Well I'm really not an expert on horror films um but I think "Frankenstein" is one of my favorites. That was the big influence on Toxic Avenger. I always wanted the monster to live. You know Frankenstein is very sad. That was part of the inspiration of creating the Toxic Avenger was so that Frankenstein could live. Todd Browning's movie "Freaks" is a good one, Dracula's great, certainly "The Shining" is maybe the scariest movie. I just saw Julie Teymore's "Titus", which is her addition of Shakespeare's Titus Adronicus. That's a scary disturbing movie. "Evil Dead part 2" is certainly a masterpiece. I don't know if you'd consider "Army Of Darkness" by Sam Raimi. But you know that's a great certainly a tour de force acting role for Campbell. Bruce Campbell should have gotten the Oscar for that.

4. What are the pros and cons of fame?

Well Fame uh had some a couple good songs but I never liked the dancing in it. It was too uhh I don't know. Too much too watered down. The director was talented, good director.

5. What do you look for in an actor or actress?

At least in a movie I direct. They must be totally it has to be all about the movie. It can't be about anything other than the movie. If they are doing it for money obviously they can't work for Troma. If they are doing it for food they can't work for Troma because we don't have a Primanti Brothers in New York, which has such delicious food. We uhh you know we want unique energetic people who are there to sleep on the floor, eat cheese sandwiches three times a day, know how to defecate in a paper bag and worship the film itself. Do what they believe in and that's kinda I think that's what we look at. We look for people who are just dying to be in our movies. Now if the actor can act that's also good but there's a lot more too it than that. If you look at the Troma movies you will see they're either we tend to like extremes. There's like very beautiful people or very bizarre looking people and so we sorta always have an eye out for unusual people for our ensemble.

6. What are some of your favorite bands?

I don't know much about music. I mean I like a lot of it. I just don't know really who they are. Right now New Found Glory I think is very good. I like them a lot. I like Eminem but that's not a band. Is he a band, Eminem? Do you consider him a band? In terms of bands, I guess the Doors were great. I don't know much about bands. Benny Goodman had a good band. Lionel Hampton just died. He was the last of the Benny Goodman crew. Not to mention the fact that Benny Goodman had an integrated band long before Hollywood did. Long before Hollywood had black people Benny Goodman had Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson. That was pretty cool. I'm trying to think of other bands.. Who were those guys that kinda had mop hair? They were like in the sixties? The Cockroaches. Whoever they were they were good. Motorhead of course. I like Sublime a lot too. The Misfits are great- I like them.

7. What advice do you have for people who idolize you?

Well to that one person, to the two people out there- my mother thank you for having me, but I still resent the fact mom that you called me your little mistake. I don't like that. My wife thanks for putting up with me. I don't think there are too many people who idolize me. If there are, they are dangerous. Watch out! Just continue to carry on, do what you believe in, to thine own self be true, and take no prisoners.

8. What made you decide to be a director?

I made the mistake of going to Yale University. I was going to be uhh it was the sixties and I was headed to be a teacher or a social worker. I wanted to do some good, to change the world, to do something good with my life. Teach people with hooks for hands how to finger paint or teach bums how to sew beads into a necklace. But unfortunately, I got roomed with a movie nut at Yale and he started showing me all these great movies and I literally caught the bug. We had a very small bedroom. We lived together in a little tinie winie bedroom and his bed and my bed were head to toe. So every night I would smell his god darn stinking feet. And the Aroma du Troma was born. I couldn't stop watching movies and then started I decided I'd start making them. I bought a Bolex camera and uhh I can retell you the exact moment I made the decision to make movies. It was at the Yale Film Society watching Erntz Lubiches "To Be or Not To Be". I don't know if you've seen that film but Mel Brook's did a remake of it, which wasn't bad. "To Be or Not To Be" is Jack Benny, Carol Lombard, and Robert Stack. It's a marvelous film and I just sat there in the dark seeing how powerful Lubiches art was, but yet the movie was so out of control and so so crazy. And there was kind of the ying and yang and um I decided right then and there. It was as easy as getting up from the lazy boy and going to the icebox and getting a beer. I said I'm gonna be a movie man a movie maker. I will make movies. So if you wanna blame Troma on somebody Jack Benny's died, Carol Lombard is dead, but you can throw an egg at Robert Stack. He's still around. It's all his fault.

