Lloyd Kaufman has a beard: it comes on like last week’s five o’clock shadow. His dark, disorderly-conduct hair feels at home with it, perhaps because Kaufman’s schoolteacher wife trims both. The nose is strong, big; it could be a muscle. Somehow Kaufman appears artificially tanned: you sense that the coloring, a kind of Aramis maybe, might rub off on your finger. I’m hesitant: I can’t help thinking, even at 10 p.m., that I’ve just gotten him out of bed. Kaufman is shy, self-deprecating. His posture seems an all-body shrug. Lloyd Kaufman, Yale grad, will be 29 next month. He speaks French and Chinese; he teaches at the School of Visual Arts. Kaufman is intelligent, honest, dedicated; an indefatigable worker. Lloyd Kaufman makes hardcore porn films.
They’re good films, given the budget, given the rigid sexual canon which varies from X film to X film as menus vary from McDonald’s drive-in to McDonald’s drive-in. Kaufman has made a few modest G films, some broke even, but he can only get “substantial” backing for hard-core. Judith Crist called him “A young man of talent, wit, and potential.” Vincent Canby said, “He has talent.” Kaufman’s latest skin song, The Divine Obsession, cost $70,000: $70,000 wouldn’t buy the titles for a Hollywood trial horse flick. Mike Herz, his partner—an attorney, another Yale grad, another beard—tells me, “Everything Lloyd has done so far has produced results.” That is: he makes films under budget and “gets a lot of value on the screen.” The $70,000 came from “relatives, friends, friends of friends—and you don’t want them to lose money, you have a responsibility.” Kaufman and Herz keep solvent by pricing screenplays, putting trailers together, “hotting up” other people’s films (slipping porn scenes into a box office dog). “We barely pay the rent,” says Kaufman, “but we don’t have any debts. We’re film-makers, that’s what’s important. I find the sex bits a bore, but at least we’re making films. We’re learning.”
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