LLOYD KAUFMAN WANTS US DEAD!
Mike and Ike, America's greatest stoner film connesuirs join GeekPlanetOnline and have somehow managed to get away from the sofa long enough to bag an exclusive interview with Lloyd Kaufman. You'll have to forgive Ike his spelling by the way. He has trouble seeing the keyboard through the fug. He also ain't that bright.
DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING STORY IS SLIGHTLY TRUE. HALF A NAME WAS CHANGED TO PROTECT US FROM LAWSUITS.
DISCLAIMER 2 - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THERE ARE LOTS OF IN JOKES.
Mike: (English accent) Greetings and salutations. He’s not Mike.
Ike: (Southern accent) He ain’t Ike and ya read that right, nuggets. Lloyd Kaufman has put a price on our head.
M: Every hideously deformed mutant of superhuman size and strength in the tri-county area is trying to kill us.
I: Our house is gone.
M: McLintock is dead.
I: We think.
M: We’re on the run.
I: Nobody’ll help us.
M: The worst part is, none of this is our fault.
I: Oh no!
M: We place the blame completely on that sack-sucking douchecanoe Steve who runs Horror-Extreme.com and Dave McGuigan.
I: Who from now on will be known as Cunty McFucknuts.
M: Backstory: Through begging, bribery, and blow jobs, we were able to get an interview with Mr. Kaufman.
I: We were stunned. This guy runs Troma Entertainment; he’s the creator of The Toxic Avenger. We’re a couple of possibly fictitious stoner comic/critics stuck in Ohio.
M: But he said he’d do it.
I: Praise The Rain Maker.
M: And we decided, for once, not to ask any of our usual dumb ass questions.
I: We were gonna be as close ta honest ta Fudd journalists as two possibly fictitious stoner comic/critics stuck in Ohio could be.
M: But then we had to talk to the dynamic duo of dickheads.
I: “Oh, don’t do that!” they said.
M: In unison, which was quite eerie.
I: “Ya gotta be true ta who ya are,” they said. “Besides, he made a musical about chicken zombies with a song talkin’ ‘bout salad tossin.’ He’ll LOVE the weird questions!”
M: Which did make sense.
I: David wanted us ta ask if Lloyd had ever ridden on the back of a very large dog.
M: Which I believe he asks every single person he meets.
I: And Steve suggested this doozy: “If you, Ron Jeremy, and Debbie Rochon were kidnapped by a mad scientist who wanted ta make a human centipede, what position would you want ta be and why?”
M: Which is, admittedly, something we would ask.
I: Now we were doin’ the interview by phone and Lloyd’s intern-a-tary Justin suggested that we probably shouldn’t ask any weird questions.
M: If only we had listened.
I: But we didn’t.
M: Like hydrocephalic children who’ve just fallen down a 30 foot well, we started with Steve and Dave’s questions.
I: And here was Lloyd’s response:
LLOYD: Justin, they’re asking me these asshole questions. I don’t want to answer this bullshit! This question is asshole time. There’s my answer! I don’t find these questions amusing. I’m 64 years old. Ask me something gay. Ask me something about the American musical theatre. Ask me something about Loony Tunes. Have I ever ridden a dog. I’ve FUCKED a dog! And I spent a year in Africa and I fucked goats!
M: And then he hung up.
I: Two days later a fat guy in a diaper blew up our house.
M: The next day we found McLintock (Our lycanthrope chauffeur/dealer) lying in a pool of someone else’s vomit with a silver mop shoved up his ass.
I: Granted, we did that.
M: Our lives have turned to shit and it’s Steve/Dave’s fault.
I: We may be on the run, but we’re runnin’ for you.
M: We have passports and we have semi-automatic weapons.
I: And it’s asshole time!
SHORT PAUSE
M&I: (Together) JUST KIDDING!
I: And so was Lloyd.
M: We spent a good half hour talking to Mr. Kaufman, and it was one of the best thirty minutes of our careers.
I: Ya get paid for a career. This is just an obsessive hobby.
M: Point taken. We spent a good half hour talking to Mr. Kaufman, and it was one of the best thirty minutes of our obsessive hobby.
