Lloyd Kaufman will return to Richmond on Saturday, May 31 for a special screening of Return To Nuke ’em High Vol. 1 at The Byrd Theatre (2908 W. Cary St). The screening begins at 1 PM and will be followed immediately afterwards by a Q&A with Kaufman. Tickets are $7, or $5 for members of the Virginia Production Alliance. Advance tickets can be ordered here: http://tinyurl.com/l3p7mnt
Science Team writer/producer/director Drew Bolduc and producer Michele Lombardi both created special effects for Return To Nuke ’em High Vol. 1. Science Team is out now, and will be shown at the 2014 Tromadance Film Festival in New York on June 27.
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I’m sitting in an old luxury home someplace in Chesterfield. There are about 18 pairs of shoes in a pile near the front door, including my own. The living room is a mess with costumes and production staff. Richmond filmmaker Drew Bolduc is pacing around the next room, red hair a mess and glasses slightly off-kilter. Across from this tortured genius sits a similarly tortured genius, though the latter is one who you might be a bit more familiar with.
This article is taken from the brand new print issue of RVA Magazine. Click here to read the digital version of this issue.
Lloyd Kaufman will return to Richmond on Saturday, May 31 for a special screening of Return To Nuke ’em High Vol. 1 at The Byrd Theatre (2908 W. Cary St). The screening begins at 1 PM and will be followed immediately afterwards by a Q&A with Kaufman. Tickets are $7, or $5 for members of the Virginia Production Alliance. Advance tickets can be ordered here: http://tinyurl.com/l3p7mnt
Science Team writer/producer/director Drew Bolduc and producer Michele Lombardi both created special effects for Return To Nuke ’em High Vol. 1. Science Team is out now, and will be shown at the 2014 Tromadance Film Festival in New York on June 27.
———–
I’m sitting in an old luxury home someplace in Chesterfield. There are about 18 pairs of shoes in a pile near the front door, including my own. The living room is a mess with costumes and production staff. Richmond filmmaker Drew Bolduc is pacing around the next room, red hair a mess and glasses slightly off-kilter. Across from this tortured genius sits a similarly tortured genius, though the latter is one who you might be a bit more familiar with.
This article is taken from the brand new print issue of RVA Magazine. Click here to read the digital version of this issue.
Lloyd Kaufman–67, grey haired, face wrinkled and worn like a knot in an oak tree–is sitting in a leather chair wrapped in a blanket and breathing heavily with an oxygen tank. He’s faking it, though. The co-creator of Troma Entertainment, with over 50 years of filmmaking under his belt, is still quite spry and alert, but he’s doing a walk-on part for Bolduc’s new movie. Someone yells, “Action!” and Kaufman starts mumbling.
“Mommy! Mommy! uggggggg… I wet myself.”
I’m on the set of Science Team, a horror/sci-fi movie that has since been independently released. The local project is the most recent mutant-brain-child of Bolduc, whose last film, The Taint, received international acclaim and helped put Richmond on the map as a place for out-of-this-world movies featuring exploding penises (many, many exploding penises). Bolduc’s work on The Taint got him an audience with Kaufman, and earned the fledgling movie maker a chance to do special effects on the Troma movie Return to Nuke ‘Em High, released in 2013. Bolduc impressed Kaufman so much, the film legend offered to play this walk-on part in Science Team for free. He covered the train ticket, and is even sleeping at a friend’s house.
“Cut!” yells Bolduc. And this gives me a give a few minutes to have a conversation with a film legend.
Does shooting on a set like this kind of hearken back to days of old for you all?
I like new locations because the films that Troma makes, like Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead or Tromeo and Juliet, are totally unreal. So to have one foot in reality and real locations, it gives the audience something to cling to. They can believe in the movie. And also, some of these locations you couldn’t create. We shot in a water factory in Buffalo. It was huge. You couldn’t have built that, and if you did, it wouldn’t look real. [If] you shoot in a 100 year old bakery, it’s so much more interesting, and you just couldn’t build that. It’s so much better to go to a real place.
So Lloyd Kaufman will never be doing movies on green screens?
Well, Return to Nuke ’em High was the first time I directed a movie with digital cameras. We’ve produced some, but I’ve never directed one. Return to Nuke ’em High has some green screen in it, and Drew Bolduc is responsible for it. Unfortunately, I know nothing about it. I didn’t shoot it very nicely, and that was very frustrating for Drew, I think. I just didn’t know anything about planning it out. I still don’t.
So you still learn stuff.
Shit yeah, especially digital. It’s so different, and so much more fun too. You save a lot of time on lighting. Actually filming a 35mm movie has never been fun, and filming RTNH, which was digital, it was fun. This movie [Science Team] is fun; it doesn’t take all day to light a room, and you can shoot so many more angles.
