Lloyd Kaufman - part one

JOHNNY: Welcome to ALLTHINGSHORROR Lloyd!

LLOYD: We finally meet!

JOHNNY: How are you doing?

LLOYD: I’m really fine! And how is ALLTHINGSHORROR?

JOHNNY: It’s late...

LLOYD: Now that is a horror.

JOHNNY: So how is your day so far?

LLOYD: Well the time is almost teatime, when we drink the blood. But it’s really hot; it’s a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

JOHNNY: Okay, let’s start at the beginning. I’ve read before that you wanted to become a social worker, so why and how did you make the jump from social work to making films?
 
LLOYD: Well it was the sixties, I was interested in making the world a better place, helping people with hooks for hands and teaching them how to fingerpaint, teaching bums to paint happy faces on beads and then get them to string the beads together. Make the world a better place, but during my first year at Yale, my roommate was a film nut, and he ran the Yale film society and slowly but surely I became infatuated, I caught the movie virus. I started seeing films by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, I kept getting knocked out by Andy Warhol. I didn’t even know what a movie director was – I didn’t know that Charlie Chaplin was a film maker or a film director - I thought he was just a clown. And then I really started to gain an appreciation for the incredible experience of watching a film and one day I happened to be at the Yale Film Society screening of a movie called To Be or Not to Be by Ernst Lubitsch and it was right then and there, I was so impressed by the craziness of the movie as well as the control that Lubitsch, the director had over the art form, so I said, ‘I’m gonna do this,’ so I was kind of moved away from the social work, and I went on to do something else.

JOHNNY: So this was the first time you had ever watched movies? As a freshman at Yale?

LLOYD: Nope, never watched them, I was more interested in the legitimate theatre; the pulleys and curtains, the spectacle on stage, the musicals – I never thought about it professionally, but I loved the Broadway musicals and I would see every single one when I was a kid.

JOHNNY: So what were the first films you actually had a hand in making?

LLOYD: Well, I made a film at Yale; I went right in and made a feature film. I bought a Bolex - a Bolex is a wind up 16mm camera that has no ability to record direct sound so we had to shoot basically a feature length silent movie called The Girl Who Returned and then after the picture was shot, and it was shot in black and white because that was less expensive than colour, but after the movie was shot I could put in narration, music and some sound effects but I could not have synch sound so I basically had to tell a story the way that a silent film would tell a story. I couldn’t have dialogue cards because I didn’t have the abilities, didn’t have computers, it would have been really expensive. So it was a good discipline, I did two or three movies like that, The Girl Who Returned, I actually presented it at places like Harvard and Princeton and Yale Film Societies.
JOHNNY: Was it well received?

LLOYD: No, in fact it taught me a very valuable lesson. People would pay a dollar to see it, and in those days it was quite unusual for someone to make a feature length movie. Most of the movies being made were short, psychedelic non-narrative, experimental, music driven pieces and here was I doing something that made you sit there for 80 minutes. And the lesson I learned was that once people have paid for their tickets, they don’t usually ask for their money back. A very valuable lesson. And also the movie itself had absolutely no erotic content, but there was one photograph of a woman on her back, sweating with her melon heavy breasts kind of sticking up into a tight t-shirt. It had nothing to do with eroticism, but it looked kind of sexy. And the poster was up around the campus at Yale University. That same night there was a movie playing called Moonrise. All they did there with the poster was they had the name of the film and the director and three people showed up. 400 people turned up for The Girl Who Returned. I learned another very valuable lesson.

JOHNNY: After that, did you have to put your own money into further features, were people investing in you – how did you go about making those early films?

LLOYD: I took a year off actually from Yale and I spent a year in Africa in Chad, which is in central Africa. In the bush. This was in the sixties, when ‘bush’ was not an obscene word.

JOHNNY: Was that with the Peace Corps?

LLOYD: No, I was there ahead of the Peace Corp. I was there as a pathfinder for the Peace Corp, I was a test, a guinea pig. Where I was there was no electricity, no phones, no television, no nothing. It looked like Africa from the movies and there were a lot of naked women running around. A lot of animals being slaughtered, and I got a lot of images for my subsequent oeuvre. Lots of opportunity to be immature.

JOHNNY: Were you sad when it was time to leave Africa, was it a place you connected with?

LLOYD: I loved it, are you kidding? There were lots of naked women running around!

JOHNNY: And have you ever returned in the subsequent years?

LLOYD: I brought my family back to that area, and it had changed quite a bit! (chuckles). It was really dangerous. I had brought my three daughters and my wife and I told them that I had the best time, that there were animals and there was an animal park there was all sorts of incredible old mud castles and religious things, we were gonna have the best time! And of course, when we get there, it’s dangerous; there are rebels all over the place – highway bandits. It was horrible, horrible. Totally dangerous.
JOHNNY: Right, you’ve made some adult films in the past, under the name of Luis Su...

LLOYD: I don’t know anything about them.

JOHNNY: You don’t know anything about them.

LLOYD: I’ve heard that Luis Su is a very prominent director, Chinese director of adult films. But I know nothing about them.

JOHNNY: So you wouldn’t know anything about producing a further three of them as well?

LLOYD: No way. What do I know about them? I’ve heard that it’s a very good way to learn, at least in those days – in those days the movies were shot in 35mm, so you could kind of use those films as a way to learn, almost like film school.

JOHNNY: And did you learn in any way shape or form on these films?

