President of Troma Entertainment
When I entered Yale in 1964 as a Chinese Studies major, I had expected to become a social worker who would do good things like teach people with hooks for hands how to finger paint. I didn’t, of course, because I got infected with the movie bug. My roommates at Yale were co-chairs of the Yale Film Society and it was because of them that I began watching great mainstream movies by Hitchcock, Chaplin, Renoir, Fuller, Lang, Lubitch and others. In my first film, I slaughtered a pig in Chad, Africa, and it was then I realised that offending people was what I yearned to do. By slitting a pig’s throat and watching it shit and oink at the same time, I somehow expected to become renowned in the mainstream just like my movie heroes.
It is thirty years later. Michael Herz and I are still expecting. We are an independent team that has tried to hit a home run for the past thirty years. I’m not going to lie – I would cum in my drawers if a Troma film ever became a grand slam in movie history like Hitchcock’s Psycho. However, Troma is still standing on second base, waiting for one of our pictures to hit us into movie stardom, making our name just as recognisable as Hitchcock’s. If you ask someone, “Weren’t you scared to take a shower after you watched Psycho?” almost everybody would understand your reference to Marion Crane getting slaughtered by the cross-dressing killer Norman Bates. As of now, if you ask someone, “Weren’t you scared to ride a bike after watching The Toxic Avenger?” you might get a few people who understand that you’re talking about the scene in which a young boy innocently riding his bike gets his pre-pubescent cranium turned into kiddy-splat after being crushed by the wheel of an automobile. Perhaps such an image is too graphic for ‘the mainstream’ to handle. Hollywood prefers to protect human innocence by endorsing movies such as Pretty Woman, which should have been subtitled: Girls who suck will be in luck.
Troma has never sucked the mainstream. Rather, we have flirted with the establishment as a high school nerd flirts with the idea of being popular. One day, the nerd becomes friends with someone respected by the in-crowd and thinks that he just might be accepted. Troma makes a movie called The Toxic Avenger (in which a washroom nerd named Melvin is transformed into a radioactive defender of the weak and powerless). This in turn spawned the children’s cartoon show, The Toxic Crusaders, a whole lot of lunch boxes and other ‘useful’ merchandise for kids. Perhaps the mainstream will embrace us. The nerd starts going to parties. Troma visits Hollywood. However, the nerd realises that in order to be popular, he would have to change who he is and leave all of his Melvin-like friends behind. After all, the big shots don’t accept the geeks. Troma realises it would have to ditch its underground roots and get Toxie to suck the ‘over-ground’ snobs in order to be accepted by the mainstream. The nerd decides to stay an outcast and remain loyal to his friends, rather than making a fool out of himself by attempting to ask out the hottest girl, boy or class pet in school.
Troma is that nerd. (Some might say my red bow tie confirms that.) We stay in the underground and remain loyal to our roots. Yes, we’ve strolled into the mainstream’s phoney forest. Luckily, we listened to Hansel and Gretel and left a trail of Toxie crumbs along the way so we’d find our way back home… to a company which stabs movie characters in their hermaphrodite groins (Terror Firmer) as opposed to the backs of their employees. We’ll leave that to Hollywood.
For me, Troma is an example of underground, micro-budget art that produces macro-violence-vomit-tits-and-more-tits. We have to sleep on the floor, eat cheese sandwiches three times a day and defecate in paper bags in order to make our movies on a non-Hollywood budget. Is this a bad thing? No. In fact, being in the underground is liberating. Not only does this allow us to make the kinds of films we want without mainstream interference, it also allows Troma to distribute movie after movie by artists who have something different to say – something unique and out of the ordinary. If running such a business makes us part of the ostracised underground, so be it. Thanks to the underground and the support and artistic freedom provided and encouraged therein, my career as a film director has been aberrantly prolific.
