Roy Frumkes is a teacher of film at the School of Visual Arts, but his side job is making some of the coolest cult films of all time. His most famous creation is the classic Street Trash, which caused a flurry of homeless penises to be thrown into the air when it was released in the 80s. Street Trash has just been released on special edition DVD with some fantastic extras including a documentary created by Frumkes and called Meltdown Memoirs. For the Memoirs, Frumkes interviewed every cast and crew member of Street Trash he could track down, and then edited them together with some 20 year old behind the scenes footage.
Check out the official website for the DVD of Street Trash
Daniel Robert Epstein: Are you ready to do our interview?
Roy Frumkes: Well, I am. I cant even imagine why SuicideGirls would want to interview me although Im crazy about them. I particularly love their deck of cards.
DRE: Thats great.
I watched Meltdown Memoirs this past week. Did you always know you wanted to do something like this since you had directed Document of the Dead before?
Roy: No but Im 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 hes not aware of my working style. It takes me the minimum of three years to do a movie. Im very slow. Im 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.
DRE: Oh really?
Roy: Then Id have to call my editor and say Ive got to shoot this and weve got to re-cut. This last year in particular was held up twice because of finding Vic Noto and Clarenze Jarmon.
DRE: Where were Vic Noto and Clarenze Jarmon that you couldnt seem to get a hold of them?
Roy: 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 Trashs Vietnam sequences. He thought Vic had passed away, so as a favor for me he checked all the veterans hospitals and then I just stumbled upon Vic. He was still registered with the Screen Actors 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 hes a riot.
DRE: Yeah, hes hysterical.
Roy: 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 were missing now is Jane Arakawa and Im offering a thousand dollar reward for her. If she turns up Im going to re-cut the film again. Shes a lovely girl but I suspect the worst. But Ive gotten many leads because of that ad. I called a Jane Arakawa in Honolulu but it wasnt her.
DRE: What was the Jane Arakawa in Honolulu like?
Roy: Very uncommunicative [laughs]. She didnt know what I was talking about. Street Trash? click. But Janes out there somewhere.
DRE: Who took all the on set behind the scenes footage of Street Trash?
Roy: 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. Theres only ten minutes of that stuff but its important because thats the only footage of [Street Trash director] Jimmy Muro from back then.
DRE: I didnt see any new interviews with Jim Muro.
Roy: No you didnt. The new thing that Jimmy did is a commentary track on Street Trash. Jim is a very busy guy. Hes the foremost steadicam operator in the world and he is constantly around the planet doing stuff. Also he doesnt 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 its 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.
DRE: Do you two still get along?
Roy: Yeah, Im working on a script for him right now. He was the DP on [2004s] Crash and that got the Academy Award for Best Film which catapulted him into a more favorable light in Hollywood. Now theres a film he very much wants to do and he thought of me to write it. So were working on that.
DRE: Whats the film?
Roy: 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] Friedkins version. Its very much an everyman thing. If you believe and you can invoke Jesus, you can exorcise someone. You dont have to be a priest; you dont have to be trained. Then thats just the tip of the iceberg. Ive been writing the script in my own inimitable fashion and Jimmys very excited about it. Hes 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 shouldnt be let down but I solved it to his satisfaction and it is going to be more literate and less exploitative.
DRE: For someone who doesnt want to do a horror movie you would seem like an odd choice to write that film.
Roy: 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 its a horror film or a thriller or the film I did for NBC about handicapped children. I can stretch a bit but the films Im remembered for tend to be the horror ones like Document or Street Trash and now hopefully Meltdown Memoirs. Thats just fine because there are no conventions for comedies. There are no big Lets go to the drama convention and meet all the stars. But its wonderful to have a following.
DRE: Is there something about Street Trash that Jim Muro and Bill Chepil both became born again Christians?
Roy: Im really going to have to give that some thought. Certainly the mold was set for me. Theres no way I was going to go in another direction. By the time Id 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. Theyd come into the office and if the sergeant said Listen, youre taking things into your own hands again. They would say We answer to no one but Odin. [laughs] They terrified the police station. Its a great story and I hope someday I can do something with it.
DRE: How much different was it doing Meltdown which is a film that you were very involved with as opposed to doing Document of the Dead?
Roy: Outside of the fact that theyre both grouped under the generalized heading of documentary, theyre 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 its a personal film. Its very subjective, which is very different than Document. Its 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 shes 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.
DRE: I worked on very low budget movies shot in New York and I know that a 13 week shoot for an independent film of this budget is unbelievable. They dont even do that now.
Roy: I know, it is rather unique and it shows, doesnt it? The coverage is beautiful. The art direction is so elaborate and detailed that its made the film timeless. Street Trash doesnt 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 thats when they felt artistic. So we would show up each morning and thered be all these murals all over the junkyard but wed never see the two of them.
