One of the markers we typically resort to when classifying directors as great or legendary is ‘voice.’ It alludes to a signature way of shooting movies, methods and techniques, themes and politics. When considering the life and work of Lloyd Kaufman, the co-founder and public face of Troma (the longest running independent film studio in the world and home of the original Toxic Avenger), voice falls short. In a case like his, it’s perhaps more appropriate to think about an entire soundscape. Like a classic rock band, with iconic tunes and rhythmic sequences, Kaufman is what pure independent filmmaking sounds like.
Any attempt at putting together the multitude of interviews, expressions, opinions, and stories Kaufman has offered over the entirety of his career is like attempting to put together a definitive history of the universe. And yet, this is what writer, filmmaker, and pop culture historian Mathew Klickstein has managed to achieve with his book Lloyd Kaufman: Interviews, published by University Press of Mississippi.
The book is composed of interviews, op-eds, back-and-forths, intense disagreements, and debates Kaufman offered throughout his extensive career. These are comedic, confrontational, iconoclastic, and angry, often all at the same time. Klickstein undertook a gargantuan task putting these writings together for what should be considered a definitive exploration of the mind of a legend that doesn’t always get the attention he deserves. It’s the price of non-conformity, a philosophy Kaufman lived by to create some of the most in-your-face and unique movies in cinema. The mainstream doesn’t always know what to do with creators that don’t follow the rules, and Kaufman was very vocal about how an excess of rules can shackle creative endeavors.
The Beat sat down with Klickstein to discuss Kaufman’s place in film, the exhaustive research process for the book, and how hard it is paint a broad picture of a man that had an opinion on most every subject.
RICARDO SERRANO: Given your bibliography, Lloyd Kaufman seems to be an obvious choice to turn into a book. So, why now? What made you go with a Kaufman interviews book at this time?
MATHEW KLICKSTEIN: I’ve known Lloyd for more than half my life now. I grew up on Troma movies, like a lot of people from our generation. We’d have sleepover parties just to watch Toxic Avenger and Surf Nazis Must Die during the Joe Bob’s Drive-in Theater tv show (what we colorfully called Skinemax). That was really the apex of Troma, when it was getting out there through late night cable. I was part of the generation that’d be watching that as soon as our parents went to sleep. It was just so much fun to watch people swearing all while blood and guts and little bit of t-and-a flashed across the screen, though a lot of it was censored.
Simply, I was a Troma kid. It followed me to college and film school at USC. There, I made a friend who was actually working with Troma. He was a little older than I was, and he was around when Troma still had an LA office. So, I started kind of hanging around the office with him and got to see some of the projects he was working on. It was an ideal time in my life to be in that space. As I started thinking of my career, such as it was already in early film school, Troma convinced me that anything was possible.
Over the course of the next few years, I ended up working on some projects that came across Lloyd’s desk, so to speak. One day, I ended up at a Troma event that used to be held at Sundance every year and finally got to meet Lloyd in person. We started bumping into each other at movie events and lectures after that. So we started talking and visiting video stores. I started looking up to him as something of a mentor. Lloyd’s very good at finding and helping people that want to create. He really embraces and emboldens them to expand their worldview however he can. There’s a reason we all call him Uncle Lloyd. He takes to a paternal mentality when it comes to young talent, such as it is.
I always found a way to involve Lloyd’s stories and anecdotes into my projects. He’s just a great interview. He has done it all, and he pulls no punches when expressing his views. He’s a real character. He’s very smart, he’s very funny, and he’s extremely prescient. I would always find a way to interview Lloyd Kaufman for almost every one of the projects that I worked on. Lloyd was always in my back pocket in that way.
SERRANO: Kaufman is a well of stories and experiences. It’d be easy to justify a multiple volume project on him and you’ll probably end up capturing just part of it. How did you wrangle all that to settle on key interviews and pieces?
KLICKSTEIN: I was reading a book published by the University Press of Mississippi, which is one of the top (if not the top) spots for pop culture history and scholarly work nationwide, and they had this series called “Conversations with Filmmakers.” It’s been around for over 25 years. I would read these books over the years, all these different collections of interviews with different filmmakers.
A few years ago, I found myself thinking that it would be great to do a project about Lloyd and Troma. There have been smaller documentaries here and there, and Lloyd’s written some books of his own. But I knew there certainly was plenty of material and content out there about Lloyd and about Troma to do kind of an end-all-be-all authoritative tome on what he was all about but on a much deeper level, on a cultural and on a societal level.
There’s a lot of meaning in what he did, and it came through in his interviews. You could see that he had messages he wanted to put out there. Something that would come up a lot is the idea that sugar helps the medicine go down. He wants to talk about these very big issues, and he found he could do so through goofy, cartoonish, scatological, sex, horror, and comedy-type movies.
I knew that the Toxic Avenger reimagining was going to be coming out in a couple of years when I started thinking about the book more seriously. So that opened a window there. It’s always best to pitch something when an anniversary or a reboot is coming up. It’s easier to get money for things that tie into those milestones.
