Edition: U.S. / Global

TELEVISION; The Boys From 'South Park' Go to War

Published: August 22, 2004

TREY PARKER and Matt Stone have had it up to here: with self-righteous movie stars, stupid political leaders, that idiot Michael Moore -- and most of all, with the new movie they are making that mercilessly lampoons all of the above.

Last month in the vast hangar space where they were shooting the movie, ''Team America: World Police,'' they spent the whole day complaining about how hard it had been to make: stressful, tedious, and exhausting.

''We had the perfect lives making 'South Park,' '' grumbled Mr. Parker, who seemed to think everything but his current work schedule was a joke -- war, world leaders, his peers. A half-incinerated puppet of Tim Robbins lay slumped in a corner. ''We had complete creative control. All our friends work on the show. It's great fun.'' He rolled his eyes. ''This movie is so hard.''

His partner, Mr. Stone, glumly agreed: ''We're so dumb.'' (Except that he added a four-letter word. Many of their sentences include four-letter words.)

Mr. Parker: ''Our whole summer is shot.''

Mr. Stone: ''It looked easy.'' Pause. ''It's a nightmare.''

''Team America,'' the $32 million movie that they co-wrote and are co-directing, is a timely political satire, set to open Oct. 15, about a special American police force that goes around the world saving everyone from terrorism. The North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is the principal villain, peddling nuclear weapons to terrorists to spite the United States. The special police force sets out to stop him. But that day on the set, it was still not clear how it would all shake out.

''We don't know what this movie is about,'' Mr. Stone said, exaggerating but only slightly. ''We still don't know how it's going to end.''

This much, however, is clear: the live-action film features no actual actors, just dozens of 22-inch puppets, amid reduced-scale sets of Paris, Cairo, London, North Korea, the Panama Canal and Mount Rushmore.

Once upon a time, the idea seemed simple: make a Jerry Bruckheimer-style high-octane, blow-'em-up action-adventure blockbuster using puppets. Unfortunately, the execution has been somewhat more complicated. It turns out that making a puppet walk across a room, much less making it take a flying leap into a fountain while machine-gunning a terrorist, requires painstaking time and effort -- enough to make the filmmakers yearn for their hand-drawn, one-dimensional roots.

On this day dozens of Hollywood specialists were helping to send the marionettes through pneumatic tubes, drive their Humvee into the Sphinx and race across a desert landscape on a motorcycle. Outside, painters were carefully applying gold leaf to the columns on a miniature Korean palace which, like every other set, would soon be blown to smithereens.

The violence was cathartic in its way, they said, but hardly enough to compensate for all the 12- to 14-hour days. With three weeks of production to go, the filmmakers found themselves in a warp-speed work schedule of shooting all day, editing half the night and rewriting on the weekends.

''Every shot is problem solving,'' Mr. Parker explained. Every day they looked at the script and discovered that the puppet couldn't actually do half of what had been written. ''So we rewrite on the fly. I do all the lines by myself. Fifty percent is left of the original script. It's insane. I'll happily go back to animation where we're used to saying, 'O.K., let's have the Chinese Army roll up.' ''

But then, as Mr. Stone reminded himself: ''We work best in chaos.''

Having permanently raised the bar on potty humor with ''South Park,'' and tested the political waters with that show's ''Blame Canada'' theme and the short-lived cable series ''That's My Bush,'' Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone seem bent on offending as many people as possible. In ''Team America,'' they take aim at sanctimonious right-wing nut-jobs and smug Hollywood liberals alike.

Alec Baldwin, for example, emerges as a villain almost as evil as Kim Jong Il. Sean Penn and Danny Glover take up arms to fight beside Mr. Kim, with Mr. Penn crying ''Die, conservative!'' before blowing away a Team America member.

Mr. Kim, for his part, feeds the international weapons inspector Hans Blix to his sharks. (They used real sharks for that scene.) But not before he croons a song about the solo life of an absolute dictator: ''I'm so Rone-ry.''

The American agents are barely more sympathetic. Along with Gary, a leading American actor recruited to their cause, the team wears glittery red-white-and-blue outfits and drives a Humvee as a pulse-pounding, patriotic anthem laced with expletives and exclamation points plays.

The current version of the film is a guaranteed NC-17, with surprisingly graphic scenes of puppet sex. The filmmakers will have to cut it to an R rating, but not before they have their fun torturing the ratings board.

It's hard not to wonder: are these guys just out to provoke? Or do they actually have something to say? Underneath all the kidding around, it seems possible they're angry. But if so, at whom? ''We don't know,'' Mr. Parker said, hanging his head as if embarrassed. ''People who go will be really confused about whose side we're on. That's because we're really confused.''