Do you think filmmakers today will lack the appreciation for the cutting room floor? Editing in a locked basement working frame by frame? Do you think that’s part of the process, or do you think it just evolves and now it’s a little different?
Well, that’s a good question. I think that the digital format empowers you to be much more independent and much more creative. You can control so much more. With 35mm, you need yourself a supervising editor, and you need at least two assistants. Even on our low budget movies, because there is so much rewinding and reconstituting and numbering. It’s a really horrible exercise. With the digital format, you can be an auteur without having to hear from anyone else. Which can be good, in that you have total control over it, and you can do it a hell of a lot faster. [But] faster’s not necessarily good. Sometimes, taking six months to edit a movie might be a good thing, because then you really think about it. You have other people giving you their opinions, and you get ideas, and you read the book, and you say, “Why don’t I try this thing? Or this rhythm?” With digital, it can go so fast–so maybe you lose something in the fact that you don’t have the time to stand back a bit and look at your work.
You learned about Bolduc through The Taint, his last movie–which featured Richmond heavily, as well as a lot of full frontal male nudity. How did you feel about The Taint?
It has a great environmental message about water supply, which is coming to haunt us. The world is running out of water. My daughter (Charlotte) spent two years in Yemen, and Yemen’s got a huge water problem. I did a piece about BP on YouTube where I portrayed the chairman of YouTube talking about the [oil] spill. It was obviously a satirical thing.
Fast Food Nation was a great book, [but] the movie appealed only to yuppies, to people who were already interested. It was boring. No one went to see it. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, there’s a movie that some people saw. And maybe it changed a few. Maybe it got people thinking a little bit. And they had a good time. But what’s great about The Taint is that it’s got an important theme, a satire of American culture. It’s got some great effects. Technically it’s brilliant, and it’s extremely entertaining.
I took the train here for seven hours because I identify Drew as talented, perhaps the next Trey Parker or Matt Stone. Troma discovered them. They did Cannibal: the Musical for Troma, they went on to do… well, I don’t know what happened to them. They sure were talented! James Gunn did Tromeo and Juliet, and is now directing Guardians of the Galaxy. A lot of famous people came out of Troma, and I think Drew will be recognized as one of the world class directors. I paid for my ticket myself, I’m sleeping in somebody’s house, it’s definitely not luxury. I had some kind of three foot… insect that attacked my laptop in bed last night. All because I think [Drew]’s really important.
How has the distribution of The Taint gone?
It’s a difficult movie, like all Troma movies. It’s ahead of its time and it’s slightly controversial. And it’s got a lot of exploding penises, which apparently is a problem in places like Australia. We played it at Tromadance Film Festival, [which] was a reaction to Sundance–we felt Sundance was exploiting the filmmakers and the fans, and really was a tool of the elites. Drew sent the movie in there, and we loved it.
Have a lot of the independent festival scenes changed?
I think Cannes has changed a lot. The first time I went I slept on the beach. I had a 35mm movie and I had enough money to rent a theater so we could show the movie to try to get distributors around the world. But I didn’t have money for a hotel.
It wasn’t what it is today. Today it’s all corporate elitist, almost like a military thing. I got kicked out of the Coen brothers screening because I wore the wrong tuxedo. Six goons pulled me out of line. I didn’t have the right color. Everyone has to be black, apparently, everyone has to be the same. I’ve been wearing the same tuxedo for over 40 years. It was kind of a dark paisley. It’s custom made! It wasn’t solid black, and that’s a new rule. It didn’t used to be that way.
I remember I got some flack because I had green pants once. The guy stopped me, about 15 years ago, because I had green pants in my tuxedo. And then the other guard said, “No no no, he’s Troma, you let him in.” But now it’s developed to the point where the whole message of that place is “It’s all about Leonardo DiCaprio.” Not that he isn’t talented, he’s very talented, but the whole idea of a festival is to try and expose new talent. So we created Occupy Cannes. We brought about 15 people there and we tried to raise the profile of independent art. We tried to bring some fun to the festival.
This requiring of dress codes and formalizing the whole experience–is that a manifestation of the change in the industry?
Since I started Troma Entertainment with Michael Herz, my Yale friend, we’ve noticed that the industry has become more and more consolidated. The rules that used to prevent monopoly have virtually been done away with, through Reagan’s administration and Clinton’s administration. So what protected the public against monopoly is no longer there.