LLOYD: Well...uh...I’ve never seen an adult film, so I really don’t know. I would assume that whoever made them had a lot of education in terms of how to make movies because it’s 35mm – those days are gone unfortunately, today – again, I’ve never seen a porno film, but today...have you ever seen any?

JOHNNY: I’ve seen a few of them.

LLOYD: Okay, well you know that the ones made today, that there’s no art to them – it’s just the performers performing. In the seventies there was, there was art to it, people were writing scripts, it was shot in 35mm and there were attempts to make real movies in the confines of the demographic.

JOHNNY: Like the Johnny Wadd movies starring John Holmes?

LLOYD: Well, I don’t know if he was ever in any good ones, and again, I’ve never seen one of those movies – but there were some good ones, there were some very good ones and in fact we’ve just lost a great American actress.

JOHNNY: Marilyn Chambers.

LLOYD: Yeah, she died last week – and her movies are really beautiful. I’ve never seen them of course, but I’ve heard they’re very beautiful.

JOHNNY: Do you know what she died of?

LLOYD: I don’t know.

JOHNNY: Her death has been pretty much gone unnoticed, what with JG Ballard’s death in the last few days.

LLOYD: No! I didn’t know that! He loved Tromeo and Juliet! He hung out with us in Cannes. He went to see Tromeo and Juliet, this was when Crash was playing there and he just kind of wandered in while Tromeo and Juliet was playing and then he hung out with the Troma team for the rest of the festival. He was so fascinated how we could possible come up with something so wild! Because Crash is pretty wild you know – and he was like, how could you ever come up with something like Tromeo and Juliet!
JOHNNY: And he was a nice man to get along with?

LLOYD: I only knew him during Cannes, but he was a nice man to get along with. He was totally enthralled by the film, but he got it. He had gotten a huge kick out of the fact that we had the nerve to make such a movie. And changed the ending of the Shakespeare!

JOHNNY: So why haven’t you revisited the Shakespeare canon and try to remake some of his other works – there’s much to choose from!

LLOYD: Well actually, I’m looking very closely at the Comedy of Errors right now and am embarking on the 5th Toxic Avenger movie and I don’t know where I’m going with it, but in the 4th one, Toxie and his significant other have given birth to toxic twins. So I thought maybe I would do Comedy of Errors and use Toxie and Tromaville and go back to Shakespeare and see if anything can be made of it, with the mistaken identity and all of the rest of it.

JOHNNY: How did Troma Entertainment come to be, and who did you come up with the name of the company?

LLOYD: Well in New York State, we needed to incorporate swiftly, and in New York State is an old state so every name is taken – you know if you wanted to do the Johnny Mains company, somebosy probably already has a company called that so we decided on the most horrible sounding name we could think of to ensure that it would be available. The reason we started this company is we needed to learn distribution, we had made Sugar Cookies and Big Gus, What’s the Fuss? And something else and we got screwed each time, either through incompetence or dishonesty. So we felt that if we want to be in charge of our own movies and have artistic freedom we better do something about learning the sales side because we can’t keep on raising money from our friends and dentists, so we made this movie called Squeeze Play and we raised money from about fifteen people, many of whom were dentists and we would be out of business in a couple of months anyway so we didn’t really care about the name and this year, here we are, thirty five years later and the Troma name has become very famous. It totally means absolutely nothing.

JOHNNY: Was it a hard road learning about distribution and safeguarding rights and all of the other pitfalls involved with the sales aspect of moviemaking?

LLOYD: Very hard, it’s the hardest business in the world – there’s nothing harder – apart from maybe opening a restaurant.

JOHNNY: So is everybody out to screw you in the movie business, or can you find scrupulous, good honest people anywhere?

LLOYD: I think that there is a very small percentage of people in the world in our industry who are good and fair. Very, very small.

JOHNNY: Which leads me onto a quote of yours which stated that after working on The Final Countdown; ‘you never wanted to work with a major studio again.’

LLOYD: The experience of The Final Countdown, a movie which could have been good, I mean it’s actually a pretty decent movie, but it could have been great. It was all of this effort and all of this work and no-one seemed to be interested in making a good movie. The director that they chose came out of an agency (William Morris) and his claim to fame was that he ‘gets movies completed’ and ‘he finishes the movies.’ I was partners with Kirk Douglas’ son, Peter, and we had a very good script and we convinced Kirk to play one of the main parts, THE main part actually and then the problem was that Kirks agent, William Morris put the film together, packaged the film – the director they picked was a drunkard and the crew that came on were a bunch of union mediocrity, in fact the director brought on a crew of drunks and after a week of material that was unacceptable I had to fire them all which was a big deal because the National Labour Relations board, the unions go to the Government after you fire everybody and stuff. But the director stayed on board but he was very drunk and very lazy. But nobody wanted to make a movie, other than Kirk Douglas, his son and me – there was very little enthusiasm in making a really good movie. The crew for the most part were how much could they scam, how much overtime, petty cash, what’s gonna be for lunch and the thing is, it was a really good script and it’s still pretty good. And if you get the DVD, I’m interviewed on the special features and I say a bit of this on the DVD. I spent a year on it and it was a total waste of time as far as I’m concerned. I wish I would have directed some small film instead. But it was a big learning experience and Kirk Douglas was a major influence and he taught me a lot. He was a tough guy to work with and to work for. Basically The Final Countdown was Kirk’s movie.