DRE: What was it like shooting such a low budget movie at a time when New York was definitely not so safe?
Roy: 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 theyd see who was picking up stuff and theyd 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, Whats shooting? Ahh School of Visual Arts. Then theyd 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 wouldnt be spotted. So our real threat wasnt the inhabitants in New York, it was the unions.
DRE: What did the people that ran SVA think of you drafting students to come work on Street Trash?
Roy: Well they didnt 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 doesnt give tenure. It doesnt 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 didnt which is a real testament to SVA. I didnt get any congratulations but I never heard about it so that was cool.
DRE: I thought Bryan Singer went to USC, how did he end up working on your movie?
Roy: 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 theres 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, lets see, I have to do this moving shot. Maybe I can get my brothers 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, youre 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 didnt use, just because I couldnt find a place to put it, was when he says, With all that Ive done, I have a really warm spot in my heart for Street Trash, and he turns to the camera and says, Because its the only film I did where my credit isnt directed by. So hes a good sport.
DRE: At what point did you realize that Street Trash had become a cult classic?
Roy: 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 wouldnt advertise an unrated film. So we thought that was a terrible idea that hed 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 were spending almost nothing to create a buzz about this film and itll be perceived as a cult film because its 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.
DRE: Why did horror comedy become so popular in the 80s?
Roy: Actually I was sitting with someone last night talking about each decade and what it produced and why. Some of the films in the 70s 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 80s 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 Im 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 didnt 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 didnt perform. In the very late 80s a really vile serial killer was caught in Japan and in his closet were all of these films as if hed 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 wouldnt 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 directors cut.
DRE: I worked on Tromeo & Juliet back in 1995 and [Troma co-founder] Lloyd Kaufman doesnt seem to like you that much.
Roy: We have a fictitious feud going on [laughs]. Neither of us really gives a shit about one another. We dont dislike each other. Someone started this thing and Ive 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 Yorks most prestigious theater. All of SVA showed and we also invited all the studios to take a look. Troma called me back and said, Weve 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 dont like comparisons between Street Trash and Lloyds stuff unless its 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 hes picked up have been terrific like Cry Uncle. So I like a few things that Troma puts out.
DRE: What else are you working on right now?
Roy: 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. Thats because I did the TV special on the set of Land of the Dead called Dream of the Dead that was shown on IFC. Ill probably be covering Georges new one, Diary of the Dead and then Ill have a final installment of Document. I said to George, You can keep on doing this but Im retiring after The Definitive Document of the Dead. I dont want this to be the Seven-Up series of horror.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the official website for the DVD of Street Trash
Daniel Robert Epstein: Are you ready to do our interview?
Roy Frumkes: Well, I am. I cant even imagine why SuicideGirls would want to interview me although Im crazy about them. I particularly love their deck of cards.
DRE: Thats great.
I watched Meltdown Memoirs this past week. Did you always know you wanted to do something like this since you had directed Document of the Dead before?
Roy: No but Im 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 hes not aware of my working style. It takes me the minimum of three years to do a movie. Im very slow. Im 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.
DRE: Oh really?
Roy: Then Id have to call my editor and say Ive got to shoot this and weve got to re-cut. This last year in particular was held up twice because of finding Vic Noto and Clarenze Jarmon.
DRE: Where were Vic Noto and Clarenze Jarmon that you couldnt seem to get a hold of them?
Roy: 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 Trashs Vietnam sequences. He thought Vic had passed away, so as a favor for me he checked all the veterans hospitals and then I just stumbled upon Vic. He was still registered with the Screen Actors 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 hes a riot.
DRE: Yeah, hes hysterical.
Roy: 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 were missing now is Jane Arakawa and Im offering a thousand dollar reward for her. If she turns up Im going to re-cut the film again. Shes a lovely girl but I suspect the worst. But Ive gotten many leads because of that ad. I called a Jane Arakawa in Honolulu but it wasnt her.
DRE: What was the Jane Arakawa in Honolulu like?
Roy: Very uncommunicative [laughs]. She didnt know what I was talking about. Street Trash? click. But Janes out there somewhere.
DRE: Who took all the on set behind the scenes footage of Street Trash?
Roy: 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. Theres only ten minutes of that stuff but its important because thats the only footage of [Street Trash director] Jimmy Muro from back then.
DRE: I didnt see any new interviews with Jim Muro.
Roy: No you didnt. The new thing that Jimmy did is a commentary track on Street Trash. Jim is a very busy guy. Hes the foremost steadicam operator in the world and he is constantly around the planet doing stuff. Also he doesnt 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 its 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.
DRE: Do you two still get along?
