Previously on My Troma Summer: Part One, Part Two
My first few days as a barely-paid production assistant in Troma’s three-story walk-up Hell’s Kitchen “studio” were uneventful (and possibly carcinogenic) as my new drill sergeant, Andy, had me organize and inventory several piles of fake severed limbs and other junk in the building’s cramped, asbestos-y basement. After that was done, I was assigned to watch and transcribe every dreadful line of dialogue from one of the company’s recent releases, Fortress of Amerikka, for use by Troma’s overseas distributors (an exercise which at the very least taught me a valuable screenwriting lesson about NOT starting every other line of dialogue in a movie with “Listen,” as in: “Listen, we gotta get outta here.” “But those men will kill us!” “Listen, if we stay here, we’re dead for sure.” “I’m scared!” “Listen, Jennifer, you’ve gotta listen to me...” “Listen! Someone’s coming!”).
And so on.
Andy didn’t have anything in particular for me to do after the Amerikkka transcript was complete, so he decided to further indoctrinate me in the house style by sitting me down with another recent release, Troma’s War, which employed the signature Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz formula of sex, violence, sophomoric humor and paranoid, populist outrage against “the power elite” and all the other assorted scumbags, shysters and pests who plagued the lives of decent, ordinary people.
Of course, like many a populist, Lloyd himself lived much better than the working class heroes he championed, as I discovered when I was summoned one afternoon to the Troma kingpin’s spacious brownstone maisonette to discuss his upcoming production, Kabukiman.
Shortly after signing on as a P.A., I’d handed Andy a copy of my first ever screenplay, a John Hughes rip-off distinctly lacking in gratuitous nudity or exploding skulls. Andy nevertheless forwarded it to Lloyd, who praised the work as he escorted me into his private home office, then handed me a folder of news clippings about Japanese culture, virtual reality technology, insider trading, Al Sharpton’s defense of some teenagers recently arrested for “wilding” in Central Park and a variety of other disparate elements he somehow wanted to shoehorn into the plot of his next film.
“Basically, it’s a culture clash, East meets West,” Lloyd exclaimed, the carnival huckster exuberance of his public persona dialed back a notch or two in private. “I want the main character to be a real American hero, an honest New York City cop who gains these amazing kabuki powers and has to learn to eat with chopsticks and sing Madame Butterfly or whatever to balance his Western yin with his Eastern yang, or something like that...you know Madame Butterfly? Puccini? Oh, beautiful. A classic. Anyway, so he gets these kabuki superpowers and then he’s able to, like, chop up muggers and rapists with a Samurai sword and turn ‘em into sushi. Or something like that. You get the idea. Our Japanese producing partner, Fujimura-san, drew up a sketch of the Kabukiman costume...it’s in that folder somewhere...but anyway, you get the idea, right? East meets West. Culture clash. And that scumbag Al Sharpton...gotta work him in there, too, and that other guy...what’s his name? Milken, Michael Milken...and Boesky, all those Wall Street scumbags and their friends in Washington, funneling money to the CIA to smuggle crack into the ghetto...it’s all connected, oh yes...well, anyway, you’re a Harvard guy, you’ll figure it out. See what you come up with and we’ll talk about it tomorrow with the writers. Nice guys, you’ll like ‘em. College men.”
And so, for the rest of the day, I holed up with a spiral notebook and a pile of newspaper clippings, stitching together a Frankenstein’s monster of a story that would slowly stir to life in the coming weeks and months of my humid Troma summer.
To Be Continued...