9. Did you ever imagine Troma would take off like it did?

Troma will be lucky to be alive. You better get this out fast. We're barely in business. Troma is like a car with, we used to say it was a car with three flat tires. It's now got four flat tires and we're out of gas. Troma's never taken off. It's very hard to be an independent artist and I'm sure you know because it's not that the public doesn't want you. It's that they can't get you. There's no way for them they want it's like the blue whale. The blue whale is becoming extinct because the male, there's so few left in the ocean they can't find each other to make whoopie. So they are becoming extinct and with the independent film artists it's very hard for the public to find them. The biggest problem we have is that people say to us constantly "How do I buy your movies? How do I get them? I can't you know Blockbuster doesn't carry them. I can't find them". For my partner and I, we are still to this day we are astounded that somebody actually pays money to go see a Troma movie. We still can't quite believe that somebody would pay money for something that we had so much fun making or that we enjoy so much. And we also do not see ourselves as we don't really take ourselves too seriously. We take our movies very very seriously but we're not exactly confident that we are in a league with John Renoir or Lenny Rufinsthal or D.W. Griffith. He was brought down by the big boys. He was destroyed by the system. He's one of the tragic geniuses one of the many. Buster Keaton's career was ruined also by the big companies. He was a contract player and MGM destroyed his career. Lenny Rufinsthal, who I've met a few times, she made movies for Hitler. She's still one of the greatest all time greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema. She happened to be a woman. What would she have done if she was in America? She would've been cutting negatives. That's what she would've been doing. Fritz Lang who came here from Germany, who made M- Metropolis. He came from Germany to the United States. They made him do these shitty "b" pictures which was brilliant but they got chopped up. He ruined his career. Billy Wilder, those guys put their conscious over their art. Now Robert Deniro and Martin Scorcese have recently given the Lifetime Achievement Award to Ilia Kuzan who was a black listing person in the fifties and named names, who turned people in during the black list period and many young people feel well Ilia Kuzan should get the Lifetime Achievement Award because his art is more important than his politics. Hey if that's true give it to Lenny Rufinsthal. Give her the Lifetime Achievement Award. She's 100 years old. She's a woman and I don't think she should get it. I'm not saying she should get it. She still was.. she helped Hitler.

But then why give it to this Ilia Kuzan? And especially Ilia Kuzan in my opinion is not that great of a director. I mean he did theater pieces. He took plays Arthur Miller. Not Arthur Miller but he took these plays and did theater pieces. He had James Dean a great actor. His movies are great, but they're not that great. There are plenty of other Lifetime Achievement people that you could find. You don't have to find a guy who took part in the black listing and named names. And I think that this was all done deliberately to just kinda to put the eye..and I think that Deniro and Scorcese had they cause you know they are not publicity hounds. They went out in front of billions of people and they are not publicity hounds. But they actually went to the trouble of presenting the award to this guy. So there had to be some kind of statement "like okay you know you soft socialists you know this is all about American right wing capitalists. You're over you people with your peace and we're gonna bomb Iraq we're gonna you know you can forget about all this bullshit you know. And here it is the Lifetime Achievement Award to a guy who to a fascist, to a fascist, genuine fascist.". There you have it. Now of course I don't really believe all that.. God Bless America.

10. What has been the most interesting special effect you've done?

Well I think that what's interesting about Troma is that we do special effects that are you know we have no money so we have to solve things in a kinda old fashioned way. So I guess the most I think the most profound effect I suppose especially in it's day was the full head crushing scene in Toxic Avenger. Just because we shot it at night. It's a little boy, the car runs right over his head and squashes it and then the car backs up and goes back over his head and the kids the other bad kids come photograph it. Most interesting to do I guess? Special effects are fairly they're not really too sophisticated so uhh...I think what I think what makes them fun is when you solve something like in the beginning of "Tromeo & Juliet". There's a shot of someone who's testicles have been shot off and we just took toilet paper and you know kinda made them into spaghetti and sort of just had em put them around the guys crotch area and put a lot of blood and it was real simple and yet you see that shot and he removes his hand from it and you swear its you know the blood testicles and it's just toilet paper wrapped up like little spaghetti.

