’s competition, but bigger competition are these Youtube stars. Who are changing what entertainment is. Maybe the ones who have made it through the Epic Rap Battles, or Angry Video Game Nerd, maybe they’ll have enough money to get onto the super highway with Rupert Murdoch, but we won’t. Troma won’t…and we’ll probably just blow our fucking brains out.
Tristan : Troma was really wrapped up in the rental store and VHS culture of the eighties and nineties, and that culture is seeing a massive resurgence as people are starting to embrace the analog thing again. Are you seeing any of this?
Lloyd : None.
Tristan : Really?
Lloyd : We’re more famous than ever. I get stopped in the street a couple of times a day, half the time its because they think I’m Mel Brooks, but the other half is because I’m Lloyd Kaufman, wearing Brooks Brothers clothing. We’re more famous than ever, but I don’t see our movies playing anywhere, do you? Are they on HBO, are they on Showtime? They’re certainly not going to be on Netflix, ‘cause they don’t pay anything. And in fact, Amazon and Youtube are becoming more…how shall I say it, homogenized. They’re demonetizing movies on Youtube, Amazon is kicking out independent movies for so-called immoral themes. Its OK for Bruce Willis to blow somebody away with a shotgun and it’s ok for Shades of Grey to have all sorts of fucked up boring sausage…sausage in ever sense of the word, including nothing interesting.
The point is, it’s a double standard, and they always want to get rid of the competition. When we were coming along you had the Motion Picture Association of America, and we had to have a rating. We had to have an ‘R’ rating, or milder to get into the movie theaters. The theaters wouldn’t play an unrated film. So the MPAA was a great tool of the cartel, the monopoly, the oligopoly whatever you want to call it, to get rid of competition, because they could disembowel our movies, and not disembowel the Bruce Willis movies. But now you’ve got the two or three big owners of the internet joining in to censor independent art. Arbitrarily. Its got nothing to do with morality. It’s the same thing that fat Al Gore and his pig wife were trying to do with music. They thought they’d make their bones on it… they were like Trump. They should have picked immigration. They would have picked anything to get elected, anything to get power. Even censoring adults… what adults listen to for music. Luckily we had Dee Snyder, John Denver, and Frank Zappa who were brave enough to go down to Washington and give the finger to those fuckers. And that was the end of it. That broke it. They went away. They couldn’t even get elected against President Bush! That’s how bad they are. But I’m not bitter…I’m happy! As I slide down the razorblade of life. I’m just so joyful. God is in the heavens, the birds are chirping, I wake up and I just love that sunshine. And I’ve had a melanoma thanks to the sunshine. Even the sunshine sucks.
Tristan : Goddammit.
Lloyd : No… I’m not going to die from it. I may die…I hope I die… The sooner the better.
Tristan : Goddammit. What’s Pat going to do? You two are fucking adorable. You should write a relationship book.
Lloyd : Well, you’re a nice guy. Well, we’re going to a…Pat has retired from being the Film Commissioner of the great state of New York. She was appointed, as you know, by both Republican and Democratic governors and she served for about twenty years. And she will be one of the producers, she is one of the producers of Return to Return to Nuke ‘em High, aka Volume 2. Which still has yet to play in a Portland movie theater. We’re hoping you’ll give us decent playing time.
Tristan : Hey… we’ve done it with everything since Poultrygeist so far…
Lloyd : Well, this’ll be the first time they refuse, but try anyway. We did alright for Volume One. Its hard for me to go all the way to Portland for one show, but we’ll see. It did a week in LA and got good reviews. So far it’s doing a lot better than Volume One, which didn’t do bad either. Volume One did pretty good. But we were relegated to the back of the bus because we’re independent. If we only get one theater it’s pretty hard to advertise.
Lloyd : My 50th year making movies, at least we could get a weekend. Play a few movies. They can have the premier of Volume Two. Make it a big deal.
Tristan : We did that down in New Hampshire at the Seacoast Rep. It was put on by my friend Knate, and Covered in Bees played for that.
Lloyd : Yeah!!! That’s right Covered in Bees! Yes! Covered in Bees gave us music for Poultreygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. I wanted to make a video for you guys but we couldn’t get the schedule worked out and we never got it together. I was hoping to use Toxie, Kabouki Man and footage from the movies. I’d do it all for free. I’d still like to do it…I like Covered in Bees. Once we finish filming this summer. I’m pretty open for the rest of my days…
Tristan : Speaking of The Bees, your movies have lots of punk bands, lots of metal bands, I’m assuming that’s not your go-to for music.
