Put Mr. Spielberg on Hold

On a bitterly cold night 8000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains, the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel in Aspen is ground zero for people who make people laugh--and for people who make money from people who make people laugh. This is the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, an annual showcase and shmoozefest for buyers and bookers, stand-up stars and wannabe comics. In the St. Regis, the crowd that spills forth from the lobby bar is meeting and greeting with a vengeance.

Out of this social melee strolls a tall man with a thatch of (mostly) blond hair that appears not to have seen a comb during the Clinton administration. He has a glazed look in his eyes: He's a little dazed, maybe a little drunk, definitely wary of all these professionals. He's wearing an untucked blue shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, a baggy pair of shiny sweatpants and clunky sneakers. He makes a beeline to a similarly unkempt pal with a head of brown curls who's wearing a white Mao T-shirt. A few eager, well-dressed festivalgoers watch him pass. "Is that him?" whispers one woman urgently. The man she's with looks him over, then nods slowly. "Could be," he says. "He has that look, like he might be a creative genius."

It's not the first time that has been said about Trey Parker. He's also been called a menace to society and a corrupter of our (continued on page 169)"Put Mr. Spielberg on hold"(continued from page 129) nation's youth--but that's what happens when you're the mastermind of a television show as rude, hilarious and subversive as South Park. By now, even people who haven't seen the show know the fundamentals of Comedy Central's animated series: It's an inelegantly minimalist show which posits that children are mean-spirited, foulmouthed little brats who try to make sense of a landscape littered with alien anal probes, gay dogs, cable-access shows hosted by Jesus, and a 40-foot, fire-breathing Barbra Streisand who tries to enslave the world.

The show's characters are Kyle, Stan, the obnoxious Cartman and the eternally doomed Kenny. But the stars are Trey Parker, 28, and his cohort Matt Stone, 26, a pair of beer-drinking, sports-loving dudes from small-town Colorado. Parker and Stone have turned the remembered indignities of their childhoods into one of the funniest shows on television. Their humor is undoubtedly in bad taste, but there is no anger or maliciousness in it; the tastelessness is goofier, more gleeful. The kids on South Park may well be profane little bastards--but they're only eight years old, so it's not as though they're as stupid as our last set of animated boneheads, Beavis and Butt-head. (Well, Cartman may be heading in that direction.)

But you don't spend time with Parker and Stone basking in the glow of their genius. More likely, you spend that time laughing at two guys who speak their minds and gleefully bad-mouth movie stars and pals alike. They're two guys who are clearly trying to figure out how to act now that they've become so damn successful.

First of all, the perks are mind-boggling: In January, for instance, Comedy Central got them tenth-row, 50-yard-line seats for the Super Bowl, where they watched their beloved Denver Broncos upset the Green Bay Packers. They now have a tape of that game, and they watch it every week. "It was," says Stone, "the greatest day of my life."

Then there's the restaurant thing. "You know the Sky Bar?" says Parker. "You can't fucking get into that place. I went there with this girl, and the guy at the door said, 'Do you have a reservation?' I said no, and he said, 'Well, we only take reservations.' And I said, 'Did you ever see South Park?' He goes, 'Yeah,' and I said, 'I'm Trey Parker. That's my show.' And he goes, 'Oh, sorry. Come in.'" He breaks into a goofy grin, still amazed. "I mean, it works."

Stone hasn't tried that yet, but he's ready. "A year ago," he says, "I would have said 'Oh, man, that's fucked, that they give people special treatment like that.' Now I think, Yeah, I deserve that. The rules shouldn't apply to me. For some reason, I'm now completely convinced that I deserve it."

Parker agrees. "It's sweet," he says.

The sign says surf 'n' turf club. On a small square of Astroturf in the parking lot of the aging Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles sit three chairs, a punching bag, a workout bench, two birdbaths, three rubber ducks and no water.

This is director David Zucker's spread on the set of the movie Baseketball, but this afternoon it's the province of Parker and Stone, who have lead roles in the movie as the stars of a new sport that sweeps the nation--part baseball, part basketball. Clad in baseball shirts and basketball shorts, they sign autographs on a copy of Rolling Stone that features South Park on the cover. They confer briefly with their assistant, Brandon Cruz (three decades ago he played Eddie on the television series The Courtship of Eddie's Father), and chat with South Park writer David Goodman about a writers' meeting.

