LLOYD KAUFMAN RECALLS MEETING DE PALMA AT THE THALIA IN 1971 FOR 'BATTLE OF LOVE'S RETURN' PREMIERE
At Den of Geek today, Tony Sokol asks Troma's Lloyd Kaufman how Troma came to distribute The Wedding Party, a film by Brian De Palma, Wilford Leach, and Cynthia Munroe:
Most people don’t know Troma’s connection with Robert De Niro and Brian De Palma on The Wedding Party. What was the role beyond distribution?Brian De Palma and Paul Williams, and the toymaker [director Ed Pressman], we all knew each other because they all went to Harvard, and there was some exchange between the Yale film society and Harvard’s filmmaking community. Brian De Palma actually showed up at the Thalia, a great art house. That was the only theater I’ve ever been in where the seats in the front were at a higher altitude than the seats in the back. It made our movies look a lot better to the people in the back.
The Battle of Love’s Return opened there, and Brian De Palma showed up that night. I was friendly with one of the producers. We had nothing to do artistically with it, but if you look at The Wedding Party, De Niro looks like he’s 15 years old. We bought a package of movies. Whenever we had money, we bought. We would buy collections of movies because small companies can’t stay in the business. We did buy Greetings and another one, but it turned out the guy who sold it to us was a grifter, so we don’t own them. We got fucked. The Wedding Party we bought from Woodford Leech.
A couple of notes: Kaufman certainly means Wilford Leach, not Woodford Leech. The Battle of Love’s Return premiered in 1971, years after The Wedding Party had been completed (and one year after Hi, Mom! was released).