11. Who's your favorite person to work with?

Well I learned the most from John Alberson I think. I attached myself to a guy who I perceived as being a talented person when I was a production assistant in 1970. He was making a movie called "Joe" and the first day I came on the set he was setting up the shop and I peeked through the camera. At which point I was severely chastised by the union camera man for doing that. But um yeah so this guy's good this guy's great. And "Joe" I don't know if you've ever seen "Joe". Peter Boyle's first movie, Susan Sarrandon's first movie-the hippies versus the hard-hats. Alberson went on to do "Rocky" and "The Karate Kid" and "Save the Tiger", a bunch of movies. He's a great guy so I learned a lot from him. How he auditioned. How he rehearsed. He would film his rehearsals and lie up you know figure out the angles. So I think I probably learned a hell of a lot from him and also I think I learned from him a bit about you know fight for what you believe in. Alberson's a interesting mainstream director. Alberson would never do what I do. He would never work for the he just wouldn't bother. Right now you know he's not working but he wouldn't you know if you said do you want to do a 300,000 dollar Troma movie. It's very doubtful he would. Well you never know but it's doubtful that he'd do it. But the movies he's been fired off of "Serpico", "Saturday Night Fever", ahh you know just because he had a vision and if he couldn't stick to his vision he'd get himself kicked off. He claims he regrets that but I don't think he does. I'm convinced if he would've compromised that he wouldn't have come up with things like "Rocky" and he also did "Cry Uncle" which Troma distributes. In fact the "Cry Uncle" dvd has a pretty good interview with Alberson where I ask him I interview him entirely about the movies he's been kicked off of. It's quite interesting to hear him talk about it.

So I think I don't know if he's my favorite but I certainly learned more from him. I've learned an awful lot about making films from him. He also was a good guy. He's very loyal and I remember once there was a like something happened. I think the camera fell into the river or something and his first question was "Was anybody hurt?". No. He said "So what are you all upset about?It's only a camera big deal.". As long as nobody was hurt he was okay. If somebody was hurt that was not lost on me. And the three rules of production of Troma are : safety to humans. That's the number 1 rule. Safety to people's property. If you are shooting in a location have respect for it don't F it up. And then underneath make a good movie. We post those posters everywhere because with 35 mm you need a lot of light and it's very dangerous. Lights can fall, people are tired, they can trip.You have a lot of cars that can crash cause nobody sleeps. Steven Spielberg is responsible for the death of Vic Marrow and two small Vietnamese children who were decapitated on a movie called "The Twilight Zone". They never really, it was Warner Brothers so they were able to dodge. They probably probably somebody should have been put in jail for that I would think. Two children didn't just die. They had a helicopter decapitate them along with Vic Marrow a somewhat well known actor.John Landis was the director but Spielberg was the product. Making movies is very dangerous. It has nothing to do with money. We make very low budget movies and no one's been hurt. Knock on wood. Nobody's ever been hurt on a Troma movie.We've had one or two. We had one car stunt that we screwed up but luckily the guy wasn't hurt.And we've had a few close calls. But basically and a lot of that I think you know I think that thinking was ahh. You know I remember that incident with Alberson.

