Lloyd Kaufman is 80 years old today. He was born on 30 December 1945. And these days, he’s showing his age!
I’ve written about Kaufman before, Troma and Economic Inequality. On the one hand, I think he’s a horrible guy. On the other hand, exploitation filmmakers are usually horrible people. But there is a difference between exploitation filmmaking and exploitative filmmaking. Kaufman has made millions with the latter.
Brian Albright interviewed Larry N Stouffer for Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990. And Stouffer ranted through much of the interview. He complained about people expecting to get paid. They didn’t have his passion for his films. I like Horror High quite a lot. But he hasn’t produced anything since that interview. Actually, he hasn’t produced anything for decades. So many supposed entrepreneurs are like this! They think that everyone around them should make their dreams come true for cheap. But the “entrepreneur” gets all the profit! They could at least stop whining.
But Lloyd Kaufman didn’t suffer from this. With Troma, he was able to get a never-ending stream of young people to work for free under terrible conditions for “experience.” And look, I’m not saying this is the worst thing in the world. Struggling filmmakers are fine to get their friends to help out.
The problem is that Troma is a profitable company based on this. And once the company was established? They used even more low-paid/unpaid workers. Not because they had to. Because they could!
(The “work for free and get experience” is a nonsense claim. People gain experience when paid, too! This is the biggest change over my lifetime. When I was born, IBM trained its employees. Now, IBM hires indebted people they don’t have to train. Good for IBM!)
But Lloyd Kaufman is a good filmmaker. I like many of his films. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead is an extreme but excellent film. And I get it. Tyrants are often required to get a low-budget film made. But when you are a tyrant to people you aren’t paying, that’s unacceptable.
Even though, Poultrygeist is better, let’s watch the classic Troma film: The Toxic Avenger.
Lloyd Kaufman by Gage Skidmore under CC BY-SA 3.0.
That’s truly rotten about IBM. But it’s a market efficiency! In a way, they HAVE to do it — they’re a publicly-traded company, if there’s a way competitors are cutting costs, and IBM refuses on principle (not like they would), shareholders would be within their rights to oust the principled CEO and appoint a new one who does what the competitors are doing.
But I don’t think Troma is publicly-traded…
It kinda makes me have more respect for Corman. It does seem like he really was eager to help young filmmakers get a leg up, not just rip off their work. I mean, there’s a lotta people who got started with Corman and were really grateful to him years later. In the movie business, if you worked cheap for somebody, and you’re still friends with them years later… that doesn’t happen too often! I’m sure there were people who had beefs with him too, but to leave people with a good memory of their time working for you… that’s not the norm.
Regarding IBM: this is what is dictated by the US Supreme Court. They really need to be reformed because they are reactionary with far too much power.
On Corman, I agree regarding his early career. Later, he was just renting out his name. He was a dick. But he was never anything close to Lloyd Kaufman. But now that he’s 80, I wish upon him all the incontinence he so richly deserves!