Lloyd : I’m a bourgeois. There’s nobody more bourgeois than Lloyd Kaufman. I wear a fuckin’ tie and blazer. I’ve dressed the same way since second grade. I’m entirely steeped in Rogers and Hammerstein and Rogers and Hart. That kind of gay musical theater. Being a gay married man, I’ve wept through every Judy Garland and Barbara Streisand movie and musical.
Tristan : Yeah, you’re a huge musical fan. Hence Poultrygeist.
Lloyd : Exactly! That’s where Poultrygeist came from, and also the Toxic Avenger Musical. Because I was friendly with some young people from Portland, (he still thinks I’m from the other Portland here…he was on the tail end of a terrible flu…) who worked for us, and they wrote and produced the Toxic Avenger Music-Kill, and it was great! I gave them the rights for free because I love musicals. And then that inspired, the people in Omaha who had a little money to do another Toxic Avenger musical. And then, the Broadway producers noticed the one in Omaha which went a few months and got pretty good reviews, and they produced the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels musical and a few others and they paid us. They actually paid us… and they hired the Bon Jovi keyboard guy David Bryan to write the music, and Joe DiPetro who’s a Tony award winner to write the play, and it’s just playing It just finished playing in the West End of London for three months, and it’s played all over the country, and it’s a great musical! It’s a lot of fun. If I hadn’t given the rights to the people in Portland and Omaha for free, maybe we wouldn’t have a musical, but I love musicals. At least certain musicals…
Tristan : Is Nuke ‘Em High next?
Lloyd : It’s not up to me…Somebody has to make the musical. I don’t know how to make musicals.
But the new movie, Return to Nuke ‘Em High and Return to Return To Nuke ‘Em High AKA Volume 2, have songs in them, and in Volume One Rape Door plays on camera… There’s some on screen singing in R2NH.
Tristan : Speaking of R2NH, bringing it back to comics, we should probably talk a little about Stan Lee…
Lloyd : Yes. He’s in the news a lot these days. (This was about 3 months before his death)
Tristan : He’s in R2NH…
Lloyd : He’s been in about 10 of our movies, I searched him out when I went to Yale University. I learned about drugs and I learned about movies, and I learned about comic books. Because the guy next door to my room had a collection of Marvel comics and I had never seen…I didn’t have comics as a kid. I was knocked out by Lee and Kirby, and Ditko, and they were beautiful. So I searched out Stan Lee and by coincidence…well in those days, 1969, he was living in New York, and the company he was working for, which owned Marvel, was called “Magazine Management” and it was a fairly small company compared to today’s Disney/ Marvel of today. So he was okay, I had Yale on my resume, and he had come up with a story and he put it on quarter inch tape and said, “Here, write a script.” So I did. And it got bought a couple of times, but it never got made, called, “Night of the Witch!” But it was never made. Since then we’ve been friends for 50 years, and he loves my wife and that’s probably the only reason he talks to me. Actually, he says that the only reason that he talks to me is that he loves Pat. His wife and I and my wife were very tight, and Joan was a very lovely, lovely person. (She) made great martinis. They’re just the best people in the world. I moderated, not too long ago, a panel that he did in one of the huge Comic Cons, I don’t remember which one, I just remember a big crowd, and he asked me to do the moderating. It wasn’t like NY or San Diego, but it was a big Comic Con. Stan and I keep up, in fact he’s in R2NH2. It was Lemmy’s last movie, Lemmy from Motorhead, and Joe Fleishaker’s last movie, our 500 pound action hero who passed away right around the time that Lemmy did. So, there’s a certain bittersweet quality to volume 2.
Tristan : I don’t want to hold you too long…
Lloyd : Up to you! I’m here! By the way, Voodoo Donuts… Give ‘em my love!
Tristan : Wrong Portland!!!
Lloyd : Oh… Hold it. You’re in fucking Portland, Maine?
Tristan : We’re in the better Portland.
Lloyd : More beautiful for sure. Oh yeah.. the pot’s better in the other one.
Tristan : Not anymore. Legal here now.
Lloyd : Is it legal for recreational?
Tristan : Indeed.