12. When did you first get into horror movies or into making them?

We actually started out doing raunchy comedy's. Part of our philosophy is to do what the experts say not to do and sex in the movies used to be considered very serious. It used to be something that people go into a movie and uh it was basically I believe to increase the sale of raincoats. We figured well hey Vaudeville has been around let's do goofy sexy movies. Let's make them funny. So we did a movie called "Squeeze Play" about a women's softball team. It was about the women's liberation movement but it was a raunchy comedy about a women's softball team. "Squeeze Play" by the way is not to be confused with the much inferior "League of Their Own" which Penny Marshall did 15 years later. Anyway we did that and it was quite successful. At first no theater would play "Squeeze Play". Then one theater down in Norfolk Virginia play it and it just did so well that suddenly we got calls from all over the country to play "Squeeze Play" and we ended up with about 400 35mm prints. So then we did three or four more of these. We did "Waitress", "Stuck on You", "First Turn On" and then the major studios started to catch on. They started to make these raunchy comedies. You know "r" rated like we were doing. Except they were doing movies like "Porky's". They were doing movies with good scripts and good actors so we couldn't possibly compete with that. So then we decided we would have to go a different direction and one day we were reading "Variety" or one of the trade publications. I don't remember which one and it said "Horror films are dead. They are no longer commercial.". My partner and I said, Michael Hertz, we must make a horror film. We'll go in that direction. So then we had the problem of well how do we make it original? Cause we like comedy you know. So we wanted the movie to be funny and there's Frankenstein and we always wanted Frankenstein to live. So slowly but surely it evolved that Toxie would be a hero. The movies that we have made are not scary. They are more they are actually satire and um they have you know they make Troma movies like aah cuisine art of genres. They mix all the genres together. But we started using elements of horror in our movies back in. We did have an experience where we helped out on "Blood Sucking Freaks". It's very good. It's a classic Grand Guignol but we didn't.. It's our movie but Joel Reed directed it. That preceded "Squeeze Play". That was like 1974 and uh so that kind of . It was funny. It mixed horror and comedy together. But our movies really aren't horror. We distribute some horror films. Yeah I don't think anyone is scared when they see "Terror Firmer". I think they might be disturbed or they might laugh but I don't think anyone's gonna be. It's not like "the Shining" where it's generally scary.

13. What made you decide to write a book?

A guy who was running a film festival , the Avion Film Festival which is a French film festival. They did a Troma retrospective and they had a panel which at the end they asked me a lot of questions. He thought that my answers were so interesting and unusual that he thought I should write a book. So I said "Go Ahead if you can find a publisher." and he came back with Putnam. So then uhh James Dunn with whom I'd written "Tromeo and Juliet", he was working with Troma. So the publisher paid us in advance and we wrote the book "All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic Avenger". James Dunn went from "Tromeo and Juliet" to his next project which was "Scooby Doo". He's like a major major major Hollywood writer now. He's a good guy. He'll be a good influence. He's the best. He'll be a very good influence on the mainstream. There are good people there. Trey Parker is a great guy. Those guys they won't let the mainstream screw them. They want to be part of the mainstream, they wanna make a lot of money. They wanna be famous but they will definitely do it on their own terms and they won't screw people. They're really good guys. So the book really just happened because Jerry Rutis who is my literary agent. The second book he made that deal. Books are mainly- it's ego gratification. You can't live off that. You can't live off anything but books do help a little bit. Kinda give people an idea of why we do all of this.

14. How does someone become a Tromette?

That's a good question. A Tromette is a gyno with ahh very small clothing and very big brain. So that's probably how one becomes a tromette. Then within the tromette, for example our website has a tromette of the month. We usually have a tromette of the month and I think if you read the their text usually they're quite outspoken and quite independently oriented. Debbie Rochon for example, who has been she's been in a lot of our movies. She is now branching out into character roles and other parts. She's great. She's totally independently minded. But totally cool with sex and violence. They have to have I think it starts with a very independent spirit.

15. What are the main ingredients of a Troma movie?

I think what makes Troma famous and what Roger Corman has said about Troma is that we have a mix. The genres that we have mixed in humor into the straight science fiction that he made classic. Classic horror, classic science fiction and we have mixed all of these genres together. So I think that probably that might be the most distinctive thing about the Troma movies. Other than that I think that when people go to see a Troma movie they know that they may love "Tromeo & Juliet". Or they may hate "Citizen Toxie" but they know they will never forget "Terror Firmer". They know they are going to see something they haven't seen before. They will go on an adventure in the cinema. They will have an emotion. And I think that very few unfortunately most of the mainstream entertainment does not produce emotion. It's all these hundred million dollar movies that have to appeal to the as many they have to appeal to everybody. They have to try to please everybody or they lose money. As a result of that they have their like baby food. You can live on baby food but it's very boring. Troma is kinda the Jalapeno peppers of The Primanti's coleslaw. The Primanti hot sausage of the art world.

