Read your own damn story – about making your own damn movie

Welcome to Tromaville, on the outskirts of any urban area, where fat men run naked through the… Welcome to Tromaville, on the outskirts of any urban area, where fat men run naked through the streets until one meets an untimely demise when a flying car lands on his head; where Juliet is a lesbian, raped by a sado-masochistic father, and Romeo is actually her brother.

It’s a town that traveled to room G-24 of the Cathedral of Learning on Friday evening. Lloyd Kaufman, the town’s founder — also the founder of Troma Studios, and writer, director and producer of most of its films — visited Friday evening to teach a motley crew of students, faculty and other fans of strange, independent films how to “make your own damn movie!”

“At Troma, we threw the rules out the window, and unfortunately, it killed some guy on the street. But he was never loved,” Kaufman told the audience in a discussion moderated by Pitt film studies professor Carl Kurlander. Kurlander likened his experiences in working with the Brat Pack on “St. Elmo’s Fire” to Kaufman’s Troma team and the alternate universe of films like “Tales from the Crapper,” “Class of Nuke ‘Em High,” and “Tromeo and Juliet.”

Kaufman has been touring the country to teach his class and promote his recent book, “Make Your Own Damn Movie,” through lectures and clips from the DVD of the same title, scheduled to be released in March 2005.

Troma is the embodiment of cult films: strictly independent fare that has developed a loyal fan base since the studio’s creation by Kaufman and Michael Herz in 1974. Ten years after it was founded, the studio had a breakout hit in the form of a vengeance-seeking refugee from a toxic waster dump, the main character in “The Toxic Avenger.”

Kaufman had read an article that said horror films were no longer popular, so he decided a horror film was exactly what Troma needed to do. The now-classic work of dementia actually began, Kaufman said, as a reaction to the hypocrisy of the early-1980s health club obsession and the simultaneous defilement of the planet.

The film was later made into an environmentally correct children’s cartoon, Kaufman said, noting the paradox that the movie “featured a young boy’s head smashed by the wheel of an automobile.”

Later, a group of Toxie fans in Portland, Ore., wrote a musical based on the film called “Toxic Avenger: The Musikill,” which Kaufman “had nothing to do with.”

A man holding a mop and sporting a mask of the disfigured face of Toxie sat to the left of Kaufman, while the producer advised the audience about the virtues and disadvantages of independent filmmaking and spoke matter-of-factly about Troma topics like “the thick brown line.”

Kaufman told the audience never to compromise an artistic vision, to “do what you believe in,” even if it might be simulating the brutal, unsanitary mutilation of various body parts.

But through all the disembodiment and special effects that he described as deliberately “cartoonish,” he advocated the safety of people working on the films and boasted that in its30 years of existence, Troma has never had a serious accident.

Kaufman added that students should never give in to the “vassals of a devil-worshipping conglomerate,” and he even critiqued what he described as the hypocrisy of the independent Sundance Film Festival, which requires artists to pay to enter films. Responding to this in 2000, Kaufman established Tromadance, a completely free film festival held in Park City, Utah — in the same city and on the same date as Sundance.

Kaufman showed clips of the festival, depicting a bar crowded with Troma fans whom he describes as “a lot of good people who aren’t fascists or killer robots.” Fans placed countless copies of “The Toxic Avenger” in front of him for signatures, and everyone seemed to want a picture with Lloyd Kaufman. The fans obviously did not agree that, as Kaufman wrote in “Make Your Own Damn Movie,” meeting Lloyd Kaufman is one of the cons of distributing a film through a small production company