During my seven years in the editorial department at Marvel Comics, I edited several comic book series based on other companies' characters. Working on these comics usually had lots of downsides: there were heavy restrictions on potential storylines, there was too much interference from licensors who knew nothing about comics and, in several cases, the TV shows and toys our comics were based upon were just plain lame. As a licensor and as a film company, Troma was refreshingly different.

Over five years had passed since I'd last been in touch with Troma president Lloyd Kaufman but, when I saw him at the San Diego Comicon in August 2002, he was warm, welcoming and foolish enough to give me his current phone number. Lloyd was manning the ever-popular Troma booth, signing autographs, posing for photos and answering questions about the many mayhem-filled movies he's made. I always liked Lloyd and enjoyed his films but, since becoming a part of an independent publisher, I've developed a new respect for him. There are times I enjoy having so few of us involved in so many different aspects of producing our product. There are also days when I wonder how we do it... or even why.

Whenever we'd worked together in the past, Lloyd and I were always focused on the projects we had in common: The Toxic Avenger & Toxic Crusaders comic books. Sure, we'd shoot the breeze with one another, but I don't think I ever got to really pick Lloyd's brain about filmmaking... until now. It was a cold, rainy day when I visited Tromaville and, of course, we talked comics first...

ROB TOKAR: You know, I really enjoyed working on your comics. Does anyone else currently have the pleasure of publishing any Troma properties?

LLOYD KAUFMAN: Fester Comics in Spain (www.festerworld.com) are Troma fanatics and they're putting out Spanish language comic books. Of course, we also intermittently publish our own comics (Tromeo & Juliet, the new adventures of Toxic Avenger), but Fester is doing a whole series of comics based on Troma movies, (Sgt Kabukiman, NYPD; When Nature Calls; Toxic Avenger) including Troma movies that pre-date Toxie (First Turn On; Stuck On You; Squeeze Play).

ROB: I had a little screening of Citizen Toxie for some Comiculture contributors and we have a few production questions. In a scene where there's so much splatter and so much mess - like the ultra-messy hospital massacre - how do you do retakes? Do you set it up so you don't have to do retakes? It must be a huge job.

LLOYD: It is. In the case of the hospital in Citizen Toxie, we had something like 40 some odd gallons of fake blood.

ROB:; What do you use for fake blood?

LLOYD: Karo syrup and vegetable dye (red vegetable coloring) with a little bit of soap in there to help it wash out of clothing. Vegetable dye washes out pretty easily anyway, but with a little soap, it washes right out. In my new book, Make Your Own Damn Movie, there's a whole chapter on special effects. We tell you how to do a head crushing using a simple melon, hamburger and cranberry, we tell you how to do a dismemberment, how to make vomit, how to make fake shit, urine.... Also, the second disc of the Citizen Toxie DVD contains Apocalypse Soon, a very good documentary about the pain and suffering and joy and idealism of making a low-budget movie. It's really good.

There was an interruption (Lloyd's a busy guy) and I overheard him giving a Tromite instructions on something about movie theatres that caught my attention. A polite person either wouldn't listen in or wouldn't let on that he listened in. Luckily, I was there instead...

ROB: That's a great title, Chains Without Balls.

LLOYD: We wrote an essay for the website, if you'd like to read it, in Lloyd's Roids.

ROB: I've read that section of your website - those are some great rants! Speaking of chains, when video stores first started popping up and things got to the point where even I had a VCR, one of the things my friends and I enjoyed was going to our little local video stores and renting Troma movies...

LLOYD: Those were the good old days.

ROB: ...Surf Nazis Must Die, The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nukem High, and yet nowadays I don't know where I'd find them. Are you guys carried in Blockbuster?

LLOYD: Blockbuster is owned by Viacom. The purpose of Viacom is to conspire with Sony and with the other devil-worshipping national media conglomerates to kill off all of the independents. We are almost thirty years old and we are the oldest continuously operating independent movie studio by far; certainly in North America, probably in the world. The cartel is running the world of art and they have killed off most of the independents. There are independent movie companies, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one more than five years old. For an independent studio, that's very old; that's like dog-years. That'd be like ninety in human years or something.

