Last week, indiewire.com announced that Troma, Inc.’s, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, “debuted” at New York’s Village East End Cinema with “a finger licking good per-screen average of $10,700,” thanks in part to the typically relentless promotional efforts of the film’s director (and Troma founding father) Lloyd Kaufman, who “dressed as a chicken” and picketed the theater prior to the premiere.
Troma’s brand identity and marketing have always been at least as entertaining as the cinematic output of the defiantly independent (formerly) Hell’s Kitchen “studio.” Since the production company’s inception in 1974, Yale graduates Kaufman (and his partner, Michael Herz) had no illusions about the carnival huckster nature of their enterprise: the name TROMA itself is (allegedly) an acronym for “Tits R Our Main Attraction,” in honor of the duo’s early slate of sex comedies, including Squeeze Play and Sizzle Beach, U.S.A., featuring a then-unknown, now presumably mortified Kevin Costner.
In 1989, I was working in a Cambridge, MA video store (Central Square’s late lamented Action Video), and only knew Troma through memorable titles in our “cult” section like Surf Nazis Must Die, Class of Nuke’Em High and, of course, the essential Toxic Avenger series.
At the time, I was on the lam from Harvard University, having skipped all my finals in a passive-aggressive attempt to free myself of the liberal arts grind and concentrate on my one true love: movies. As it turns out, it’s harder to flunk out of Harvard than one might expect, but my stunt worked well enough to get me put on academic suspension for a semester, allowing me plenty of free time to dabble in LSD, feud with my horrified parents and, in my spare time, attempt to become rich and famous.
Despite tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, countless hours in the halls, libraries and career offices of academia and Harvard's reputation as a networking paradise, I hadn’t managed to schmooze up a single show biz connection there, and had no freakin' clue how to get started in the movie business (or, indeed, any other business).
I'd heard about Roger Corman, whose legendary low-budget productions had been the training wheels for actors and directors like Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese, and hoped, while alphabetizing the titles in the Action Video cult section, that Troma, Inc. would be an East Coast indie boot camp equivalent.
And so I sent my resume to the address on the back of one of the weird Troma video boxes and waited...
...while halfway around the world, Lloyd Kaufman was gearing up for his next big project, a Japanese co-production that was about to become the most expensive film in Troma history.
To Be Continued...