Roy Frumkes writer of Street Trash

No but I’m thrilled. [The head of Synapse Films] Don May asked me to make it after he got the rights to Street Trash four years ago. He said, almost causally, “Would you be interested in doing a making of documentary?” Unfortunately he’s not aware of my working style. It takes me the minimum of three years to do a movie. I’m very slow. I’m a pack rat and I had saved everything from Street Trash so I said “Yeah.” He paid me the advance for the film and then waited for four years. But like a saint he never brought it up but I know the money could have earned, even in an account in his bank, it would have made him some money [laughs]. I slowly cobbled this thing together. It involved traveling all over the country finding everyone that was still around. Putting up ads on the internet, offering rewards. I had finished Meltdown twice and then more people were found through the ad on the internet.

Then I’d have to call my editor and say “I’ve got to shoot this and we’ve got to re-cut.” This last year in particular was held up twice because of finding Vic Noto and Clarenze Jarmon.

Well I had no idea where to find Vic Noto so I contacted a close friend of his named Bill Graham who had been the snake and rat wrangler for Street Trash’s Vietnam sequences. He thought Vic had passed away, so as a favor for me he checked all the veteran’s hospitals and then I just stumbled upon Vic. He was still registered with the Screen Actor’s Guild and there was a number for him. So despite the fact that his close friend told me he was dead I found him and he came in and he’s a riot.

There was no way I would cut into those tirades of his. They just stand as they are. Then somebody saw the ad, called Don May and said, “Are you looking for Clarenze Jarmon?” and Don May said “Yes.” He says, “I got him.” The only one we’re missing now is Jane Arakawa and I’m offering a thousand dollar reward for her. If she turns up I’m going to re-cut the film again. She’s a lovely girl but I suspect the worst. But I’ve gotten many leads because of that ad. I called a Jane Arakawa in Honolulu but it wasn’t her.

Very uncommunicative [laughs]. She didn’t know what I was talking about. “Street Trash?” click. But Jane’s out there somewhere.

It was the son of one of the potential investors who never did invest. But he said that his kid wanted a career in film so he hung around for several days and shot footage but nothing ever came of it. When I contacted him, all the footage was still sitting somewhere in the cans which was very fortunate. There’s only ten minutes of that stuff but it’s important because that’s the only footage of [Street Trash director] Jimmy Muro from back then.

No you didn’t. The new thing that Jimmy did is a commentary track on Street Trash. Jim is a very busy guy. He’s the foremost steadicam operator in the world and he is constantly around the planet doing stuff. Also he doesn’t have the close relationship to Street Trash that I do. He has really moved on so his memory of it was not that great but it’s still a really nice commentary. My commentary, which is on the same disc, tends to be anecdotal and his tends to be technical so we complement each other.

Yeah, I’m working on a script for him right now. He was the DP on [2004’s] Crash and that got the Academy Award for Best Film which catapulted him into a more favorable light in Hollywood. Now there’s a film he very much wants to do and he thought of me to write it. So we’re working on that.

Jimmy is a born again Christian. I am a heathen. Nonetheless he tolerates my spiritual deficiencies. He wants to do an exorcism film but from the point of view of the born agains, which is almost entirely different than [The Exorcist director William] Friedkin’s version. It’s very much an everyman thing. If you believe and you can invoke Jesus, you can exorcise someone. You don’t have to be a priest; you don’t have to be trained. Then that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been writing the script in my own inimitable fashion and Jimmy’s very excited about it. He’s not interested in horror. He wants the script to be something more akin to A Beautiful Mind or Good Will Hunting. I think that the potential audience for an exorcism film will come with expectations and shouldn’t be let down but I solved it to his satisfaction and it is going to be more literate and less exploitative.

Thank you [laughs]. I take it as a compliment only because it suggests that I have a reputation. [laughs] I wrote The Substitute and that became a franchise. That was back in 1996 and there were three more of them. But the one thing all my films seem to have in common is black humor whether it’s a horror film or a thriller or the film I did for NBC about handicapped children. I can stretch a bit but the films I’m remembered for tend to be the horror ones like Document or Street Trash and now hopefully Meltdown Memoirs. That’s just fine because there are no conventions for comedies. There are no big “Let’s go to the drama convention and meet all the stars.” But it’s wonderful to have a following.