Also, I was concerned about Lloyd’s age, to be perfectly honest. I knew that he was getting up there in age. I thought now’s the time to do this. The 50th anniversary of Troma and the 40th anniversary of The Toxic Avenger were also within sight. Then it was a matter of going through years of interviews and putting them together.
Lloyd talks a lot, and he doesn’t say no to anything. He does interview after interview after interview. It’s almost another one of his art forms. It’s like performance art for him. Frank Zappa used to say he saw his interviews and anything else that he did as part of a unified esthetic, one large project that included everything. Lloyd definitely falls into that category. Because of that, there’s an infinite amount of interviews. Many of them are very long and very turgid and have a lot of information in them. And he is constantly bouncing around. He’s extremely discursive. I had a lot of material to go through.
SERRANO: Any finds in particular that really caught your eye?
KLICKSTEIN: Early on I found one that was headlined “The MPAA Can Burn in Hell.” I immediately knew I had to get that one in there, just for the headline alone. I hadn’t even read the article yet. I just knew that was the kind of piece or interview I wanted in the book. And yet, I didn’t want it to be the same thing over and over again. I didn’t want it to be redundant. I really wanted to track Lloyd’s career and life, as well as what he talks about in his interviews.
I wanted to capture what was going on socio-politically in the world, what’s going on with global economics, what’s going on with the film industry, what’s going on with the art world, what’s going on with technology, what’s going on with censorship and how these things coalesce to create our society. I wanted Lloyd’s take on society writ large.
I looked everywhere I could for these interviews. I looked through friends’ zines, I looked through old magazines, I looked through old books. I had a friend whose daughter was going to a college that had a great archive system and she was able to plug into it to get me some articles that I wouldn’t have been able to find elsewhere. A lot of them aren’t even online anymore. That was very helpful. Unfortunately, some of those subscription services are ridiculously expensive, completely cost prohibitive. I’m talking thousands of dollars. But if you’re in college, you can utilize them in the library.
Once I had enough to choose from, I started to weed out the ones I thought were repetitive. I don’t need a bunch of interviews talking about just one movie. I don’t need a bunch of interviews just talking about Lloyd’s books or his workshops. I kind of wanted each interview in the book to represent and to speak on different aspects of his personality.
I also wanted the interviews that were in the book to be egalitarian. I wanted them to be very eclectic. That’s how Troma is, and that’s how Lloyd is. It really delights me that there is one interview in there from an early 90s punk zine right next to interviews from the New York Times or The Village Voice. It’s the high and the low together.
SERRANO: You mentioned you always found a way to bring Lloyd Kaufman into your projects. What about the other way around? How did your other work perhaps play a role in making this book?
KLICKSTEIN: Well, now that you mention it, I do have something that might interest your readers. While working on my oral history of Comic Con, both as a book and as a podcast, I had access to a DVD of the 2009 Roast of Lloyd Kaufman that San Diego Comic Con put together. Even Lloyd didn’t have one.
A number of other iconic people, both in the comics world and pop culture in general, were there. With Lloyd’s permission, I was able to incorporate his response to the roast. It was great. He’s cracking jokes about Stan Lee and some of these other filmmakers and comic book people in attendance.
My favorite, of course, being one he made about Stan Lee and how his jokes for the roast were all written by Jack Kirby. So you see, I really wanted to be eclectic with the interview selection. I wanted each one to really be its own little world, its own little ecosystem.
SERRANO: To think of Kaufman and TROMA’s influence in cinema and pop culture can lead one to think about the company he keeps in that arena. I’m thinking of Roger Corman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and William Castle here. Where does he fit in the B-movie walk of fame?
KLICKSTEIN: He is absolutely a part of that continuum. He’s an heir apparent to the people that you’re talking about, from Roger Corman to Herschell Gordon Lewis and Russ Meyer, even though they’re also somewhat contemporaries. Lloyd comes from the world of midnight movies. He was watching Jodorowski and other weird movies that gathered a cult following, so he was definitely operating on the same frequency as the others.
Something these filmmakers had that Lloyd is so much a part of is the idea that you can make movies with everything around you, that budget is not a deterrent but a means to know how creative you need to get to make stuff happen. That’s what a lot of “grindhouse” or intentionally-made B movies get wrong. The filmmakers you mention, along with Lloyd, made movies with whatever they could, and they threw it all in there. It showed in the final products. You can’t help but feel all the love that went into making them. It’s what inspired Lloyd’s mentees, from James Gunn to Eli Roth and Matt Stone & Trey Parker.
As a result, they created collective experiences. These movies became cult classics, stories that people would seek out and appreciate because they connected with the fact that it all looked like it stemmed from a love of pure independent filmmaking. That’s what made so many of us seek these movies out at video stores or at midnight screenings. And then we would pass that down to future generations, building on a community that took to these movies to not only learn something about society through a lot of gore, sex, comedy, and violence, but also to celebrate the craft of filmmaking.
Lloyd Kaufman: The Interviews is available now wherever you get your books.