Lloyd : In Maine? Jesus. It gets no…all you hear about is lobsters and the oni…the sea urchins.
Tristan : Yeah. I was just doing my taxes, and there’s a line item for if you’re selling weed.
Lloyd : Well… Let’s do something in Portland! Funny. Shows you I’m getting senile. I thought it was Portland, Oregon. I was wondering because Covered in Bees, I knew was Maine.
Tristan : Am I hallucinating or did you once tell me that your son-in-law started Blue Apron?
Lloyd : Yes he did! He invented Blue Apron, he’s the chairman and we subscribe to Blue Apron, and it’s terrific. If you go to my instagram, or my twitter, my wife and I when we make Blue Apron, Pat cooks and I film a little bit. She’s the trophy wife and we made little commercials for Blue Apron that go up on Youtube or my Instagram. It’s really good, its really healthy. We’re vegetarians, at least I am, and my wife is nice enough to go along with it. So we get the vegetarian option and its great. I hate vegetables too…
Tristan : Charles Band and guys like him, they’re all in the same position that you are with the way the word has turned for independent cinema, I hope its not an insult to compare you to Charles, have you thought about selling VHS or any of the marketing stuff they’re doing?
Lloyd : I don’t make movies to make money. I never have. I get involved with something to do with current events, or social satire, or right now I have my head up my ass about the fact that for my entire career my wife has been, and we’ve been married for 44 years, for the time I’ve known her she watches this shit on TV on at 8 in the morning, like the Today show, and that SHIT. And they have these ads every thirty seconds for pharmaceuticals. Right? So they’ve normalized, it to 2 year old kids, who were born in 1974 are now in their 40’s and they’re hooked on pills. Right? They even make it kind of hip! Like, you’ve got Hep C! That’s a filthy disease it’s disgusting. You get it from filth! But it’s Hep-C! Why don’t you go listen to some John Coltrane and get some Hep-C! And we’ll give you some pills for it! Right? I mean they’ve normalized every fucking disease and they don’t cure it. So that’s what the Tempest is going to be all about. Shakespeare’s Shitstorm, that’s what that’s going to be all about. It’s also about the ridiculous mood of the country, where we have freedom of speech as long as we don’t say anything.
Poultrygeist, was all about fast food, I hate fast food, and I started becoming an expert on it, and that’s what inspired Poultrygeist. Obviously I’m into animal rights, I’m a vegetarian because of the animals. Not because of health. I have no interest in health. It’s about the animals. Billions of chickens are slaughtered, that’s dealt with in the film. But in an entertaining way that might get young people who want to be entertained to also think about maybe not stuffing that fat greasy piece of chicken shit full of hormones and God knows what else down your gullet. So all my films come out of that.
I don’t know where Charles Band’s films come from. But I can tell you that when he was directing movies, they were very good. The Puppet Master and Troll, the movies he directed were fucking good. He’s one of the visionaries of the movie industry, and I don’t think he gets enough credit. I mean, him and his father were the first to do VHS. They did it before anybody. Except the porno people. The porno people always lead the way. He and his dad, they pretty much invented the VHS. As far as I know, they were first. And, you know in a big way. He’s just making movies to make money. I took seven years to make this fucking movie. Volume One and volume two, and I have to go blow people to get into a movie theater. And FUCK it’s better than 99% of the shite that’s out there. No joke. You know, I’ve seen the Band movies, and they’re very commercial but they’re not theatrical. My movies are theatrical. They’ve got thousands of people, there’s all sorts of stuff that you miss on the small screen.
They’re not made for the small screen. So it’s really an outrage that the only way I get into the movie theaters is when enough fans go to the theater and demand it. It’s all about the fans. They support us, and we make moves that mean something… that might change the world a little bit. In the case of Toxic Avenger, just talk to the directors of Deadpool and they’ll tell you that we’ve changed the world. Talk to James Gunn. I was in his movie and he made a big speech to about 3000 people the day I was in it, telling them that he channels Lloyd Kaufman when he’s making a movie and blah, blah, blah. So anyway, we’ve left a huge mark on the countryside, aesthetically. But to be an independent filmmaker is a lot harder that being a Van Gogh. Because all he needed was a piece of cloth and some paint, right, his brother would pay 2 or 3 hundred euros maybe for what he needed. We’ve got 3 or 4 hundred thousand to make a movie. That’s still a lot of money, even though its less than one half of one percent of a normal mainstream movie. To make a movie for $500,000 the R2NH first volume was about 450, and the next volume was about 400 I think. That’s still a shitload of money, and I spent seven years on it.