"We don't really need a meeting," Parker says. "The three of us just need to get together and write. It should just be Matt and you and me and some chicks. We'll party all day, and I bet we get a million great ideas." He grins, and reconsiders. "Well, at least three great ideas."

For the most part, creators of other successful animated shows were (at least initially) content to stay in the background and stick to those projects--think of Beavis & Butt-head's Mike Judge, or The Simpsons' Matt Groening. But Parker and Stone seem determined to do a little of everything: make South Park, write, produce, direct and star in live-action films and act in other people's movies.

South Park, for instance, began running a set of new episodes in May, and Comedy Central has picked up the show for years three and four. This means 60 shows have been ordered (fewer than 20 have been completed). Baseketball comes out this summer, and a few months later October Films plans to release Orgazmo (a low-budget, Parker-directed film about a Mormon missionary who moonlights as a reluctant porn star to raise money for his wedding). They've signed a deal for two pictures with Paramount, the first of which will be a South Park movie. And they've agreed to write the script for the sequel to Dumb and Dumber.

"It's hard when you first come to town," explains Parker. "You're broke. The only way you make it in this business is to take everything that's offered, because nine out of ten things fall through. So we signed every deal we could. If this falls through, fine, we've got that. For three years, we kept taking everything we could and signing every deal we could. And the problem is that after South Park hit, we still had that mentality--not realizing that things weren't going to fall through anymore. We found ourselves thinking, Holy shit, we've got to do all of this now."

As a result, he says, the two are completely booked through the year 2000. They find this comforting but confusing. "It's funny," he says, "because we're touted in the media as the hottest guys. But we have no money. We're broke. I mean, we don't make shit off of South Park, because it's Comedy Central, because it's cable, and because we signed a shitty deal. Who knew? To us, a year ago, a thousand bucks a week sounded like amazing money. And now I keep reading about $33 million worth of T-shirts sold. I got my check last week: $7000."

He tries to laugh at this, and almost succeeds. "If you let it get to you, you can get really bitter and pissed off. But then that'll destroy you. You have to let go of it. You have to say, 'All right, we're creating this and giving it to the world.' That's the only healthy way to really do it. You see people like the Ren & Stimpy guy--you know, he's just such a pissed-off little bastard now that he hates everyone and everyone hates him. Well, was it worth it?"

Here's another perk of fame. (Or maybe it's another sign that some mean little kids never completely grow up.) "We have a little friend," says Stone, "who we're giving the silent treatment to today." His name is Dian Bachar and he plays Choda Boy, the diminutive sidekick to Parker's title hero in Orgazmo. They've known Bachar for a long time. They give him work. "We love fucking with Dian," says Parker. "We have done it since we were in college, and this was the ultimate one. We got offers for these parts in Baseketball, and we went to David Zucker and said, 'You know what would be really funny? If these two guys had another friend they just fucking ripped on all the time, and they called him a little bitch. And then when they get to be huge sports stars, he's known as Little Bitch in the sports world.' And he said, 'That's good, that's good.' Then we said, 'And we know a guy--' "

"Who'd actually be perfect for this," says Stone.

"And now he's starring in the movie."

"As Little Bitch," Stone laughs. "And he hates us, but he's, like, totally poor, and he's getting however much money for this."

It's nice, I say, to find people who use their newfound fame in such constructive ways.

"Yeah," agrees Parker. "We've been fucking with him for a long time. The cocksucker."

"We give him the silent treatment," adds Stone, who just then spots Bachar coming around the corner of a nearby trailer. "Oh, here he comes." As soon as he sees Parker and Stone, Bachar makes a U-turn and walks the other way. "Now he's sure we're talking about him," says Stone gleefully, "because he's a paranoid dick."

And if he reads this story, I offer, he'll know you were talking about him.

"Yeah," says Stone.

"Yeah," says Parker. "Sweet."

Back in Aspen, Parker and Stone have arrived at the St. Regis Hotel for a program titled "South Park Comes Home," a tribute to the show that also includes showings of a few early student films by Parker. First, though, there's a press conference at 9:45 A.M., an hour ungodly enough that they have waiters deliver them breakfast midway through the Q. and A. session. "We thought it would be funny if we ate breakfast while talking to you," explains Parker to the media. Stone disagrees. "Fuck, no," he says. "We were hungry."