I: He was nicer than hell.
M: Except for when he was busting our balls.
I: Yeah, but it was Lloyd Kaufman bustin’ our balls! He even invited us ta hang out with him at a convention this October here in Ohio.
M: No, he said that Troma has a booth at the convention and that if we showed up he’d be the guy in the corner with a gallon of pepper spray.
I: Yeah, but it’d be Lloyd Kaufman blindin’ us!
M: Anyway, smoke if you got, buy if you don’t and enjoy the interview.
I: We did.
M: Indeed.
US: Our first question comes from Ryan Smith, who calls himself That Guy on the internet (We call him Marlo) He wrote a lengthy paragraph which we cut down to one sentence because it amused us. Will we ever see a 3-D Troma film?
LLOYD: You will never see a 3-D Troma film. Toxie 5 will be promoting and bringing to the audience the amazing technique of Troma’s 1-D!
US: Since you brought it up, what are you willing to tell the fans about Toxie 5?
LLOYD: Toxie 5 will be the darkest and the most uncommercial of any Toxic Avenger film. It continues the story of Toxie and his offspring, the next generation of Toxies. It will deal with something that you guys are very much involved in, the gay rights movement. I know you guys are homos so you’ll probably like this movie. What more can I say? We’re writing the script. Like every Toxic Avenger movie, they’re all different. Toxie changes. He gets older and older. He got married in Part 3. In Part 4 he impregnates his significant other and we deal with abortions and plastic surgery.
US: Which are sort of the same thing.
LLOYD: And Part 5 will deal with marriage and gay rights and all that kind of stuff.
US: We have to say, Part 4 is our favourite of the films so far.
LLOYD: Citizen Toxie is the best of the Toxic Avenger movies. It sold about 300,000 home videos, DVDs, etc. and it’s never been on American TV. It hasn’t even been on the crappy cable systems. Nothing. It’s called economic blacklisting. We are totally blacklisted. We have no distribution anywhere. The only reason we’re still around is because you fans continue to make the extra effort to find Troma DVDs and buy them. Otherwise, we are totally shut out. We are blacklisted economically. We haven’t had a movie on television for ten years. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead has never been on any kind of television. Cannibal! -The Musical by Trey Parker and Matt Stone has never been on American TV, not even on the unfunny Comedy Central. Nothing, and that’s because Troma is blacklisted. The big conglomerates do not want Troma to exist. They don’t want the conscience of the independent film industry to exist. They hope that they can snuff us out by blacklisting us but our fans keep us alive. Barely alive, but they keep us alive.
US: Look at it this way, being blacklisted has gotten you a worldwide fan base. Troma will be around long after we have both been executed.
LLOYD: Let’s hope so. I mean, we honestly care about the movies we make. Cinemax has asked us to make Skinemax movies for them You know those stupid softcore sex films. I’m not going to do that.
US: GOOD MAN!
LLOYD: Who wants to make that kind of shit? In fact that’s an insult. They tell us “We can’t play any of your movies, but why don’t you make a sex film and maybe we’ll play it.” The deals we were offered for Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead were so bad that we put it on the internet. You can see Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead - my best film ever in 40 years of making movies - on Hulu for free.
US: Who wrote the songs for Poultrygeist?
LLOYD: Well, Duggie Banas wrote the music and Gabe Friedman and I wrote the lyrics. I put something on the internet. “If you want to write music for my next movie and you don’t want to get paid sign up here” and Duggie Banas who lives in Winnipeg did it for no money. I think we ended up paying him 100 bucks or something because I felt guilty. We let the actors actually do the singing so there’s a little more reality to it. It’s been in about 300 cinemas and the DVD sales were very good but unfortunately it will never go on American TV, not because of content but because of blacklisting. It has nothing to do with the content.
US: Did you know when you were writing the script that you would be playing the adult Arbie or did that happen during the process of shooting it?
