Matt Stone

Early life

Matthew Richard Stone was born on May 26, 1971, in Houston, Texas, the son of Sheila Lois (née Belasco) and Gerald Whitney Stone Jr., an economist. He is of Irish-American heritage from his father's side and Jewish heritage from his mother's side. The South Park characters Gerald and Sheila Broflovski were named after them. Stone and his younger sister Rachel were raised in Littleton, Colorado, a Denver suburb, where they attended Heritage High School. He played drums, and early musical influences included Rush and The Police. He attended the University of Colorado Boulder. His father, fearing his son would "become a musician and a bum", insisted that he major in something "practical". Stone graduated with a double-major degree in mathematics and film in 1993. At CU, he met Trey Parker, and the pair bonded over anti-authoritarian ethos and love of Monty Python. They studied with the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whom they cast in their first feature film.

Career

Beginnings

In 1992, Parker, Stone, Jason McHugh and Ian Hardin founded a production company, Avenging Conscience, named for a film which the group hated. Its first production was The Spirit of Christmas (1992, referred to as Jesus vs. Frosty), a short pitting the religious figure against Frosty the Snowman. Observing the showdown are four foulmouthed friends who would feature in their later work.

The quartet created a three-minute trailer for a fictional film, Alfred Packer: The Musical. Alfred Packer, the "Colorado Cannibal", was a prospector convicted for consuming his companions during a harsh winter (the CU cafeteria is named for him). The trailer became a sensation among students and Virgil Grillo, the chairman and founder of the film department, convinced the quartet to expand it into a feature film. Parker was a longtime musical theater fan and dreamed of doing something in the genre. Stone had a "musical-deprived childhood" (aside from Fiddler on the Roof and Monty Python numbers) but Parker showed him the ropes. Parker, under the alias Juan Schwartz, starred, directed and co-produced, creating an Oklahoma!-style musical with ten original show tunes. The movie was shot on Loveland Pass as winter was ending, and the crew endured freezing weather. Filming locations included the Lake City, Colorado courthouse where Packer was tried. Stone and McHugh costarred, and Brakhage had a bit part.

Alferd Packer: The Musical premiered in Boulder, Colorado on October 31, 1993. The group submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival, which did not respond. Parker said he had a "vision" they needed to be at the festival, so the group rented out a conference room in a nearby hotel and put on their own screenings. MTV did a short news segment on The Big Picture about the film, and they made industry connections through the festival. The film was sold to Troma Entertainment in 1996, where it was retitled Cannibal! The Musical, and upon the duo's later success, it became their best-selling title. It has become a cult classic and adapted as a stage play by community theater groups and even high schools nationwide.

Following the succès de scandale' of Cannibal!, the group, sans Hardin, moved to Los Angeles. Upon arrival, they met a lawyer for the William Morris Agency who connected them with producer Scott Rudin. The duo acquired a lawyer, an agent and a script deal. Despite initially believing themselves to be on the verge of success, the duo struggled for several years. Stone slept on dirty laundry for upwards of a year because he could not afford a mattress. They unsuccessfully pitched a children's program, Time Warped, which would have involved fictionalized stories of historical figures, to Fox Kids. The trio created two separate pilots, spaced a year apart, and despite the approval of executive Pam Brady, the network disbanded Fox Kids.

South Park

The pilot episode of South Park was made on a budget of $300,000, and took between three and three and a half months to complete, and animation took place in a small room at Celluloid Studios in Denver during the summer of 1996. Like Parker and Stone's Christmas shorts, the original pilot was animated entirely with cutout animation. The idea for the town of South Park came from the Colorado basin where a lot of folklore and news reports originated about "cattle mutilations and UFO and bigfoot sightings". The setting provided a home for the show's surreal, subversive humor. Starring are four foul-mothed friends, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick.