Tristan : And you switched to digital right?
Lloyd : Yes…But we didn’t save any money doing it, the Alexa camera was a lot more expensive than the camera we use on 35mm. On our level…well… hopefully the Alexa has gone down in rental price now that there are more of them. There is one thing that I should mention, and something that your readers might be interested in, kitsplit.com. It’s an Air B&B for camera and photography equipment and its terrific. So if you own a camera and you’re not using it for a month, you can put it up on Kitsplit and maybe I, who may need a camera for that month may rent it from you. They’ve got insurance that’s really cheap because they do such big volume. If you make a movie, insurance is a big, big expense. Because a broken leg on a 4 million dollar movie and a broken leg on a 400,000 movie cost the same to repair. So its really hard when you’re a low budget film maker to get a deal on insurance.
Tristan : Thanks so much for talking with me today.
Lloyd : Well, I hope that we can come up and do another event with you and do the comic book store. We didn’t make it to Maine last time, but we played New Hampshire, the musical played a very nice theater in Portsmouth.
Tristan : If there’s anything I can do to help get that to happen just let me know.
Lloyd : Well, think about the Tempest… Think about some of your music… Maybe you’ve got some songs where the themes are something that are in the Tempest. Its my favorite Shakespeare play. Its about an old guy, and I saw it when I was about 8, I’ve seen it many times, and I’ve seen almost all of the movies that were made, based on the Tempest. But I waited until I was old to do it because I think I can really get it, now. Now that my revels are almost ended. (laughs) Maybe you’ve got some songs, or maybe you can write something with themes from the tempest. That would be great. Or a big shitstorm. Its a little premature for the music, we don’t even have locations yet. We’re going to shoot in July.
My wife, she usually doesn’t have much positive to say about early drafts of Troma movies. I’ll never forget Gabe Friedman and I were on our balcony writing or having a script conference about Poultrygiest. And my wife walks by and said, “You know… that draft sucked.” That was it. She just walks off. Gabe Friedman turned to her and said, “Oh… that was encouraging…”
But this on, this one she likes! Well, eventually she liked Poultrygeist. This one, she really loves the script. We did a reading, John Ableson, with whom I’ve worked most of my career, until he croaked. I was buddies with him as long as Stan Lee, and he kept telling me that because I’m interested in comedy, I should take the scripts that I’m writing, and perform them in front of an audience and see where they laugh and where they cough. I could never get, because of New York, and people are so greedy, I was never able to get a venue that didn’t want to be paid a lot of money for the time. But this year, we got picked at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater and we’ve got a lot of fans that run that theater, and they charged admission and they got to keep the ticket money. But we had a paid audience come and listen to about fifteen of us reading the different parts, reading the script basically, and it was really very helpful. It may be that its a pretty good script. We’re pretty far away from shooting and we’re working on it constantly but Shakespeare’s Shitstorm I think is going to be, again this is a 30 million dollar movie that we’re making for four hundred thousand…hopefully we can bring everything in the script to the screen in a way that the audience will like.
Tristan : The writer is a UCB alum right?
Lloyd : Yeah. He teaches there. We distribute his movies. He’s made, “The Slashening” and “Fear Town USA”, I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but they’re both on Troma Now. They’re hilarious.
Tristan : I haven’t…
Lloyd : Oh! Check out “Fear Town USA”. We’ve shown it in a few theaters and audiences love it. Its very funny. This guy is, Brandon Bassham is his name. He’ll be up there with James Gunn. Give him another five years.
Tristan : That’s super cool.
Lloyd : Well… you’re cool. You’re staying with what you’re doing, its very brave, and you’re dedicated to the independent way of life. Which is not fucking easy… (Laughs)
Tristan : No…It really isn’t. It’s insane how not easy it is. (laughs like a fucking lunatic.)
Thanks so much. It was a pleasure.
Lloyd : Yeah! I hope I get to see you soon. Should you find yourself in the big apple, make sure you come and visit us. Next year let’s have a big Monster Emporium event. We’ll co-promote, and we’ll take over the town.
Tristan : I’d be stoked.
Lloyd : Alright Tristan. Best to your band, best to your stores, and best to you.