I’m really going to have to give that some thought. Certainly the mold was set for me. There’s no way I was going to go in another direction. By the time I’d done that film it was too late. But Bill Chepil was a real cop and his real life was more dramatic and wild than the movie. I tried to write a script about him but the timing was just wrong. It was before The Shield came out and publishers were horrified by his extreme right wing behavior as a New York City cop. Him and his squad and were all these tall blonde, monstrous, guys. They’d come into the office and if the sergeant said “Listen, you’re taking things into your own hands again.” They would say “We answer to no one but Odin.” [laughs] They terrified the police station. It’s a great story and I hope someday I can do something with it.

Outside of the fact that they’re both grouped under the generalized heading of documentary, they’re extremely different. Even though Document of the Dead captures the warmth of everyone who worked on Dawn of the Dead, it really was a making of film. With Meltdown Memoirs I used the word memoir because it’s a personal film. It’s very subjective, which is very different than Document. It’s really my impressions of the film and I think in some instances that the film is very skewed because of that. There are whole sections in the film about people like Victoria Alexander [previously Victoria Lucas] who played the woman in the car. She was in the film for only 30 seconds and I give her four minutes in Meltdown. But she’s a very close friend of mine and I was doing a film about people I really like and an experience as it affected me. There was no attempt at being objective.

I know, it is rather unique and it shows, doesn’t it? The coverage is beautiful. The art direction is so elaborate and detailed that it’s made the film timeless. Street Trash doesn’t really date because it seems to exist in another world and we had months and months to create that. We hired the two best known graffiti artists in Brooklyn and had them graffiti the entire junkyard. They were glad to do it but they could only work at night because that’s when they felt artistic. So we would show up each morning and there’d be all these murals all over the junkyard but we’d never see the two of them.

The thing that was least safe about it were the unions. They were frowning on non-union shoots at that time in New York. Now the whole union scene has lightened up and independent films are being shot all over and SAG has made all these adjustments in their contracts for low budget and no budget shoots. But in those days the Teamsters might station a vehicle outside all of the camera rental houses and they’d see who was picking up stuff and they’d follow you and they would find out if it was a non-union shoot and they would do something about it. So we sent in students from the School of Visual Arts each morning to just pick up a couple of pieces of equipment and the union guys would say, “What’s shooting? Ahh School of Visual Arts.” Then they’d go back to sleep and we sneaked all the equipment out for this massive shoot and shot in Brooklyn on the Queens border so that we wouldn’t be spotted. So our real threat wasn’t the inhabitants in New York, it was the unions.

Well they didn’t read the script so they were thrilled [laughs]. The School of Visual Arts is a very unusual school. It only hires working professionals so it doesn’t give tenure. It doesn’t give people full time jobs. It wants all the teachers to be working and to hire their students, so they loved what I was doing until they saw it. Once one of the teachers got a hold of the New York Times review [of Street Trash] and slammed it down on [president of SVA] David Rhodes’ desk. The review said, “If our forefathers had anticipated Street Trash they would have rethought the First Amendment.” Then it said Roy Frumkes is a teacher at SVA. Some recommendation! I really thought I was going to get my walking papers but I didn’t which is a real testament to SVA. I didn’t get any congratulations but I never heard about it so that was cool.

He started at SVA. He took two years here and I had him as a student. In fact, in the first four minutes of Meltdown when I say “22 years ago I was teaching at SVA” and there’s this pan across a long horizontal still of me in class with a bunch of students. The student closest to the camera is Bryan. He was a very ambitious kid and really sweet and all the other kids would be saying, “Well, let’s see, I have to do this moving shot. Maybe I can get my brother’s bicycle” and Bryan would say, “I think a helicopter would work here.” Then everybody would turn and look at him. He worked on Street Trash as a PA and he was just overwhelmed. He was driving back and forth from Jersey too much and he was starting to screw up. So I fired him and he started crying. I said, “Bryan, look you have what it takes, you’re going to have a great career. This is just a bit too much for you.” But when I called him on the set of X-Men 2, I said, “Would you just get somebody there to shoot some footage of you and tell your story?” He said, “Sure Roy.” He did it and sent this tape of about ten minutes of him recalling stories, a few of which were in there. But one of the things he said that I didn’t use, just because I couldn’t find a place to put it, was when he says, “With all that I’ve done, I have a really warm spot in my heart for Street Trash,” and he turns to the camera and says, “Because it’s the only film I did where my credit isn’t directed by.” So he’s a good sport.