LLOYD: I think that Gabe Friedman and Andy Deemer and Kiel Walker, who were the young producers of that film - Gabe actually wrote most of the script. They have such admiration for me that they really wanted me to play that part. They want to have as much of me as possible in their lives. I’m very touched by that but there was a lot of stress because I had to direct and I had to do a lot of other things. I had to be in a chicken zombie costume. I had a beak and feathers and I’m trying to direct. It’s hard to get people to take you seriously when you’re looking like a cartoon character. But they wanted it and I was better than the older actors who came in for interviews. By the time an older actor gets to be 40, 50, 60, if they’re not already in the union and kind of making a good living; if they’re not already in a place where working for free on a Troma movie might not be at the top of their desires, they probably suck as an actor. I was better than the older actors available. Not much better.
US: We love the fact that Poultrygeist had a song about salad tossing. That’s something we need more of in musicals.
LLOYD: I agree. Troma has been in the foreground of many, many cinematic movements. Quentin Tarantino talks about us. Clearly we’ve been an influence on Peter Jackson.
US: Not lately.
LLOYD: Robert Rodriguez. I mean, James Gunn wrote Tromeo and Juliet. Eli Roth showed Mother’s Day at his bah mitzvah and he did the commentary track for the Bloodsucking Freaks DVD. Takashi Miike wrote a huge article about Troma and Citizen Toxie in the big Tokyo newspapers, defending the movie when critics didn’t get it. What’s his name…Gaspar Noé, who did Irreversible, he’s been influenced. The point is Troma has a big, big, big reach all over the world. These people talk about how my movies have influenced them and they’ve been able to go through some of the doors I’ve opened. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are huge fans of Troma—you can tell from the cartoon—and they’ve been able to mainstream things like dismemberment. Since it’s cartoony it’s not as objectionable. They have Mr. Hanky, which is shit that dances and sings. Our movies are not that much more extreme than South Park. It’s just that ours is live action.
US: Our next question is from Dave Probert over at GeekPlanetOnline.com. Have you ever had a script that you had to abandon because you just couldn’t get it to work?
LLOYD: No. Well, there’s a project I would love to do. I’m a big Jane Austen fan and Schlock and Schlockability - The Revenge of Jane Austen would be a terrific project but we need to shoot it in the United Kingdom, which is an island off of Europe. Some people call it Ohio or something like that.
NOTE: If you don’t know, that’s where we’re currently imprisoned.
LLOYD: But we couldn’t get the money. We could put up half the money but we needed someone in England to put up the other half, but nobody was at the other end of the phone
NOTE: Get to it, GeekPlaneteers!
LLOYD: But we’ve never has a project where we’ve abandoned the script. That’s one of the reasons why our movies are so good. It takes us a long, long time to get to a script that we love. That’s why all these fans have been writing and twittering on my twitter (@lloydkaufman) “I want to help on Toxic Avenger Part 5!” “I’ll work for free.” “I’ll pay you to let me work on Toxie 5!” “I’ll blow you if you let me sleep on the floor and work on Toxie 5.” It takes me a long time to get a script because I have to have something I really, REALLY believe in.
US: We read in your bio (Yes, we occasionally do research) that in the early days you actually worked on Rocky and Saturday Night Fever. What did you do on those films?
LLOYD: Those are good films so I don’t like to talk about them. I’m ashamed of having been involved in a good film. Both of them were shot almost Troma-style, which is why I was hired for those movies. Troma line produced all the Philadelphia footage for Rocky and that material, all of the dailies, was synched up in the Troma editing rooms by my partners Michael Herz and Maris Herz and in those days nobody knew who the hell Stallone was. They had no idea what they were dealing with. I’m in Rocky also. I play the bum. A fabulous amazing performance as the drunken bum who Sylvester Stallone throws over his shoulder and carries inside the bar and seats next to another drunken bum. That was my first one. I’ve been in about 200 movies and I get cast as drunken bums quite a bit! After that I did work on Saturday Night Fever as the Executive in Charge of Locations, which was very hard work. And recently the A&E channel had me host a tour of those locations in Brooklyn. This was for the 30th Anniversary of Saturday Night Fever. I haven’t seen it. I take them to all the location for the movie and talk a bit about how we got them and how John Travolta and I used to dance together.