Then they get back to answering the questions. A man from High Times wants to know if they are big drug users. "I think that it's the same as it is with most people," says Parker with a shrug. "We wouldn't say we haven't had some great times on acid, but it has nothing to do with the work. Unfortunately, we don't have time for drugs anymore."

"Yeah," adds Stone. "And it's a real shame."

Inevitably, questions arise about the criticism leveled at the show, and about whether the show is appropriate for children. "If I had kids," says Parker, "I would much rather have them watch South Park than Full House, because you want them to grow up with a brain."

And so it goes. Q.: "Now that you're so successful, do you worry about letting your focus slip?"

Parker: "I don't think so. First of all, we've never been that focused."

"Would you be willing to compromise your vision and style for a big network?"

Parker: "If it meant more money, sure."

Afterward, Stone walks through a hallway, stopping briefly before he's called to do another interview. "This has been cool," he says, "because there are lots of Colorado people here."

Coloradans, to hear Parker and Stone tell it, are a different breed. They love the Broncos and hate Barbra Streisand. Most of them can't get Comedy Central because the cable systems don't carry it, so they can't see South Park unless they visit a Web site from which they can download entire episodes (with the blessings of all involved). But when Colorado people do see the show, they get it on a deeper level than do folks from other parts of the country.

That's because Parker and Stone are Colorado people. A few facts: Parker grew up in Conifer, Stone in Littleton. Neither lived in South Park.

As a child, Parker had a habit of forgetting to flush the toilet. His father tried to impress on young Trey the necessity of flushing the toilet. "If you flush," he said, "your poo goes away. But if you don't, the poo will come to life, jump out of the toilet, do a little dance and kill you." His dad called the poo Mr. Hanky. The rest is history, as fans of the episode "Mr. Hanky, the Christmas Poo" know well.

Parker's sister Kelly, he says, "kicked my ass" every day. So he took tae kwon do for years. (This would come in handy in Orgazmo.) When he was 13, his father bought him a video camera.

Stone's sister didn't kick Matt's ass. In the pilot episode of South Park, her picture is on a table in Cartman's house. Matt Stone was an honors student and a math whiz.

Parker and Stone met at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and bonded largely because of their mutual fanaticism over Monty Python's Flying Circus. Stone majored in mathematics, but Parker was determined to make it in showbiz. "We were," says Stone, "the only two guys in film school who didn't want to be Martin Scorsese."

Parker hit on his signature style of animation--cardboard cutouts--when he waited until the last minute to do a film-school project. Cardboard was faster than real animation, so he used it. The short, American History, was cheap but hilarious. It won a Student Academy Award.

At the age of 21, Parker was dumped by his fiancée. Depressed, he stopped going to classes and decided to make a real movie. Stone helped. They didn't have the money they needed, so they shot a trailer instead--and then made the rounds of friends, family and well-heeled acquaintances, showing the trailer and explaining they could finish their movie if they had a little more money. They raised $125,000 and made Cannibal: The Musical, Parker's affectionate nod to the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein. But Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein would never have written a show about a notorious flesh-eating Coloradan.

They had big plans. "We figured, Look, we'll just make it totally stupid," says Parker. "It'll be a movie. Video stores need movies, right? Like someone's going to buy this."

"We thought we'd spend $100,000," adds Stone, "and we'd get a million for it, and make $900,000."

"And then we' d go back to Colorado," says Parker, "and make another one."

They took the movie to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It hadn't been accepted into the festival, but they showed up anyway and held a couple of guerrilla screenings. When a few Hollywood types liked it and told them they should come to Los Angeles, they headed straight there, where they were astonished to find how many other cheap, stupid movies they were competing with. But people liked Cannibal, including then--20th Century Fox executive Brian Graden, with whom they began to work on a variety of projects--"all of which," says Graden, "went nowhere."

Another fan was Airplane! co-director David Zucker, who'd signed a deal with Universal Pictures around the time the studio was purchased by Seagrams. Hired to direct an in-house film that made light of the acquisition, Zucker turned the project over to Parker at the last minute. There was no concept and no script, but big names (including Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone and Demi Moore) had agreed to participate.