Our movies you may be disturbed but you will no matter what happens in a Troma movie people know they are gonna feel some kind of strong emotion. And maybe a whole bunch of strong emotions. A very symbolic scene, I play a blind director in "Terror Firmer" and I go into the bathroom and I there are two people copulating, a camera man and an actress. I don't know that they're doing that cause I'm blind. The camera man they are making noises. It sounds like the camera man could be taking a shit. And I turn to him and start talking and I pee in his direction. The point is what do movie directors do? They pee. They pee on their camera men and their actors. It's very symbolic and you know most people didn't quite look at it that way. You know it was considered pretty disgusting. There are too many thought police trying to control what you are thinking. "Terror Firmer" was inspired by when I wrote the book it suddenly began to hit me. That um James Dunn and I wrote the book. When James Dunn and I were writing the book it was hitting me that shit there's some interesting ideas here. Troma itself could be the theme of a Troma movie. You know just being the theme of "Terror Firmer" one of them is the independent filmmaker trying to.. The independent artist just trying to exist in a world that is pretty unfriendly. So that book really that was "Terror Firmer" is kinda the result of that book. In spite of that world. "Citizen Toxie" the first shot is the World Trade Center Towers. "Citizen Toxie" opened a month after the collapse. Right in New York city and it opened downtown in Greenwich Village. You know not far from the collapse and people applauded. The major media has totally lost its moral copious. They have no, they have absolutely no.

I'm working on an essay with Jamie about 9-11. I talked about it a little bit in another interview and I said that 9-11 was so inspiring. That it showed how the media, the mainstream media are so efficient and how within a few minutes after the thing happened they were broadcasting human beings leaping out of 107 story buildings. And isn't Fox brilliant. A half hour later they had a musical score under it. They had already composed music for the ominous disaster film music. And then a short while later they had a title up. They gave it a title. You know America fights back while you are seeing the same horrible footage over and over. And then three days later it's all about "Spiderman" may have to get rid of the World Trade Center and we're gonna erase the World Trade Center from "Friends". These people who are running our lives, these people for whom we are meat for satan's locker.. meat for satans icebox. These people have no moral copios. They have absolutely they have no idea of what's right or wrong. They could go to church a hundred days a week and they wouldn't know right or wrong. That's the thing that we're doing this essay about.

16. What do you think of this censorship on the movies as opposed to the censorship or lack of it on the news?

I don't believe in any censorship whatsoever except for children and if you watch television the mainstream media does just the opposite, right? During the Clinton presidency how many times did CNN run shots of body parts? You know when little children are having breakfast or dinner. How many times has Katie Coric on the Today Show had the most disgusting stories that any child would be watching would be traumatized? You know they're they're worried about the children being upset by you know the movies. How many times did they show.. Is it a surprise that children are upset about 9-11 when they saw those human beings leaping to their death over and over and over and over again? So the mainstream media does what they want. T.V. is a shit box. I tell my wife it's a box that creates shit. It's awful. It's horrible. On the other hand there's some good stuff. Some of it's hilarious but the point of censorship is that I don't think there should be.. for adults I don't think there should be any censorship. But children obviously. We don't permit our kids to see. I have a 10 year old kid that acted. I mean she's not ten now but she was ten when she acted in "Terror Firmer" but when she was on the set she never ever saw anything. You know she never saw any nudity. She never saw any serious violence. And she was removed and even at the end of the movie the little girl kills the bad guy by running a boom a microphone boom through his nether regions. But she never saw what, she didn't know what she was doing. She was just told to run at the camera and then using the magic of editing we were able to construct the scene in a rather convincing way. Everybody is interested in what you permit your children to see and with "Terror Firmer" when they saw it everybody asked how did you let your kid do that? In the dvd, if you get the dvd, I interviewed everybody loves this little interview with my daughter because I asked her these questions exactly about " you know you're in this movie with all this horrible sex and violence how was it handled?". Then she explained blah blah blah she never saw any.

