STUDENT ADVANTAGE MAGAZINE
Warning. The following is, as
promised, unedited and uncensored. That means it's sloppy,
rambling, confusing and full of the type of glaring grammatical
mistakes that people make when they talk. Normally, magazine
editors clean this stuff up and cut for length and get rid of
some of the naughty bits when articles go to press. But we
promised you "raw," so it's "raw" you get.
Critics that call your work "dumb," "stupid,"
or "sophomoric":
a) just don't get it
b) are paying high compliment
c) need better thesauri.
Answer: (b) I agree with them, so it's high compliment. If I'm
dumb and sophomoric and something like Full House isn't, I prefer
to be dumb and sophomoric.
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Trey Parker:Matt Stone is most like:
a) Frank Sinatra:Sammy Davis Jr.
b) Jerry Seinfeld:George Costanza
c) Conan O'Brien:Andy Richter
d) Liam Gallagher:Noel Gallagher.
Answer: You have to invent a new one for me. I'm more to Matt
what Bill Clinton is to Monica Lewinsky. Matt's just my little
bitch. He knows that. As Bill's found out, sometimes you need a
little bitch and sometime it'll get you in trouble.
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I'm most embarrassed by:
a) old friends who call me for money
b) my fan mail
c) my parent's reaction to my work
d) seeing myself on the cover of college magazines.
Answer: (d) Seeing myself on the cover of anything is
embarrassing. I never intended for me to be the one on the
covers. For Cartman and Stan to be on the covers is okay, but I
never presumed that people wanted to see me on a cover. Even now
that I'm getting attention for acting, it's bizarre to see
yourself rather than the kids. You look up at it and don't think
it's you. It's like, "Who the hell is that?"
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The Hollywood figure that means the most to me is:
a) Chris Elliott
b) Quentin Tarantino
c) Oliver Stone
d) John Waters.
Answer: It's (e)-Jennifer Aniston. She's hot. I want to bag her.
Apparently, she a big South Park fan. She apparently loves the
school counselor, a character I do. I think I have a chance. I
can woo her with my school counselor voice.
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I failed out of college because:
a) I stopped going to classes
b) drug use
c) student film
d) all of the above.
Answer: (a & c) I failed out of my classes because I was
doing (c), which lead to (a), but I think I would have failed out
of my classes anyway. I'll say that now. I've been using film as
a crutch too long. Yes, I was making a feature film, but I was
already at a point that I was so frustrated with school that even
if I hadn't been making a feature film I would have found drugs
or some other reason to fail out of school. I was a music major
for a couple of years and got to realizing that this simply
wasn't something to learn in a college. It was too structured and
too formulaic and I just wanted to become a better pianist. I got
frustrated because it was too much theory and not enough hanging
in smoky bars playing. I finally quit that and was going to go
into something more academic but my heart was with art and found
the same thing with film school. How much was I going to learn
there? I had to make films, because a film degree isn't going to
do anything for me. But you're in school all the time, so you
don't have time to make films. That's what got so frustrating.
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Winning a Student Academy award for the animated short American
History while in college:
a) meant very little to anyone other than student film geeks
b) were my rewards for skipping classes
c) gave me my famous "Hey, wanna come over and see my
Oscar" pick-up line
d) all of the above.
Answer: (d) Unfortunately, the Oscar is still at my parents
house, so I haven't really been able to use it to full effect of
(c). It was a funny thing because I didn't submit that to the
Student Academy Awards-another guy that worked on it did. I was
hanging out at school and he come up and told me that we won. I
said, "Are you crazy? that's the biggest hunk of crap I ever
made." Then I found out they'd fly us out and put us up in
Hollywood. That was cool until we got here and were surrounded by
all the CalArts students that had lost and had done all these
beautiful-color animation and pencil animation-the most beautiful
animation you've ever seen. And I had to sit with them in theater
and watch mine. I swear to God they wanted me dead. I had to just
shrug and tell them I didn't send it in. I still feel guilty. I
didn't deserve it.
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College least prepared me for:
a) tennis with film executives
b) a real job
c) promiscuous South Park groupies.
Answer: (b) It's definitely not (a) because it really prepared me
for that. Dealing with professors and sipping tea with Hollywood
executives are the same thing. It's schmoozing. It's got to be
(b) because it prepares you for a real job, but not a real
Hollywood job. It prepares you to come out and be something like
an agent's assistant, but not much more. The biggest thing about
Hollywood is that you have to come out and create your own work.
We had to come out and create our own show. The only thing that
prepares you for that is doing it.
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The sudden success of South Park:
a) was no surprise
b) still scares me
c) turned me into a jerk
d) "What, you mean the show's successful?"
Answer: (c) Now we can be a lot more cocky about things and go
into meetings making demands. We spent so long having people tell
us what would or wouldn't work, and mostly the Hollywood execs
that went to Harvard or Yale were wrong. Now we can get people to
listen to us, but they think we're cocks. On the inside our
friends and family probably thing we're cocks too, but at least
there's a false exterior shell where they like us a lot more
because we have money.
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When I meet my college-age fans, the word that comes to mind is:
a) merchandising
b) restraining-order
c) both a & b.
Answer: It depends if it's a chick or not. A hot college chick
brings something else to mind. It's pretty funny, because we
don't even think so much in terms of our college-age fans. Having
been tossed out of school, we so much came right form college to
doing the show that even though we haven't been in college for
five years, we still feel like college students and feel like
it's all part of the program. When we talk about who we relate
to, it's definitely just college people. We'll still be calling
ourselves college people when we're fifty, because that's the way
you get college chicks. And I didn't graduate, so I can always
still say I'm "working on my degree."
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When I write comedy, I write for:
a) 11-year old boys
b) 15-year old boys
c) the boys of the Delta Sig house
d) Matt Stone.
Answer: (d) It's vice-versa. It's serious, because that's the way
it works. We've found out that if you try to write for anybody,
it fails for sure. If you do what you do, which is to try to make
your friends laugh, it works every time. Matt and I came from a
relationship as guys who would hang out in college and try to
make each other laugh, to the point that we'd always be the guys
running a joke into the ground in the back seat while everyone
else in the car was yelling, "Shut the hell up, you
guys." But that little relationship is simply on paper now,
and it's the show.