South Park premiered in August 1997 and immediately became one of the most popular shows on cable television, averaging consistently between 3.5 and 5.5 million viewers. The show transformed the then-fledgling Comedy Central into "a cable industry power almost overnight". At the time, the cable network had a low distribution of just 21 million subscribers. Comedy Central marketed the show aggressively before its launch, billing it as "why they created the V-chip." The resulting buzz led to the network earning an estimated $30 million in T-shirts sales alone before the first episode was even aired. Due to the success of the series' first six episodes, Comedy Central requested an additional seven; the series completed its first season in February 1998. An affiliate of the MTV Network until then, Comedy Central decided, in part due to the success of South Park, to have its own independent sales department. By the end of 1998, Comedy Central had sold more than $150 million worth of merchandise for the show, including T-shirts and dolls. Over the next few years, Comedy Central's viewership spiked largely due to South Park, adding 3 million new subscribers in the first half of 1998 alone and allowed the network to sign international deals with networks in several countries. Their philosophy of taking every deal (which had surfaced as a result of their lack of trust in the early success of South Park) led to their appearances in films, albums and outside script deals. Among these was BASEketball (1998), a comedy which was a critical and commercial flop.

Stone was a fan of Primus and asked them to do the South Park theme song. Comedy Central released spinoff albums, including Chef Aid: The South Park Album and Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics, in the late 1990s. The song "Chocolate Salty Balls" (sung by Isaac Hayes's Chef) was released as a single in the UK in 1998 and became a number one hit. He directed many of the show's musical guests, like Hayes and Radiohead.

Television and film projects

In 2000, Parker and Stone began plotting a sitcom centered on the winner of the 2000 presidential election. The duo were "95 percent sure" that Democratic candidate Al Gore would win, and tentatively titled the show Everybody Loves Al (after Everybody Loves Raymond).The main goal was to parody sitcom tropes, such as a lovable main character, the sassy maid and the wacky neighbor, in the context of the White House household. Parker said the producers did not want to make fun of politics, but instead lampoon sitcoms. They threw a party the night of the election with the writers, with intentions to begin writing the following Monday and shooting the show in January 2001 with the inauguration. With the confusion of whom the President would be, the show's production was pushed back. The show was filmed at Sony Pictures Studios, and was the first time Parker and Stone shot a show on a production lot. Timothy Bottoms starred as a fictionalized George W. Bush.

Although That's My Bush!, which ran between April–May 2001, received a fair amount of publicity and critical notice, according to Stone and Parker the cost per episode was too high at "about $1 million an episode". Comedy Central officially cancelled the series in August 2001 as a cost-cutting move; Stone was quoted as saying "A super-expensive show on a small cable network ... the economics of it were just not going to work." Comedy Central continued the show in reruns, considering it a creative and critical success. Caryn James wrote "That's My Bush! is a satire of hero worship itself; it is the anti-West Wing."

In 2002, the duo began work on Team America: World Police, a satire of big-budget action films and the war on terror. It was inspired by Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds: "We thought it would be cool if someone used the Thunderbirds kind of look but made the film fast-moving and funny. Then we realised that the only people stupid enough to do that would be us." Team America was produced using a crew of about 200 people, including three dozen highly skilled marionette operators. The puppets were designed by The Chiodo Brothers. The execution of some very simple acts by the marionettes proved to be very difficult, with a simple shot such as a character drinking taking a half-day to complete. Stone called it "the worst time of my life - I never want to see a puppet again." The film was barely completed in time for its October release date, but reviews were positive and it made a modest sum at the box office. The duo battled with the MPAA over a love scene; finally, it was rated R for "graphic, crude, sexual humor; violent images and strong language–all involving puppets.”

Broadway and movie studio

Parker and Stone went to see the puppet musical Avenue Q on Broadway, and found they were thanked in the Playbill. Robert Lopez, the show's writer-composer, spotted them in the audience and struck up a converswation. He expressed interest in a musical on Mormonism, a subject which had long fascinated the duo. The musical, then The Book of Mormon: The Musical of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was worked on over a period of eight years; working around their South Park schedule, they flew between New York City and Los Angeles often, first writing songs for the musical in 2006. Developmental workshops began in 2008, and the crew embarked on the first of a half-dozen workshops that would take place during the next four years. Originally, Scott Rudin planned to open The Book of Mormon Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop in summer 2010, but opted to premiere it on Broadway, "[s]ince the guys [Parker and Stone] work best when the stakes are highest."