"I had to write it, direct it and do it all on the fly," says Parker. "And there was this frantic woman at Universal coordinating it. I'd be sitting there with Demi Moore, and this woman would run up and go, 'Steven Spielberg said he'll do something. He's going to be here in 30 minutes. It's got to be funny.' It was like that for eight days. I almost went insane."

And since the big stars didn't know who he was and didn't trust him, he lied to them. "I would sit on the cell phone," he says, "and pretend that David was on it. I would say to Steven Spielberg, 'Here's what I'm going to have you do: You're on the Jaws ride.' And Spielberg was like,' I don't get it.' And I would say, 'Well, it was David's idea,' and he'd be like, 'Oh, OK.' Sometimes I'd pretend to be on the phone to David: 'You want him to do what? OK, cool, got you.' I would tell them that I was just doing what David told me to do, and then it was fine. But before that they were like, 'Who the fuck are you?' "

He laughs; it's safe to call it the last laugh. "And now Spielberg's been trying to get a meeting with us for the past two weeks," he says, "and we've been too busy. It's pretty sweet."

The Universal project gave them a little money, but none of their other projects caught on. In 1995, out of ideas, Brian Graden threw them $1200 to make a video Christmas card he anticipated sending to some 500 friends and studio executives. They pocketed half the money and made The Spirit of Christmas, an uproarious five minutes in which Jesus and Santa duke it out over the meaning of the holiday, while four foul-mouthed third graders watch. Graden knew the video was too raunchy to send to anyone but his friends, but before long, dubbed copies of the tape began showing up all around town.

Suddenly, Parker and Stone were hot. They took the characters from The Spirit of Christmas and got to work--in Graden's words--on "turning five minutes of fart jokes into a half-hour TV show." It took them 70 days to make the South Park pilot. Debbie Liebling, a Comedy Central vice president, says that when she saw they weren't going to make a deadline and gave them two extra days, they used those days, unbeknownst to her, to make a short film.

South Park went on the air in August 1997, and the buzz started immediately. By Christmas, the show was racking up unprecedented ratings for Comedy Central and record ratings for cable in general. Howls from outraged would-be censors followed. So did T-shirt sales, magazine covers and offers for Parker and Stone. They moved from their small, dumpy apartment in Playa Del Rey to a bigger, nicer apartment in the same west Los Angeles beach community; they went to Beijing together for New Year's Eve. And they finished Orgazmo, which had been one of the first projects they pitched to Hollywood studios when they came to town on the heels of Cannibal.

But Orgazmo is clearly not a big-studio movie. It's cheap (made for $1 million), fast (shot in five weeks) and proud. "Any fucking idiot," opines Parker, "could make a movie great if he had a day to do fucking 20 seconds. A movie like Orgazmo, it's all about how quick you can d o it, and whether you can actually do it for a million bucks."

He laughs. "I remember when Orgazmo got its first review, in Variety. It was a good review, but it said, 'Parker needs to sharpen his visual style'--all this stuff basically related to money, you know what I mean? And I just thought, Well, fuck yeah. If I had all the time in the world, I'd do all kinds of crazy-ass shit."

This is not to say that Orgazmo does not contain plenty of crazy-ass shit, including a Mormon porn star, his deadly foe Neutered Man, a sidekick with a rocket-shooting penis and a devout, apple-cheeked young lass who considers her fiancé's new career as an orgasm-inducing crime fighter and concludes, "This whole thing is just too gosh-darn wacky to be co-inky-dink. Maybe this is what our Heavenly Father has intended for you."

Inspired by Parker's memories of the Mormons he'd grown up around ("I always just found them to be really funny," he says) and prompted by his and Stone's feeling that it'd be cool to do a movie about the porno industry, Orgazmo was in the works when the two heard about Boogie Nights. For a while, Parker was pleased by the idea that people would think they'd made an instant parody of that movie. But then South Park hit and October Films decided to hold Orgazmo for close to a year, waiting while its creators' stars were on the rise.

