Lloyd Kaufman & James Gunn: Everything I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger

Over the course of the past 25 years, Troma Pictures has emerged as an unlikely American institution. Operating as the eccentric id of the American independent film movement, Troma and its gregarious, hyperactive founder, Yale graduate Lloyd Kaufman, have survived in the cutthroat world of independent cinema by making extremely low-budget genre pictures (The Toxic Avenger, Class Of Nuke 'Em High, Tromeo & Juliet) that appeal to both 14-year-old boys and the 14-year-old boy in everyone. At their best, Troma films compensate for what they lack in sophistication and polish with sheer energy, chutzpah, and a fearlessness that comes only with having very little to lose. At their worst, they're juvenile, sophomoric exercises in excess that revel in tastelessness for its own sake. Luckily, Everything I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger, Kaufman's autobiography, generally represents the Troma aesthetic at its shambling, satirical best. The Kaufman that emerges from Everything is an excitable but genuinely idealistic populist, part charismatic cult leader and part egomaniacal tyrant, who has held together his makeshift empire with duct tape. According to the book, much of Troma's ingenuity comes from Kaufman's almost comical cheapness: In a business in which such hacks as Joe Eszterhas get paid millions to write treatments for shitty films, Kaufman got away with paying Tromeo & Juliet co-screenwriter James Gunn $150 for an entire screenplay. But just as Kaufman's anecdotal, engaging tome shares many of the strengths of his films, it also possesses some of their weaknesses. Sloppily written, crude, and frequently scatological, Everything even has its share of continuity errors: On one page, Oliver Stone is described as a major actor in Kaufman's Battle Of Love's Return, while on another, Stone is described as a cameo performer in the same film. Still, Everything is often hilarious and always informative, and it should serve as required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in independent film, trash culture, or the psychological and emotional life of one seriously stingy bastard.