After a frantic series of rewrites, rehearsals and previews, The Book of Mormon premiered at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on March 24, 2011. The Book of Mormon follows a pair of mismatched Mormon missionaries (Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells) who are dispatched to a war-torn, AIDS-plagued village in Uganda. It received broad critical praise for the plot, score, performances, direction and choreography. The cast album became the highest-charting Broadway cast album in over four decades. The musical received nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical and a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. The national tour kicked off at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It has expanded to include productions in Chicago and London. Parker and Stone have confirmed a film adaption is in pre-production. The Mormon Church offered a measured response. Stone says "The official church response was something along the lines of The Book of Mormon the musical might entertain you for a night, but the Book of Mormon,' — the book as scripture — 'will change your life through Jesus'. Which we actually completely agree with. The Mormon church's response to this musical is almost like our Q.E.D. at the end of it. That's a cool, American response to a ribbing — a big musical that's done in their name. ... We weren't that surprised by the church's response. We had faith in them."

With sufficient funds from their work on South Park and The Book of Mormon, the duo announced plans to create their own production studio, Important Studios, in January 2013. The studio will approve projects ranging from films to television to theatre.

Personal life

Stone met Comedy Central executive Angela Howard in 2001, and they began a relationship shortly after. They got married in 2008, in a ceremony officiated by Andrew Sullivan, and have two children together.

Stone has described himself as ethnically Jewish due to his mother being Jewish. He is an atheist. He dislikes New Atheism, arguing that its adherents "have set atheism back a few decades. And I’m a self-described atheist.” Stone says he and Parker are "atheists who don't hate religion, who are fascinated by it and kind of admire it." He describes The Book of Mormon as "an atheist's love letter to religion". He explains "There's a catharsis in being able to really laugh at some of the goofier ideas of religion without necessarily laughing at the people practicing them. We never like to make a 'point,' per se. We want to give you room to feel what the show is saying to you. We don’t want to tell anybody what the point is, or what the politics are. It’s up to you to figure out what it meant." He calls the Mormon Church's response to the musical "a big-hearted, American, First Amendment-loving reaction."

A. J. Jacobs writes that "On South Park, they’ve mocked Big Government (smoking bans, the drug war) and remain free-speech diehards."

Stone said in 2001, regarding his political views, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals." When asked about that quote during a 2010 interview, Stone stated: "We don't want you to come to it thinking, 'These guys are going to bash liberals,' … It's so much more fun for us to rip on liberals only because nobody else does it, and not because we think liberals are worse." In 2006, Stone described himself as libertarian. Parker and Stone have consistently defended free speech. "Cartoon Wars Part I" and "Cartoon Wars Part II" address the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, with Kyle arguing that the First Amendment right of freedom of speech protects the right to offend: “Either it’s all okay, or none of it is.”

He was interviewed in Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine. Moore cuts from the interview to a South Park-style short, which Parker and Stone were not involved with. They were not amused, as evidenced by their depiction of Moore in Team America. Stone explained: "he didn't misrepresent me in the film at all. But what he did that really pissed Trey off, and kind of pissed me off too, was put a little animation right after our interview. Tons of people have come up to us and said: 'Oh I love that animation you guys did in Bowling For Columbine'. It's very South Park-esque but we didn't do it. ... It was a good lesson in what Michael Moore does in films. He doesn't necessarily say explicitly this is what it is, but he creates meaning where there is none by cutting things together. But I don't really hate the guy." He appears in Kirby Dick's This Film is Not Yet Rated, a critique of the MPAA, arguing that the board is harder on independent films than studio productions, and more lenient on violence than sex.

Discography

Filmography and accolades

Cannibal! The Musical (1993)

Orgazmo (1997)

BASEketball (1998)

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)

Terror Firmer (1999)

Bowling for Columbine (2002)

Run Ronnie Run (2002)

Team America: World Police (2004)

The Aristocrats (2005)

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006)

Electric Apricot: Quest for Festeroo (2007)

Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010)