17. What do you think of the current independent horror films or current independent films that are out now?

There are wonderful independent films being made all over the world and I see them mainly at film festivals. They did a retrospective of some of the movies in Korea. I saw these incredibly wonderful Asian movies. We will never see them here. They'll never get on screen. They'll never be in video stores. I saw movies from Thailand, from Korea, from Japan. Brilliant stuff but you don't get to see them because we are living in a cartel that dominated age. So indeed there are great independent movies being made in Spain, Croatia everywhere. Everywhere this country too but the problem is we don't get to see them. Now the movies that we do get to see 90% of them are absolute crap. Un fortunately the movies that get out that pass for independent movies they stink. I just saw this movie called "How I Learned to Kill My Father" French film. I don't know why that movie I think Sony classics somebody distributes it . I don't know why. It's not bad, it's okay. But it's nothing compared to how many great movies there are out that ought to be and I'm not talking about Troma. I think Troma should have a lot more visibility but Troma's nothing compared to these wonderful movies that are out there. The sad thing is that the directors and filmmakers that do them. You know they get one movie made and then you know all the money is lost. So how do they get their next movie made? And a lot of people say that the hardest thing to do is not your first movie. The hardest thing is to get your second movie made as an independent filmmaker because usually if the first one doesn't make money how do you get independent money? How do you get it? People can't keep losing money. It's still expensive to make a movie. Now with digital of course digital technology it's become much more democratic and you don't have to spend as much money as a movie like "Citizen Toxie" which is 35mm it's still expensive to make it.

18. What do you think led to your success?

Troma has necessarily not been successful. The "Toxic Avenger" that has been successful. That had a certain magic and it's hard to say what it is. But we basically survive. We've developed a brand. We have the "Toxic Avenger" which has some value. It would've had a lot more value in a better more efficient organization but we are able to do something with "Toxie" and we own about 1000 movies. We have a big collection of movies and around the world there is some need for movies. There is some need for "Surf Nazis Must Die" or "Chopper Chicks in Zombietown" or "Blood Sucking Freaks" or "Tromeo & Juliet". We have about a thousand movies so that library is again in our hands because we cannot really break through the cartel. It enables us to survive. For example we sold not sold we licensed 13 movies to French television. We got like 10 cents per movie but 13 times 10 is 130. We got a dollar thirty so that gives us a little money to pay the rent. We have about 25 employees who can stagger along and try to keep going but right now we have no money to we have no money whatsoever to make another movie. We got two movies in the editing room that we're editing. But there's no chance of shooting anything for awhile.

19. Are you planning on doing a sequel to "Citizen Toxie"?

I don't think I I'm not interested in doing one now. No but we got our first uhh do you know "Dogma 95"? The Lars Von Trer theory of digital filmmaking? We have "Dogpile 95" which there's a website Dogpile 95 about our theory of digital cinema and we've completed our first fictional movie "Tales From the Crapper" which we're editing. Which has a heavy vampire theme by the way. It's a major vampire theme. We also produced a movie called "Sucker the Vampire". I didn't direct it. Kathy Kelly at Classic Video is a big fan of it. So at any rate "Tales From the Crapper" will be coming out. I don't know if it will that will be the title. We might have to my partner does not like that title for some reason. I think he wants it to be "Tales From the Shitter". No no he's worried that the crapper thing they won't take it. We got enough going against us so.. I don't think I'm too.. I'm sorta toxiced out. Again "Citizen Toxie" had it came along when there were themes that fit in you know the abortion thing, the plastic surgery. There were a lot of things I was interested in that weren't so it was a good time to do a "Toxic Avenger" movie. The next "Toxic Avenger" movie if there is one Toxie will be older. Each movie he gets older so depending on what the themes that are of interest to the Troma team and me are that would determine whether we do a "Toxic Avenger" movie. This fast food thing is interesting because we live in a you know the fast food industry has been just so terrible for Western society on every level. No actually it's been bad for the entire world. It would just be interesting to kinda deal with that and the zombie thing kinda works with the whole theme and then we wanna go after the environmentalists a bit and the Indians.

VISIT LLOYD