DESERT NEWS: 8/13/98
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Two and a half years ago, Matt Stone and Trey Parker were sleeping on friends' couches and wondering how long they could stretch 20 bucks. One year ago Stone sold his Toyota pickup truck for $600 and figures he was lucky to get it. Today they're show-biz tycoons. Stone and Parker are the originators of the minimal cartoon, "South Park," which has reduced an unsuspecting cable audience to temblors of laughter. Their cast of foul-mouthed kiddies has earned the pair their first feature film roles in "BASEketball," as well as more episodes of the series and the first theatrical version of their controversial cartoons. Friends who met in a Super-8 class at the University of Colorado, they couldn't have started out more differently. Stone is a math whiz. He was an honors student who rarely studied, the class clown and pretty much resigned to becoming the next Isaac Newton. Parker, who grew up in the small mountain town of Conifer, Colo., is the son of a geologist. He had fallen in love with music and began studying piano when he was 12, much to his father's chagrin. "Rather than the kid who has to take piano lessons, I was the kid who was rebelling by playing the piano," says Parker, 28, who's dressed in rust-colored plaid pants, a powder blue pullover and a red baseball cap, on backward. Once his father heard him play in a school program, he began to support his son's artistic leanings. Parker was also an honors student with a talent for creative writing and a penchant for performing in school productions (Danny in "Grease" and Sammy Fung in "Flower Drum Song"). Stone's head is a mop of dark curly hair that went out with Jim Croce. He wears oblong wire-rimmed glasses, is dressed in a white, soccer T-shirt that says, "Just Do It," and a pair of faded Levi's. His parents were always willing to let him try whatever he wanted, says Stone, in spite of his mathematical prowess. "They were supportive of my trying film," he says. It wasn't exactly fate that forced Parker and Stone to create their little paste-up people. It was contempt for the pedantic hypocrisy around them in film school. (Though they certainly wouldn't put it that way.) "We naturally paired up because we wanted to make stupid, cheap things," says Parker. "And kids — 19 years old — saying, 'I'm going to make a film that talks about the importance of THIS.' It's like, 'Shut up!' We knew no one wants to hear what we have to say, so we'll just make a bunch of stupid stuff. ... They wanted to make a statement. We wanted to make people laugh. If you make them laugh, then your statement is made." That "stupid stuff" turned into a movie called "Cannibal: the Musical" which was made for $120,000 (from mostly rich doctors and lawyers in Boulder, Colo.) and rejected at Sundance. Undeterred, they took the film to Sundance, rented a projector, brought in some chairs and popcorn and showed the movie. One of the people who caught it was an executive at Fox who backed the guys' "Spirit of Christmas" — a wild animated ride in which Santa is pitted against a politically incorrect Jesus Christ. With the underground popularity of the "Spirit of christmas," Parker and Stone made a pilot for "South Park," for Comedy Central. But its tests were dismal, and the team figured their future was past."The hardest time was when they rejected 'South Park.' We'd done several pilots," Parker shakes his head. They had decided to start another movie when they were suddenly notified that "South Park" had been picked up as a series. "I gave myself until my high school reunion," recalls Parker. "(I said), 'If I have to go back to my high school reunion and people haven't heard of anything I've done, then I'll go back to Colorado and start over and be a geologist or something."'His high school reunion was July 18. And there's no going back now — for either of them. "In some ways our life hasn't changed," says Stone, 27. "We still have the same friends and we do basically what we did for years, which is just make up stupid stuff and make people laugh. But now we have so much to do, and we're always under the gun to make up that stuff that we lost any kind of life we had."When they began, they were permitted to do anything they wanted. "It was like, so free," says Stone. "Now it's so laid-out. I know exactly where I'm going to be a year from now." Stone shakes his head and refuses to answer "any girlfriend questions," but Parker has been with the same woman for six years. She recently relocated to Los Angeles which makes life much easier, he says. The ride for the tyro tycoons has been a thrill so far. "It's been an incredible year of 'South Park' taking off, doing the movie and the Broncos win the Super Bowl," crows Parker. "And we were right there, on the 50 yard line!"