Life in the Long Tail

The offices of Troma Entertainment, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, are the stuff a low-budget film fan’s low-budget dreams are made of. The cluttered main office is decorated with decades-worth of rare Tromabilia — the walls adorned with framed movie posters from Troma’s 32-year history. Combining trenchant social commentary with extreme gore — endorsing environmentalism with exploding heads and teaching tolerance through massive mammaries — is Troma’s calling card. Surprisingly enough, it has never won them a huge mainstream audience. Masks bearing the visages of perennial Troma film heroes Toxic Avenger and Sgt. Kabukiman are stacked in boxes and scattered across shelves, alongside various special-effects grostesqueries. Upstairs is a scale model of the roof of a restaurant — “American Chicken Bunker” — that is tagged to explode in the characteristically larger-than-life climax of the upcoming Lloyd Kaufman directed Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.

The apex of this cluttered trip through indie-cinema history comes at Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman’s office, where Kaufman himself stands fiddling with the remote control to a DVD player, clad in a gray Yale hooded sweatshirt, matching sweatpants, and tennis shoes. He is the kind of guy who wears whatever he wants to work. Rarely at a loss for a joke — after all his ability to combine hilarity and vulgarity has made him a living legend — he has the air of man with a thousand things to do, but he still isn’t too busy to shoot the breeze. He speaks with an explosive degree of animation, and in almost every sentence he seamlessly blurs the line between exasperation, madcap comedy and profundity.

Lloyd Kaufman

After 40 years of moviemaking, Kaufman’s business-ultracasual wardrobe has hardly been the whole of his iconoclasm. He says that he once gave MPAA President Jack Valenti a Surf Nazis Must Die sweatshirt (no word on if Valenti ever wore it.) He less than affectionately refers to the Oscars as the Asskissers. He gets especially fired up when discussing the consolidation of power in the art world – namely, corporate conglomerates taking control of the movie industry and placing profits miles ahead of artistic quality or aesthetic statements. In a world that marginalizes eccentric artistic vision in favor of big name, moneymaking blockbusters, Kaufman has long been creating a space for the outsider — the vulgar visionary, the filmmaker who wants to make a statement outside of the bounds of what major motion-picture companies consider safely edgy.

Troma doesn’t make a whole lot of money. But Kaufman, in his less bleak, less cynical moments, appreciates Troma’s veiled influence on directors who broke big, like Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino, movie stars like Samuel L. Jackson, iconoclastic auteurs Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and screenwriters like James Gunn (most recently responsible for the gore-addled splatter-fest Slither.) “We have a huge reach, and millions and millions of people have seen our movies,” says Kaufman, “and even though we are one step from living in a refrigerator box, at certain times I take great satisfaction in that.” And despite what the major studios may like to believe, contemporary cinema may very well be moving in the direction that Kaufman has been working toward all along.

“It’s very difficult to penetrate the hymen of the establishment,” says Kaufman. “When we do penetrate the hymen of the establishment, we’re the ones who get fucked.” It’s easy to see where Kaufman’s fear of a buggering from the mainstream comes from when you look at the overall mindset of the big-budget-movie industry: They’ve taken the crush-kill-destroy mentality of an action movie and made it their business model. Consider the MPAA’s rush to do battle with file sharers through a combination of lawsuits and melodramatic commercials which have become this generation’s “your brain on drugs” public service announcements. Last decade, the notion of a business suing its primary customer base would have sounded like something out of a dystopian novel. Now the MPAA has embraced it, treating lawsuits as if they were a righteous mission.

Meanwhile Kaufman and company have long embraced the potential of the Internet, file sharing and digital movie-production tools as democratizing forces. Troma has been prescient on Internet issues for quite some time. For instance, the script for the as-yet-unfilmed Class of Nuke ‘Em High Part 4 was written page by page in the mid-1990s by fans who would e-mail their submissions. Though independent art is under siege, Kaufman believes the promise of new technology may create a renaissance in low-budget cinema, placing Troma ahead of the curve.

More accurately, Troma is somewhere in the middle of the sloping power-law distribution curve that’s been frequently discussed of late in technology circles as the long tail. Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, argued in a now legendary article from October 2004 that innovations in technology and online distribution have created a huge shift in the way we understand media economics. Given the amount of choices offered over the Internet, consumers tend to gravitate not towards the gigantic hits which studios and labels have traditionally poured tons of money into (the steep-sloped but narrow portion of the curve) but to media that suits their more specific interests (the vastly larger but thinly distributed long tail). The result is a few blockbusters make gazillions of dollars, but the long tail that represents all of the works of indie art, movies independently distributed over or sold on the Internet, generate a reasonable amount of interest and make a reasonable amount of money. Anderson argues that when you add up all the artists that make up the long tail, they may as a whole outsell the ones up at the aristocratic peak of the curve.

