In 2008, low-budget filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman received a lifetime achievement award at the prestigious Sitges Film Festival in Spain, which specializes in horror and fantasy films.<\/p>\n
As he went up to accept the award, a tribute reel played in the background that was supposed to highlight his contributions to cinema as head of Troma Entertainment, from The Toxic Avenger to Poultrygeist: Night of the Living Chicken. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a mix-up. The films featured were all from critics\u2019 darling Charlie Kaufman, the oddball auteur behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a great moment,\u201d says Kaufman with a laugh, on the line from his offices in Long Island City. \u201cI have written six books. In the one about producing, I put in the book: \u2018If you\u2019re going to be an independent producer you have to produce every moment. You have to produce every minute of the day.\u2019 Even if you are getting a lifetime achievement award, I should have anticipated. I should have made the clip reel, or asked them to show me the clip reel or done something to make sure everything was in order and I didn\u2019t. I just thought: \u2018This will be fun.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Much like in many of his films, it\u2019s a funny and surreal story about being an outsider. When New York City\u2019s hallowed Museum of Modern Art featured Kaufman\u2019s Return to Nuke \u2018Em High Volume 1 as part of it Contenders film series last year, he jokingly told the Village Voice that he wondered if they too had him mixed up with Charlie Kaufman.<\/p>\n
This is not to say that the filmmaker, who will be in town over the weekend as part of Calgary Horror Con, doesn\u2019t believe he deserves the honours. He sees plenty of entertainment and artistic value in the dozens of pocket-change budgeted films he has directed and produced under the Troma banner over the past 40 years.<\/p>\n
Yet while he is constantly receiving shout-outs from younger filmmakers he has influenced \u2014 including South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth and James Gunn, a former Troma employee and director of the upcoming big-budgeted spectacle Guardians of the Galaxy \u2014 critics and academics have not been as eager to show respect. So having his movie premi\u00e8re at MOMA was a big moment for the filmmaker, putting him alongside fellow class-of-2013 Contenders such as the Coen Brothers, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, Alexander Payne and Martin Scorsese.<\/p>\n
\u201cClearly, I think it took a lot of guts for the curator of the Museum of Modern Art to schedule our film,\u201d Kaufman says. \u201cAnd the people who showed up, maybe a third were Troma fans but the rest looked like subscribers to the museum series. They had to turn away about 80 people. They said it\u2019s the biggest crowd they had.\u201d<\/p>\n
While it\u2019s not a remake, the two Nuke \u2019Em High films find Kaufman revisiting his beloved 1986 B-movie The Class of Nuke \u2019Em High. (The second instalment in due later this year). He says the idea to make it a two-parter came years ago from Tarantino, who met Kaufman at an earlier Sitges Film Festival and urged him to do something special to mark Troma\u2019s 40th anniversary. A conversation with the friendly filmmaker is an interesting experience, a strange mix of high- and lowbrow that often finds him railing against Hollywood\u2019s established guard. When talking about how technology has helped indie filmmaking evolve in the past few decades, he draws on his Yale education in Chinese Studies and makes somewhat cryptic references to Taoism and the concept of Yin and Yang.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeauty and ugliness, pain and pleasure, you can\u2019t have one without the other,\u201d he says. \u201cThey are attached to each other. The oyster gets a piece of sand caught in its assh \u2014 e and it\u2019s very painful but it produces perfectly beautiful, round pearl. The good news is anyone can make a movie, you don\u2019t have to have money anymore. Which means you can do something useful with your life, you don\u2019t have to lick the b—s of the Canadian government dog-biscuit dispenser and you don\u2019t have to suck up to Rupert Murdoch or Sony or whatever. You can be a teacher or a nurse and have a real life and help make the world a better place and make a movie, and a good one. That\u2019s the good news. Money is no longer the issue. The problem is you may not be able to make a living with your art. But that\u2019s not such a bad thing either. Because you don\u2019t have to be part of this disgusting industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kaufman had no intention of getting into the \u201cdisgusting\u201d movie industry as a young man. He wanted to be a social worker, so he could \u201cteach people with hooks for hands how to fingerpaint, that kind of stuff.\u201d But in his first year at Yale, he roomed with the student who ran the university\u2019s discerning Film Society.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a very small bedroom, our beds were head to toe,\u201d he says. \u201cAt night, I would inhale his Godard-stinking feet and the aroma-du-Troma was born. I would drift into the Yale Film Society and kept getting blown away by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang.\u201d<\/p>\n
After making a well-received student film, he moved onto directing and producing low-budget movies, occasionally working alongside future Oscar-winning directors such as John G. Avildsen and Oliver Stone before forming Troma Entertainment with Michael Hertz in 1974. After a string of campy, sex-fuelled comedies, the company hit pay dirt in the 1980s with The Toxic Avenger and The Class of Nuke \u2019Em High.<\/p>\n
While Kaufman\u2019s output has often been dismissed \u2014 unduly, he says \u2014 as B-movie schlock by critics, he points out that much of his work addresses prickly social issues.<\/p>\n
In the new Nuke \u2019Em High films, our blogger heroes battle not only a mutant version of Tromaville High\u2019s glee club but also something called the Tromorganic Foodstuffs Conglomerate. Kaufman drew inspiration from research he had done on fast food after McDonald\u2019s became an unwanted neighbour to Troma headquarters in New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started reading up on fast food and, lo and behold, it\u2019s a horrible, horrible thing,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that\u2019s pretty much what has fuelled not just Return to Nuke \u2019Em High Volume One and Volume Two but also inspired Poultreygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. Both of these series of movies are dealing with the food supply and the evils of junk food.\u201d<\/p>\n
B-movie king Lloyd Kaufman celebrates 40 years of low-budget fun<\/p>\n
By Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald July 29, 2014<\/p>\n
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\n Photos ( 1 )<\/p>\n
B-movie king Lloyd Kaufman celebrates 40 years of low-budget fun<\/p>\n
Lloyd Kaufman and “Toxie”.<\/p>\n
The origins of the unhinged superhero the Toxic Avenger, now affectionately referred to as \u201cToxie\u201d and Troma\u2019s official mascot, also sprang from timely issues that were bothering Kaufman at the time.<\/p>\n
While camping with his wife in the early 1980s, he says much of America\u2019s wilderness appeared to be covered in non-biodegradable garbage. At the time he was also reading underground newsletters that reported on \u201ctoxic waste dumps ticking away all over the world like time bombs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChildren in Rio were dancing around in the dumps, taking showers in this wonderful pixie dust that turned out to be radium that is disposed by hospitals just willy-nilly,\u201d he said. \u201cThat got me interested. And, at least in the United States, there was a big movement toward health clubs and \u2018body-beautiful\u2019 and working out. That whole movement started to rise. It was, again, that whole yin and yang sort of thing. We were making our body beautiful but defiling the earth. Toxie sort of came out of that.\u201d