Episode Details

Join Justin, Nick, and Angelique as they chat with filmmaker and co-founder of Troma Entertainment Lloyd Kaufman about cinema history, free speech, #shakespearesh!tstorm, The Toxic Avenger, and doing drugs.

Lloyd Kaufman bio:

"Stanley Lloyd Kaufman never really wanted to make movies, he wanted to work in Broadway musicals. During his years in Yale he was introduced to "B" pictures and the works of Roger Corman. Lloyd later got the opportunity to executive-produce a short movie made by a fellow student. The film, called "Rappacini", got him even more interested in movies. He bought his own camera and took it with him to Chad, Africa, were he spent his summer. There, he shot a 15-minute film of a pig being slaughtered. That was his first movie, and was the birth of what was later to become known as Troma Films. He showed the footage of the squealing pig being killed to his family, and their reaction to it made him wonder if making movies that shocked audiences would keep them in their seats to see what would happen next.

He wanted to be a director right then and there, so he got a couple of friends at Yale and made his second movie, The Girl Who Returned. People loved it, and he went straight to work on other films, helping out on projects like Joe, Rocky and Saturday Night Fever.

Lloyd put in a lot of long, hard hours in the film business, just to be in the credits and to get money for his next project, a full-length feature. It was a tribute to Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and the classic era of silent-film comedy. Even though Lloyd hated the movie when it was completed, people seemed to love it. He formed a studio called 15th Street Films with friends and producers Frank Vitale and Oliver Stone. Together, they made Sugar Cookies and Cry Uncle, directed by John G. Avildsen. A friend from Yale, Michael Herz, saw Lloyd in a small scene in "Cry Uncle" and contacted him to try to get into the film business. Kaufman took Herz in, as the company needed some help after Oliver Stone quit to make his own movies. Michael invested in a film they thought would be their biggest hit yet, Schwartz: The Brave Detective (aka "Big Gus, What's the Fuss?"). It turned out to be a huge flop and 15th Street Films was ruined. Lloyd and Michael owed thousands of dollars to producers