Conjure

So even if television stations are refusing to play the most ferociously independent films in the world of contemporary cinema — if they’re ripping off artists left and right while production companies and conglomerates get rich — and if new media monopolies have made it harder for people to get their names out to the public, the Internet has allowed the obscure, the otherwise unnoticed, to spread their work. For instance, thanks to YouTube, the young, no-budget short makers at smosh.com were featured in a New York Times story in April. In the not-so-distant past, before the ascendancy of viral video, the Smosh team’s creations would have been watched exclusively on VHS tapes in someone’s mom’s basement — a far cry from being discussed in the pages of the Old Grey Lady. File sharing and new modes of marketing from web pages and online stores allow for consumers to choose what movies they want to spend drop their hard earned cash on. Similarly, advances in digital film and home editing software have made it cheaper and easier than ever to get together with some friends and as Kaufman’s book title suggests, Make Your Own Damn Movie.

Comic illustrator Matt Busch recently made his own damn movie, for $40,000. Conjure is a supernatural horror film that, as Busch describes it, is a meta-fictional account of a trip he and his girlfriend take to an anachronistic castle in Southern California. Busch and his girlfriend play themselves, and their experience as graphic artists figure heavily into the plot of the film as they start drawing creepy stuff that ends up coming to life. Not exactly the kind of idea that you can pitch to a studio, and Busch knows it. As a professional artist who has illustrated storyboards for major motion pictures, he operates on the fringes of the mainstream movie industry. He has illustrated Lord of the Rings trading cards, and quite a few of his paychecks come from the ledger of George Lucas — Busch is currently working on a book called You Can Draw Star War Characters.

Busch’s familiarity with the industry is one of the reasons he decided to go it alone on Conjure. Four years ago, Busch published a screenplay, Crisis. John Leguizamo was cast in a starring role, and the film began development. Unfortunately, the film has progressed like a tectonic plate — it’s nearing the half-decade mark with little visible evolution into anything resembling a movie. Busch was able to circumvent the glacial pace of Hollywood production on Conjure by embracing the inexorable forward momentum of technology. He shot the film digitally and released it in March, dealing with much of the advertising himself. (Though he is using professional distributors to get the movie placed in stores, he may not for the next film he intends to make.)

Matt Busch

“For better for worse it’s a movie that I wanted to make,” Busch says. “Every time I wanted to do something, I didn’t have to wait for anybody. I didn’t have to see if it was ok, I didn’t have to meet with a marketing team who says ‘Oh, well, you can’t make a movie like this because our blockbuster numbers say that money only comes in for slasher movies.'”

Busch sees indie filmmaking as the way of the future, and he cites his distant quasi-benefactor’s recent comment to the New York Daily News as proof. George Lucas told the paper, “In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies…. I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.” That’s a few more dollars than most self-financed moviemakers have to toss around, of course, but to hear such a pronouncement from the man whose name is synonymous with insanely pricey CG acrobatics may sound like a bell tolling to major studio heads.

Even if Lucas’s prophecy isn’t completely fulfilled, new technologies could still help bring balance to the force. The lowest of the low-budget films or the ones discriminated against by the ratings board are getting easier to find and easier to see. If they don’t knock the blockbusters off of the charts, they’re still more easily accessible as alternatives. Things will continue this way if the technology that’s kicking into high gear can remain unsquelched. Kaufman points to the exporting of Internet censorship software as an example of squelching. The MPAA’s war on file-sharing is another. Kaufman has no fear of the demon that is downloading; he’s happy that people can see movies more easily. That’s why he’s been making movies for 40 years, because he loves them. He’d gladly see tattooed geeks out there in their parents’ basements downloading films, enjoying them, and making their own.

For the sake of independent artists everywhere, Internet technology and digital filmmaking will hopefully allow others to continue following Troma’s example. Kaufman mentioned the Troma Team constantly operating on the verge of living in a refrigerator box, but if Matt Busch and George Lucas are right, the long tail will soon be populated with a host of like-minded indie-filmmakers, all residing in their own respective refrigerator boxes (though despite his faith in the future of indie-film, Lucas probably won’t be joining Kaufman and friends in their makeshift domiciles.)

Kaufman’s parting complaint about the state of contemporary cinema is a cautionary tale, as he discusses happening upon a copy of Good Night and Good Luck. “It came out all scratchy and it’s in, like, black and white,” he says. “So if you’re gonna download it, folks, get the color version of Good Night and Good Luck. Incidentally, the original title for Poultrygeist was ‘Good Night and Good Cluck,’ and that damn Rosemary Clooney stole our title. You know, the mainstream… it defeats you every time.”