The Troma panel at Comic-Con gets smaller every year, but the sense that you’re at a really fucked up family reunion never dissipates. “What I find is amazing about Lloyd, is that everybody is connected to him in some fashion,” said panelist Steven Paul at yesterday’s session. He gestured at the room––the smallest I entered all weekend. “I bet everyone here has acted in a Lloyd Kaufman film.”
Not quite, but part of the reason to show up to this thing every year is to see which disparate characters Lloyd will rope into making an appearance. This year, there wasn’t a guest more unexpected than Paul, a producer on Ghost Rider, the visual effects producer on Karate Dog (!!!), and the man responsible for a number of upcoming “is that really necessary?” video game adaptations, including Castlevania and Tekken. What, exactly, was this guy doing on what Kaufman himself billed as “a panel of independent thinkers?” “I at one time was Steven’s teacher,” Kaufman boasted. “So there’s a little bit of Troma in the mainstream world!”
Maybe more than a little bit. Seated on the far end of the table was Mark Neveldine, co-writer/director of the budding Jason Statham franchise, Crank. “You’ll have to excuse me, because this is the first panel I’ve been sober for,” Neveldine cracked with pitch perfect post-frat bravado––now that nerds are inheriting the earth, an awful lot of them look and sound suspiciously like recurring characters on Entourage. What’s this guy’s connection to Kaufman? He’s apparently Troma’s most dedicated plagiarist.
…Read more
As I type this from my living room/office in Long Island City, on the Southeastern tip of Queens, through the window I’ve got a prime view of the luxury real estate company setting up shop in the abandoned paper factory immediately across the street. Yesterday, they boarded up the upper windows and hung signs; today, they’ve parked three pedicabs with their logo on the sidewalk–because buyers who have been priced out of the Manhattan condo market are apparently so humbled by the experience that they couldn’t bear to walk a block and half from the sales office to the property.
Yes, the neighborhood’s changing, which is not altogether a bad thing–after almost a year and half in this apartment, the novelty of having to take the subway into another borough to get to the supermarket, the gym or a halfway decent bar has worn off completely. So I’m comfortable with the forward motion of gentrification. I just never thought Lloyd Kaufman would be one of the gentrifiers.
Yeah, THAT Lloyd Kaufman.
…Read more