"It's both good and bad," says Parker of the delay. "I guess it'll have a chance to make more money now, but it's also kind of sad that it's just going to be the movie the South Park guys did. That's not what it was meant to be, which was just this dumb little thing you find. We thought we were making just another dumb little movie for ourselves."

Baseketball, he says, may be similarly misconstrued. Initially, David Zucker had asked Parker to direct the movie--but South Park had just been picked up, so he turned Zucker down. "They were kind of bummed," Parker says, "and then David decided he would direct it. But they still wanted our input and stuff. So they said, 'How about you guys act in it?' And we're, like, 'We're not really actors,' you know?"

"But it sounded so easy," says Stone.

"Yeah," says Parker. "So we're, like, all right, fuck it. And then South Park got big, and now it looks like they grabbed us because South Park was huge."

"I think they had to fight for us with Universal," adds Stone. "And now they look like geniuses. Of course, they're going to market this as the guys from South Park, which is kind of weird. But we've long since learned not to try to fight that shit, because they do it anyway."

"It's unfortunate, though," says Parker, "because this is David's movie. He wrote it, and he's directing it. But because we're acting in it, people are going to say, 'I want to go see those guys' movie,' you know? And we have our movies: We like doing dumb, stupid, cheap-ass movies. That's our style. This isn't our style. But on the other hand, it's been awesome, because it's, like, not really our style of comedy. It's almost like we're a rock band doing a country album, you know what I mean? And if I was in a band, I'd want to do a country album, just for the hell of it."

You are in a band, I remind him. (It's called DVDA, an Orgazmo phrase meaning "double vaginal, double anal," and it performs songs like Fuck That Guy From Bush.)

"Yeah, we are in a band," he concedes. "And we will do a country album."

Can this relationship last? That's the question facing every successful team, and Parker and Stone have given the matter some thought. "History," says Parker, "pretty much dictates that we have to hate each other eventually. Because in every scenario every band, or writing team--the Zucker brothers or whoever--hate each other after they get popular. I am so aware of that that I am going to do everything in my power to see that it doesn't happen."

Already, the two have been pigeonholed: Parker is the creative force, the guy driven to be in show business. Stone is the more business-minded pal who might not be here if not for Parker. Friends and co-workers say there's some truth to those labels, and Parker concedes it could become a problem.

"You can see how things happen," Parker says, "because you get pissed off at the dumbest things. Like, 'You didn't create that, that was me,'--you know, things that you would never have said two years ago. But I think we're great partners. Cannibal and Orgazmo, that was my shit, and Matt knows it. And then he can step up in a completely different way as a partner in South Park, where it's more collaborative." Besides, adds Brian Graden, "Something that works between the two of them creates a kind of magic. I really believe that one plus one equals ten in this situation."

So we'll leave them together, back in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel on the last night of the Comedy Arts Festival. Tonight's hot ticket was for a reunion of the members of Monty Python, another fabled team that eventually fell apart. Parker went there with a group of friends and watched Doug Herzog--the president of Comedy Central--try to arrange seats for them; after a few fruitless minutes, he walked away.

Now, some 90 minutes later, Parker stands in the St. Regis and shrugs. "We couldn't get tickets," he says. "We tried, but it was turning into a big hassle, so I just said fuck it."

This doesn't mean he missed the chance to meet with his idols. "We got to have beers with Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones this afternoon," he says. "That was enough for me. They said they liked The Spirit of Christmas, and they gave us their phone numbers in London. So we're going to give them a call when we go over there in a couple of weeks." He pauses. "I felt so stupid meeting people like that. I just hope they didn't think we're complete assholes."

He shakes his head slowly. "When I do something like that, or when I go backstage at some concert, I still feel like, When the fuck did this happen? I was the guy in the fucking back row six months ago."

But now he's the unkempt creative genius, turning heads as he walks through the lobby to chill with Stone and a group of friends, family members and hangers-on. By midnight, the official postfestival party is in full swing downstairs in the hotel ballroom, with food and music and drinks and lots of important people complimenting one another. To get downstairs and into the party, you need an official festival badge around your neck. Parker and Stone and their friends don't have badges and don't appear to want them; instead, they gather in the middle of the upstairs lobby, in front of a large fireplace and under an imposing oil painting of the Rocky Mountains, and party the night away. They're 8000 feet high and rising fast. Life is sweet.