The Culture Business

Horror Showman

The second scene was the post-head-slump. Enter Ruth Pongstaphone-Safer, who'd cast my head in dental alginate a couple of weeks before. "Are you ready to be messed up?" she asked me brightly, and led me into her domain.

Her favorite ingredients were arrayed on a ready palette: Campbell's split-pea soup, Kraft pancake syrup, Key Food instant mashed potatoes, Karo corn syrup, Hershey's syrup, cotton balls, and plenty of gelatin. "Gelatin is a lot of fun. It's got a very lifelike quality if you mix it," Ruth said. There was a jar of what looked like outsize cocktail onions on the table. For some reason they filled me with unease. "What are those?" I asked. "Those are your eyeballs!" she said and set to work smearing gunk onto my head as if it were a Belgian waffle.

"You smell like liver!" Kaufman congratulated me, then turned to an assistant and asked, "Did the slime come yet?"

"Momentarily," he was told.

The slime might not have come, but a good deal else had. Desk, walls, even the Big Heat poster had been spattered with gobs, puddles, and chunks of pink and gray . . . stuff.

Hang on. There was something there that wasn't pink or gray. It was black.

"Watch out! There's some coffee spilled here," bawled the A.D.

"Art department!" Lloyd Kaufman yelled. "Who's got the paper towels?"

"Action!" he said finally.

I dropped my head.

Sploosh!

It was sploosh after sploosh for take after take after take.

The next scene was about the movie-within-the-movie scene, and it was crammed with various beloved Troma characters. "Kabukiman! Dolphin Man! Everybody!" Kaufman said. "Hey, guys! We need someone to play Fish Man." His eye fastened on an actor holding several loops of translucent tubing and a colossal blood-filled syringe.

"Art department!" Kaufman barked. "What he's got does not look disgusting enough."

Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz are both New Yorkers. Kaufman grew up on East 62nd Street; his father was a lawyer who was a pioneer in minority-shareholder class-action suits. Herz's father was a furrier, and the family lived in Forest Hills. Kaufman and Herz met at Yale. "My brother and Michael went to camp together," Kaufman says. "I had a black-and-white TV set. The kind that went like this when a car passed" -- he zigged and zagged a hand. "He liked to watch TV. So he had to talk to me."

The talk became movie-nut talk. Kaufman was a fan of experimental moviemaker Stan Brakhage and composer John Cage. At Yale, he shot a feature-length movie, The Girl Who Returned. It was an exercise in Warholesque tedium, but it did okay on the college circuit because he advertised it with a picture of a young woman lying on her back, an orgasmic expression on her face.

Kaufman took various movie jobs after leaving Yale. He was a gofer at Cannon, then a production assistant. He also he tried his hand as a scriptwriter. Indeed, Kaufman and Stan Lee, the progenitor of Marvel comics, co-wrote a script for Alain Resnais, the reticent auteur of Last Year at Marienbad. The script -- "a sublime comedy about . . . I honestly can't remember," says Kaufman -- was not produced.

Kaufman and Michael Herz set up Troma in 1974 with $300 worth of financing in a rented storage room on Park Avenue. They were always contrarian. As the received wisdom was that comedy and sex didn't mix in movies, the first Troma movies duly were bawdy comedies like Squeeze Play and Waitress, all directed by Kaufman under the pseudonym Samuel Weil and sometimes co-directed with Herz. They also acquired Sizzle Beach (which gave Kevin Costner an early role, as a wealthy rancher). Then the studios decided that sex and comedy did mix, after all: Porky's and a slew of other movies came scrambling into Troma's nifty niche.

At that point, Kaufman read in Variety that the genre of horror movies was dead. Great! Make a horror movie! The Toxic Avenger came out in 1985, and the Troma aesthetic was born.

The Troma archive now includes something like 900 movies, including movies Troma merely produces and those acquired from such eccentric talents as Italy's Dario Argento. A Troma movie will typically be brought in for under $1 million in about five weeks, and very few have failed to turn a profit. So the sky is sunny? Not to the savage eye of Lloyd Kaufman.

In 1998, his autobiography, All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger, was published. "This is the worst it's ever been," Kaufman writes. "Our distribution channels -- the theaters and video stores and TV channels -- have been fucked by consolidation . . ."

Kaufman must have been in a funk that day. "Actually, things are a bit on the upswing," he conceded at the last shoot. This was on a set done up with a Christmas tree, Frosty the Snowman, a gargantuan red teddy bear, and string upon string of tree lights. You just knew something vile was about to unspool here. On cue, Ron Jeremy tramped onto the set, where he started serenading a young boy.

"I love you, Daddy," the boy said.

"I love you, too, Casey," the hardest-working man in porn business replied.

"Cut! It's good. Beautiful!" Kaufman said.

"One take?" Jeremy said, startled.

The young boy disappeared and reappeared -- wearing a dress.

"How do you feel?" someone asked.

"Uncomfortable," the boy said uncomfortably.

"I think I see a lawsuit down the road," somebody said. (Okay, it was me.)

The boy's mother, who had been sitting outside, belatedly reading the script, hurtled onto the set and snatched him out of harm's way.

"Nobody showed her the script. I said, 'Show her the script,' " Kaufman mourned. "Just stay calm. There's lots of kids who would love to be in the film. The production people -- they live in some kind of weird world."

"It's Tromaville," Ron Jeremy said.

"It's not Tromaville," Kaufman snapped.

It happened that there was a female Dutch still photographer on the set with a fresh face, her hair in bangs. From the back she looked like the boy's twin.

Okaaaay!

That take went into the can. But then there was a problem involving a venerable performer who was required to dribble. It kept going wrong. "C'mon! The actress is peaking," Kaufman called out. He brooded about the shoot. "It started with the problem with the Young Boy. And now we've got a problem with the Old Lady. It's a very Taoist day."