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.
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