US: What non-Troma films can you watch over and over?
LLOYD: Well, I really love Class of Nuke ‘Em High. It’s such a good movie. I can watch it again and again. It’s just amazing. In fact, I just watched it again for the first time. You asked me about non-Troma movies?
US: Yes.
LLOYD: Terror Firmer. Terror Firmer is just an amazing, visionary, totally original, incredibly politically and sociologically savvy movie that is more pertinent today than in 1999 when it was originally made.
US: Any other non-Troma films that you’d watch over and over besides those two?
LLOYD: I just love Troma’s War. You cannot imagine how Troma’s War, made in 1986, how pertinent it is today. Troma’s War predicted everything about AIDS to Iraq to sabotage to the 9/11 thing. I mean, Troma’s War was a road map to today.
NOTE: If you think he’s joking, watch the film. He’s not.
LLOYD: Nobody’s seen it. We just released it in the Tromasterpiece series and of course you can get it safely and securely at www.troma.com or at something called Amazon.com.
NOTE: Buy it. Watch it. You will not be disappointed.
LLOYD: Unfortunately, most of Troma’s War was disembowelled by the ratings board so most of the theatres had to play this R-rated chopped up version where punches were cut out, where dead bodies were cut out. I mean, it was horrible. They destroyed it. That’s why the film was unsuccessful, because it came out after Class of Nuke ‘Em High and Toxic Avenger and all our fans were really excited. Then they went to the movie theatre and they saw a movie that looked like a G-rated movie. They thought we were selling out. The MPAA made us cut all this stuff out to get an R-rating but they didn’t cut the stuff out of Die Hard, which came out right before Troma’s War. There’s blood and kneecaps exploding all over the place and they didn’t cut any of it out. For us, they cut it all out.
US: Is there a non-Troma film that you would love to give the Lloyd Kaufman treatment to?
LLOYD: Maybe remaking Pal Joey. Pal Joey is a very dark musical by Rodgers and Hart based on a short story by John O’Hara about a gigolo. I think I’d remake that one because it’s such a great show. It’s a wonderful, witty, dark, sexy musical and yet the movie was just awful. I think somebody could make a hell of a movie out of it but it’ll never happen. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart are long dead and their heirs are not going to give me permission to fuck with their million dollar property.
US: Speaking of musicals: Will we ever see Terror Firmer: The Musical?
LLOYD: No.
NOTE: This is the point in the interview where we actually asked Steve’s question and yes, we really thought Lloyd was going to hang up. Our first interview with a true legend and we fuck it up by being us. We were blown away when we heard him say to Justin “I’m giving them a hard time.” This is officially the BEST. INTERVIEW. EVER.
LLOYD: (Immediately after “I spent a year in Africa and I fucked goats.”) I have not fucked a pig! I want to clear that up right now. I have never—Well, when I was at Yale there were some girls at Vassar.
US: What type of food do you think would make a great goofy Troma monster?
LLOYD: (Long pause) I don’t know. I think a jizzum monster would be interesting. Jizzum is a food of sorts. It’s got salty goodness.
US: It’s high in protein.
LLOYD: That’s a great idea. Maybe I’ll put it in Toxic Avenger Part 5. I think you guys got my mind - the wheels are turning!
NOTE: We will shit several bricks if one actually shows up in the film.
US: Finally, and this is the most important question we’re going to ask you. When are you going to hire us for something?
LLOYD: Well, you guys are certainly high on my list of hirings, but I’ve heard you’re very expensive and hard to get and that you have a terrible diva complex.
NOTE: He’s heard correctly.
LLOYD: I just don’t know if I can be up to your standards. After you got the Nobel Peace Prize for your penis enlargement machine I heard your personalities changed quite a bit. I’ve eaten your candy for years and it hasn’t seemed to do any good, other than rotting my teeth.
M: Lloyd, even with the Nobel Prize on our shelf, we would work for you for free in a heart beat.
I: And if ya watch any of Season
M: Series.
I: Two of our web show, you’ll see we do some mighty fine commentary tracks. Just sayin.’
M: And on that note
M&I: (Together) Namaste.