It became a cult classic because of the way it was handled by David Whitten who was in charge of publicity for the film at Vestron. When the film was done, we knew it was unusual. There were other distributors interested like Dino De Laurentiis’ company who had put out Evil Dead 2. We met with him and we asked what their plans were for the film. De Laurentiis wanted to make a thousand prints and open it up around the country. But he had just had a complete failure with Evil Dead 2 which was an unrated film like ours. His campaign for Evil Dead 2 was too serious for a film that was a horror comedy and half the cities in the country wouldn’t advertise an unrated film. So we thought that was a terrible idea that he’d be spending all this money on prints and advertising and lose it and then he would cross-collateralize those losses into VHS where it would make pure profit. Whereas Vestron and David Whitten, who really understood the market, said, “I would make ten prints. Then I would move them around to midnight shows.” So we’re spending almost nothing to create a buzz about this film and it’ll be perceived as a cult film because it’s being shown at midnight following things like Rocky Horror Picture Show and El Topo. I thought that was great so I went with Vestron not because of what they offered us money wise but because of what Whitten offered us in terms of how to promote it and how to market it.

Actually I was sitting with someone last night talking about each decade and what it produced and why. Some of the films in the 70’s were very strong like Last House on the Left and were reactions to Vietnam. Wes [Craven] always maintains that was what that film was about. The 80’s may have been a more liberated time. Films like Re-Animator, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Evil Dead 2 and Hellraiser all came out within a three year period and like Street Trash, they were subversive and countercultural. Maybe ours was the most politically incorrect; though I’m not sure the term had been invented then. There were ancillary markets that guaranteed a film like that would make money. For instance, Evil Dead 2, even if it didn’t do well theatrically in the US, Japan ate those films up. Japan was a huge market and the companies in this country always saw Japan as their way to save their ass if the film didn’t perform. In the very late 80’s a really vile serial killer was caught in Japan and in his closet were all of these films as if he’d used them as his training. That made the market disappear so Street Trash actually was the last of this group to come out. After that there followed an era of very safe horror flicks where it was made clear to people like Wes and George [Romero] that their films wouldn’t be financed unless they could deliver an R rated final cut. That continues to this day except that now this wonderful policy has evolved where on DVD you get the so-called director’s cut.

We have a fictitious feud going on [laughs]. Neither of us really gives a shit about one another. We don’t dislike each other. Someone started this thing and I’ve perpetuated it and so has Lloyd. The only thing I can say is that in 1986 when we screened Street Trash, I rented the Ziegfeld Theater, which was New York’s most prestigious theater. All of SVA showed and we also invited all the studios to take a look. Troma called me back and said, “We’ve got a little conflict. Is it ok if we come late?” I said, “No” and they said, “Oh, ok.” I never invited them again. I felt that was really offensive. So maybe that triggered something but I don’t like comparisons between Street Trash and Lloyd’s stuff unless it’s just using us as the watermark and that they are kind of the sludge. I think some of his stuff is really fun and I also think that some of the films he’s picked up have been terrific like Cry Uncle. So I like a few things that Troma puts out.

I have been requested by Don May again to do an update of Document of the Dead, which will be called The Definitive Document of the Dead. That’s because I did the TV special on the set of Land of the Dead called Dream of the Dead that was shown on IFC. I’ll probably be covering George’s new one, Diary of the Dead and then I’ll have a final installment of Document. I said to George, “You can keep on doing this but I’m retiring after The Definitive Document of the Dead.” I don’t want this to be the Seven-Up series of horror.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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