ROB:: (laughter)

LLOYD: Troma's going into its thirtieth anniversary, which is totally aberrant in terms of what's going on in the world.

ROB: To go along with your content, I guess.

LLOYD: Yes, indeed. But it's a very sad state of affairs. Blockbuster is owned by Viacom. They play footsies with AOL Time Warner, of course, because they want Paramount movies, which Viacom owns, to get on HBO. There's a club. Plutocracy is the word. We live in a plutocracy.

ROB: What's that mean?

LLOYD: It's when the assets are in the hands of a very small, powerful elite. They have a separate set of laws, they live by different rules and they control everything. Which is what we've got

ROB: So what about other big chains, like Hollywood Video, is it the some sort of thing?

LLOYD: It's very hard. Basically, the independent filmmaker suffers not from the political blacklisting of the '50s but from economic blacklisting, which is more insidious because it's more mercurial and it's very difficult to pin-point.

Michael Herz, Lloyd's not-so-silent business partner, prodded Lloyd to tell me the good news about how the specialty chains are getting their comeuppance.

LLOYD: Blockbuster's stock, as you may have discerned last week [the interview took place on 1/3/03] dropped thirty five percent in one week and has been plummeting because they are only dealing in top twenty movies, they have no other products to sell, and the business has switched from a rental business to a sell-through business. So now, Blockbuster, who only has these shitty movies with Mel Gibson, and the specialized stores that deal with that, they're competing with Best Buy who sells toasters and stereos and TV sets and DVDs. And they can sell their DVDs at a very low price.

ROB: (trying to keep up): Right.

LLOYD: Now for Blockbuster, who ONLY sells videos and DVDs, it becomes very difficult for them to use DVDs and videos as a loss leader. Best Buy, Circuit City - they can do that because they've got a million different products they're selling. And Troma DVDs are priced so that Best Buy can sell them at a very low price and we can still make a profit. That's where the bright spot happens: Best Buy, Virgin,Tower ~ all these chain stores that are selling DVDs and sell other things, they love us. So you can get Troma movies at places like that.

MICHAEL: Eventually, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery (the three largest chains) will have to buy our product. Our product sells for less than the big studio top twenty product, there is a niche marketplace that looks for product like ours, and the pricing of our product is conducive to actually making a profit on it The studio movies cost Blockbuster more and Blockbuster has to sell them for more than Best Buy does. And if I'm a consumer, I'm going to go to Best Buy to buy my Tom Cruise movie because it's cheaper On the other hand, Best Buy and Blockbuster can sell Troma product for the same price -- and they can both make money with it So Blockbuster probably will be more interested in buying more Troma-esque product in the future, as will Hollywood, as will Movie Gallery. Hollywood has already indicated that they are going to buy Citizen Toxie storewide. This is the first time they have bought a movie of ours storewide. So that's the trend. I don't know if it'll be positive, but it makes sense.

ROB: So, if people are looking for Troma movies, where else can they go? Can they buy them from Troma?

LLOYD: Yes, www.troma.com or www.tromavillemaul.com. It's stupidly spelled the wrong way so nobody can find it-

MICHAEL: It's supposed to be a joke; it's supposed to be sophisticated-

LLOYD: Well it's asshole time, it's asshole time.

ROB: You could get both and just have one forward to the other...

LLOYD: Well, if you go to theTromaville site it says "store." If you look real hard, you can find the store.

MICHAEL: Go to troma.com. what's the big fucking deal?

LLOYD: Anyway, the website sells and sales increase every year. There's some happening there... Best Buy has them,Tower has them, Virgin has them, Fry's has them-

MICHAEL: Wherehouse, Borders...

LLOYD: And Borders has my book, too. It was due to my book that we got into Borders.

ROB: When I visited your booth at the San Diego Comicon, I saw a huge selection of DVDs I never would have associated with Troma. What's the story?