Roy: Yeah, Im working on a script for him right now. He was the DP on [2004s] Crash and that got the Academy Award for Best Film which catapulted him into a more favorable light in Hollywood. Now theres a film he very much wants to do and he thought of me to write it. So were working on that.
DRE: Whats the film?
Roy: 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] Friedkins version. Its very much an everyman thing. If you believe and you can invoke Jesus, you can exorcise someone. You dont have to be a priest; you dont have to be trained. Then thats just the tip of the iceberg. Ive been writing the script in my own inimitable fashion and Jimmys very excited about it. Hes 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 shouldnt be let down but I solved it to his satisfaction and it is going to be more literate and less exploitative.
DRE: For someone who doesnt want to do a horror movie you would seem like an odd choice to write that film.
Roy: 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 its a horror film or a thriller or the film I did for NBC about handicapped children. I can stretch a bit but the films Im remembered for tend to be the horror ones like Document or Street Trash and now hopefully Meltdown Memoirs. Thats just fine because there are no conventions for comedies. There are no big Lets go to the drama convention and meet all the stars. But its wonderful to have a following.
DRE: Is there something about Street Trash that Jim Muro and Bill Chepil both became born again Christians?
Roy: Im really going to have to give that some thought. Certainly the mold was set for me. Theres no way I was going to go in another direction. By the time Id 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. Theyd come into the office and if the sergeant said Listen, youre taking things into your own hands again. They would say We answer to no one but Odin. [laughs] They terrified the police station. Its a great story and I hope someday I can do something with it.
DRE: How much different was it doing Meltdown which is a film that you were very involved with as opposed to doing Document of the Dead?
Roy: Outside of the fact that theyre both grouped under the generalized heading of documentary, theyre 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 its a personal film. Its very subjective, which is very different than Document. Its 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 shes 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.
DRE: I worked on very low budget movies shot in New York and I know that a 13 week shoot for an independent film of this budget is unbelievable. They dont even do that now.
Roy: I know, it is rather unique and it shows, doesnt it? The coverage is beautiful. The art direction is so elaborate and detailed that its made the film timeless. Street Trash doesnt 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 thats when they felt artistic. So we would show up each morning and thered be all these murals all over the junkyard but wed never see the two of them.
DRE: What was it like shooting such a low budget movie at a time when New York was definitely not so safe?
Roy: 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 theyd see who was picking up stuff and theyd 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, Whats shooting? Ahh School of Visual Arts. Then theyd 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 wouldnt be spotted. So our real threat wasnt the inhabitants in New York, it was the unions.
DRE: What did the people that ran SVA think of you drafting students to come work on Street Trash?
Roy: Well they didnt 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 doesnt give tenure. It doesnt 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 didnt which is a real testament to SVA. I didnt get any congratulations but I never heard about it so that was cool.
DRE: I thought Bryan Singer went to USC, how did he end up working on your movie?
Roy: 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 theres 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, lets see, I have to do this moving shot. Maybe I can get my brothers 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, youre 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 didnt use, just because I couldnt find a place to put it, was when he says, With all that Ive done, I have a really warm spot in my heart for Street Trash, and he turns to the camera and says, Because its the only film I did where my credit isnt directed by. So hes a good sport.
DRE: At what point did you realize that Street Trash had become a cult classic?
Roy: 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 wouldnt advertise an unrated film. So we thought that was a terrible idea that hed 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 were spending almost nothing to create a buzz about this film and itll be perceived as a cult film because its 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.
DRE: Why did horror comedy become so popular in the 80s?
Roy: Actually I was sitting with someone last night talking about each decade and what it produced and why. Some of the films in the 70s 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 80s 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 Im 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 didnt 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 didnt perform. In the very late 80s a really vile serial killer was caught in Japan and in his closet were all of these films as if hed 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 wouldnt 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 directors cut.
DRE: I worked on Tromeo & Juliet back in 1995 and [Troma co-founder] Lloyd Kaufman doesnt seem to like you that much.
Roy: We have a fictitious feud going on [laughs]. Neither of us really gives a shit about one another. We dont dislike each other. Someone started this thing and Ive 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 Yorks most prestigious theater. All of SVA showed and we also invited all the studios to take a look. Troma called me back and said, Weve 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 dont like comparisons between Street Trash and Lloyds stuff unless its 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 hes picked up have been terrific like Cry Uncle. So I like a few things that Troma puts out.
DRE: What else are you working on right now?
Roy: 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. Thats because I did the TV special on the set of Land of the Dead called Dream of the Dead that was shown on IFC. Ill probably be covering Georges new one, Diary of the Dead and then Ill have a final installment of Document. I said to George, You can keep on doing this but Im retiring after The Definitive Document of the Dead. I dont want this to be the Seven-Up series of horror.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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