FIGURE 1 Filmmaking underground style: Lloyd doing his thing
One of my inspirers, Andy Warhol, was able to retain the total creative freedom afforded to him as a member of the underground, but at the same time he came to be embraced by the mainstream media and millions of people around the world. Troma has never been hugged by the mainstream, but we still feel loved! While I will never surrender my artistic freedom, I am always hopeful that one day I will wake to find that millions of people have been able to see beyond the dismemberment in Tromeo and Juliet or the de-fetusing in Terror Firmer or the head crushing-cum-diarrhoea in Citizen Toxie and carry me off the battlefield of art on their shoulders… a hero of the underground!
One of the most rewarding aspects of making movies in the underground is knowing that loyal fans genuinely admire you for the work you produce, not because you’re in one of People’s 100 Most Talented Actors editions and worshiped by trillions. One of our fans demonstrated his loyalty on 11 September 2001. That was the day the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapsed in New York City. When the obscene terrorism occurred, I became stranded in London. I didn’t feel like swimming across the Atlantic Ocean to get back home, so I remained stuck in London with very little money and no place to sleep. Luckily, Troma fan Andrew McKay allowed me to stay in his family’s house until I was able to leave England. (Andrew is the creator of the official UK Troma fan site, www.toxie.com.) For eight days, he and his parents made me feel at home and became my friends. On the plane home, I thought to myself, “You’re a lucky guy, Lloyd. You could have been gutted alive if Andrew were a psychotic fan. You could have been on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. You could have directed A.I.”
We at Troma have survived thirty years in this underground art world despite our history of getting blacklisted and evicted on numerous occasions because we do have millions of such people supporting us. It sucks that we have to eat shit to survive and that we never get praised by the BBC, but it’s worth it when people of all ages support us at book signings and conventions. They also volunteer to do all sorts of Troma-tic things for free. In fact, when we travel around the U.S. they feed us, house us, fuck those of us who are not married, put on Toxie and Kabukiman costumes and offer to wipe our asses after we take toxic turds. Our fans are the ones who inform and inspire us to do those things that make Troma successful, like being the first film studio to create a website, and the first studio to produce DVDs. Most important, they stand behind us when the mainstream tries to tear us down.
Marcel Duchamp (the guy who hung a urinal on the wall in 1907, with whom I have been compared – well, maybe it was the urinal to which I was compared) stated that “to be an artist of the future, one must go underground.” Perhaps I have survived as a film director for more than thirty years because Troma and I have been ahead of our contemporaries. This is because we have total freedom in and control over our art. And it is because Troma has remained underground that I continue to have this freedom. In fact, to be underground is actually liberating because we can stay true to our art and politics. And while the mainstream has never honoured Troma or even considered me for an Academy Award, what greater honour can I receive than being asked to write this foreword for Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider’s superlative tome on underground film? One of the most difficult aspects of being an artist is to follow Shakespeare’s admonition: “To thine own self be true… and maybe thou won’t bloweth thy brains out.” We all need inspiration and support to help us abide by this maxim.
FIGURE 2 Alternative Oscars
For a company so associated with copulation, depravity and excess, it comes as no surprise when I say that making art is very much like having sex. You can go (all) the Hollywood way, allowing the big shots to open you up, jerk you off and prod at your ideas, thereby raping your artistic vision. Or you can go the underground way – and masturbate your art. Only you know all of its hot spots – the places that must be touched in order for it to come to life. The book you are about to read will help you to be brave and masturbate your artistic minds, weather you are filmmakers, film fans or simply interested in peering into the bowels of cinema culture that goes on beneath Hollywood.
In what follows, you will read weird tales of maverick male and female directors who have combined shock value with artistic vision, movie genres that have manipulated Hollywood codes for genuine impact as well as profiles of new independent filmmakers determined to give the mainstream a run for its money. By giving exposure to the American underground, Xavier and Steven’s book gives us the courage and wherewithal to band together, proud and erect, to make some art and continue to take that art back from the giant devil-worshipping international media conglomerates and give it back to the people.
Lloyd Kaufman
July 2002
(With thanks to Jamie Greco)