LLOYD: Michael brilliantly bought Roan, which has about four hundred wonderful classic movies like Ernst Lubitsch's A Certain Affair and Zulu, which we just put out on DVD. There are all these family classics we've been putting out on DVD and they're beautiful. Like The Invisible Ghost, Joseph H. Lewis's second film, I believe - stuff like that. It's really good stuff.

ROB: I have to admit, I was a little confused. You had all of the classic, uh - are you guys insulted when your movies are termed a "cult" classic?

LLOYD: That's a good thing. That's actually rather complimentary. Usually, they call them trash.

ROB (laughter): You had all the Troma cult classics and also a whole bunch of family classics that you (Michael) acquired.

LLOYD: Yes, and we're spending a shitload of money to digitize them; to restore the masters and the negatives and there's all this extra material we're putting out. Look at the Carnival Story DVD we just put out - it's a beautiful DVD. Top quality. And Zulu is widescreen, 70mm, surround sound. All the fans especially love the sound. It's really good.

ROB: And people can get these on the Troma site as well?

LLOYD: Yeah, and they're in stores, too. Most recently, the Lassie movie The Painted Desert was in Wal-Mart -- the only time Troma's been in Wal-Mart, I believe. Our logo is on the Roan movies, but very small. We use the Roan logo. It's an interesting story: the same company that brought you Bloodsucking Freaks is also bringing you Roy Rogers and we're also putting out the original Amos & Andy.

ROB: Well, when I saw all these Roan movies at your booth, I was wondering if you guys actually had some kind of goal to "go legit."

LLOYD: It's just that these are great movies and nobody's putting them out on DVD, so why not? At some point, they'll find a market but, thus far, we need to get the word out.

ROB: I hope you don't mind, but we got so caught up in the idea of you "going legit" that we actually commissioned the artwork for a poster for one of your possible next movies called The Sound of Toxic.

LLOYD: That's good. We do have a script for Saving Private Toxie but The Sound of Toxic would be fun; it's a funny idea. We could write songs for it...

MICHAEL: Why not?

ROB (off-key):Tro-ma-ville is alive... with the sound of toxic...

LLOYD: And head-crushings.

ROB: I noticed in Citizen Toxie that there were a number of celebrities or celebrity lookalikes I soundalikes. The narrator sounded like Stan Lee...

LLOYD: If you notice in the credits, Peter Parker is credited with the narration.

ROB: There was also Lemmy from Motorhead...

LLOYD: Lemmy's been in a lot of Troma movies. He's been in Tromeo & Juliet and, in fact, Lemmy gave us music for Tromeo & Juliet, a song called "Sacrifice." He's been in three or four of our movies and he's never charged us a penny and he's a good guy. Lemmy showed up for Citizen Toxie with these silver mirrored sunglasses and I was on the camera and I could see my reflection in his glasses. And I figured, what the hell, I'd ask him to take them off, but he wouldn't. I know he wore them specifically to give me a hard time. And I thought, well, Warhol would keep it in, it breaks the fourth wall, it's great. So, if you look closely in Citizen Toxie, in Lemmy's glasses, you'll see me at the camera. He likes us because he thinks we're totally motivated by pissing people off. He thinks that's the only reason we make movies.

ROB: Is that true, is he right?

LLOYD: Definitely not. Certainly not in my case. I know Michael Herz gets a certain joy from stirring the brew but I'm a lover, not a fighter.

ROB: So why do you guys moke movies; what's the reason you founded Troma in the first place?

LLOYD: We're movie nuts. We love movies. I don't think that there are too many movie directors who are considered auteur film directors in America. There's Oliver Stone, there's Scorcese, Woody Allen, there's a handful that have a career that spans more than two minutes. Michael and I co-directed about twenty movies together and then Michael decided to build the studio; it was the only way to save us, I kept making movies. Sam Grogg, who's the Dean of the American Film Institute, said in all seriousness that I am one of the few genuine American auteurs and he's correct. All our movies are full of sex and violence and pissing and shitting and all that-

MICHAEL: So are Steven Spielberg's, right?

LLOYD: They ARE shit and piss. But the point is that we have total freedom. We are making movies that are totally ours.

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