I’ve done a lot of lobbying as the elected chairman of The Independent Film and Television Alliance. I’m not paid. Troma is the oldest one–we are 40 years old next year. No studio is able to exist that long. Not because they are making bad movies, but because they can’t eat, they can’t survive. Vertically integrated media conglomerates own the newspapers, the TV stations, and they control the movie theaters, so it’s very difficult for a young talented person to even get seen, to get mentioned. So if nobody knows you’re making the movie, no matter how great your movie is, how do you live?
The making of cinema has been democratized, as evidenced by this film Science Team. Drew Bolduc is making a movie for well under $25,000, and it’s gonna be brilliant. He’s very talented and the technology has advanced so that anyone can make his, her, or its movie. But the distribution method is stuck back in 1890. It’s the elites who still control that. So it’s impossible to live.
With all this democratization of film, and these smaller movies not making it on the big screen, do you believe big theater is still the best way to see a film?
I like movie theaters. They don’t have to be IMAX or 3D. I started making movies in the late 60s, so there wasn’t anything but movies. There was TV, but that was not a movie media. And I think the communal experience is very different from watching a movie on Netflix. And a Troma movie, especially–we have a huge amount of people in them. Thousands of people. I have a lot of stuff in the background that I want people to see. It’s part of the entertainment. Sometimes there’s goofy things going on in the background while the main characters are doing dialogue. There’s all sorts of detail, and you don’t see that detail in movies like Return to Nuke ‘Em High unless you see it on a big screen. So a movie like that needs to be, and we will have some theatrical distribution. If I direct a movie, it can usually get into about 300 theaters; not all at once, one by one.
You’ve been doing this for so many years, and you’ve had ups and downs, but you are certainly the best at what you do. What do you think the recipe for success is?
Well, if you’re in the arts, it should be an expression of your soul. That should be enough. I think that’s pretty much what art is. I think the most valuable thing that the recipient can give you is not money, but time. So I’m not necessarily against piracy–I think it helps the independent artist. I’m all about the independent. Michael Herz and I do whatever we can to raise independent filmmaking that’s really independent. Sundance Film Festival was basically a vessel for Rupert Murdoch and his minions. It’s not about really encouraging independent cinema.
To thine own self be true. That’s a phrase uttered by one William Shakespeare, who by the way wrote the very important best-selling 101 screenplay ideas, otherwise known as Hamlet. I think if you do what you believe in, you’ll be successful. Unless you’re a serial killer, in which case you may get electrocuted. I don’t think serial killers believe in what they are doing anyway.
There were these monks, illuminated books, they did them by hand. It would take them 20 years to make one book. Then what happened? Gutenberg invents the printing press. Puts them all out of work. The elite were destroyed. The printing press comes along and a lot of people start reading. Books are new. They’ve only been around for 5 or 600 years–that’s it! Copyright has only been around for 200 years.
Maybe the six second thing (like Vine and Instagram) becomes what we do. Or maybe there will be the giant event [films like] Iron Man 3, and then everybody is kind of in themselves. Tromeo and Juliet, the theme of that was that the post war baby boomers, like Clinton’s generation, have kind of smothered the next generation. They are so ultra cool and they have destroyed the concept of love. 50% of them are divorced, and as a result the next generation turned inward. And this may well [mean] that we are going to be more involved in watching this thing on our own. I honestly don’t know where it’s going, but it sure would be great to get it out of the hands of the people who made Forrest Gump or Pretty Woman.
With services like Vine, how do you feel about the jump of every Joe Shmoe being able to record really high quality?
It’s pretty interesting. When I was at Yale and I would go to the movies, there would be a short film at the beginning. And then shorts went away. Other than as calling cards so that young directors could get a job, short films were not seen. They had no value, really. They were not useful to you or to the audience. They just didn’t exist, even though they are wonderful things. And now it’s come full circle. Now the short film is kind of driving the whole industry again. People are making million dollar movies that can be chopped up in bite sized pieces so they can get on YouTube as video blogs or whatever you call them. The short form has come back with a vengeance, and you’ve got people who would never ever have made it in movies with the system of Rupert Murdoch dominating. But with the internet they can do three-minute pieces every day, and accumulate viewers, and actually make a living.
The Angry Video Game Nerd, he’s created this incredible world unto his own, and he doesn’t need his day job anymore because he’s so popular. He crowdfunded a horror film, which was his true love, and how terrific is that? There’s all sorts of great talent that this is exposing in the short form. So it may will supersede the long form movie. It’s very possible. In a way it already has. How many billions of short pieces are on YouTube, how many thousands of them get a shitload of eyeballs? Troma has three channels and we put up a short piece almost every day. In some cases more people see that short a week than see one of our films in a year on screen. It’s definitely a revolution going on.