Mr. Stone said: ''Basically, we're working it out in this movie.''

After 9/11, they, like many others, could not understand why people around the world seemed to hate America, nor why so many liberals seemed bent on criticizing everything it does. Three years later, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone say they hate the war in Iraq, but suspect it might be necessary. They think President Bush is stupid, but they can't stand John Kerry either. ''We hate both of them,'' Mr. Parker confirmed. ''They're both retards. We have to choose between a'' -- four-letter word -- ''sandwich and a'' -- same four-letter word -- ''sandwich.'' O.K., so they're not exactly nuanced.

But they know their own limitations. The filmmakers are trying to knock piety off the moral high ground. But they would never try to take its place.

''An actor convinces himself he's doing something important to the world,'' said Mr. Stone, who is 33 and has yet to work with one. ''You're an actor; all you do is read lines. And here's Janeane Garofolo on CNN: 'We are being silenced.' I can't turn on the TV without hearing Michael Moore's voice. And he's being silenced?''

''We never get silenced,'' said Mr. Parker, 34. ''People are always throwing money at us. I wish someone would silence us so we could take a frigging vacation.''

But no luck so far. ''You feel like you have to constantly take sides these days,'' Mr. Stone said. ''This movie dumps on everybody.''

Mr. Parker: ''That's our point: 'You don't know what's up, actors. You don't know what's up, President. Shut up.' ''

Hmmmm. Isn't that a bit childish? Doesn't anything matter? ''That's not our job,'' Mr. Parker said. ''Our job is making fun of stuff.'' But he used a four-letter word.

Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone got the idea for ''Team America'' while watching an obscure cable channel. The British 1970's puppet-action show about super-agents, ''The Thunderbirds,'' came on. (Universal just released a live-action, feature film version of the series, which bombed.) They liked the look of the show, but thought it was too boring.


The first challenges were practical. The puppets themselves are wonders of miniature technology. About 90 were hand-crafted by the brothers Stephen, Ed and Charlie Chiodo, long-time Hollywood puppetmakers. (Heads and bodies were separate; mixing and matching them created 270 characters.) The main character puppets have nine tiny motors built into their animatronic heads to create facial expressions, and recognizable latex skins stretched over the facial structure. (Hans Blix and a terrorist use the same puppet skull.) On the set, no fewer than five people may be required to work a single marionette, and that's not including the hair and make-up team. Then there are the meticulously hand-sewn costumes, everything from the gray flannel uniform of Kim Jong Il to the elaborate military finery of Moammar Ghadafi or the African foppery of Robert Mugabe.

As for the big disaster scenes, the special effects team that worked on ''Independence Day'' was brought in to create the flooding of the Panama Canal (in a 1,000-gallon tank) and the toppling of the Eiffel Tower, with almost no digital effects. After all this effort, the filmmakers decided to leave the puppet strings in the frame. ''We don't want anyone to think we did it C.G.I.,'' said Anne Garefino, an executive producer, referring to computer generated imagery. ''It was too hard to do it this way.''

The humor in ''Team America'' comes from channeling all the big-budget Hollywood action movies of recent years. ''After the first week we changed the tone to be a lot more serious,'' Mr. Stone said. ''You don't want gaggy, sitcom-ish humor, because it's a puppet. We wanted it to be serious, but we didn't realize how serious we had to be.''

A casual observer might not realize either: as Mr. Stone looked on, Mr. Parker, voicing part of the film's dialogue, was ad-libbing a spray of enthusiastic profanity in his best G.I. Joe voice while working a joystick to match the puppet's facial movements to his words.

Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone approached every scene with a WWJBD ethos: What Would Jerry Bruckheimer Do? The puppets bleed when they are shot. In the middle of every huge action sequence, there is a moment -- complete with a soundtrack of tender, swelling strings -- when two Team America agents confess their love, just before one gets killed. And when the Sphinx cracks in two, it falls directly on the bad guys' jeep -- crushing a young boy in the process.

''It's very Sam Peckinpah,'' explained Joe Viskocil, the production's special effects coordinator, preparing the Sphinx for a collision. ''The challenge is to make it look cool. Like it's a real movie.'' He added: ''It's a heck of a lot of fun.''

To him, maybe. But not to the directors, who at that moment were scrutinizing the monitor on the set of the Egyptian desert. They were waiting for a hair stylist to finish fussing with Lisa's blonde hairdo.

Not fun. Fun, they recalled, was back in 2000, when they dropped acid and dressed up as Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow to attend the Academy Awards. That was, Mr. Parker said, awesome.

''I'm so glad we did that,'' said Mr. Stone.

Mr. Parker: ''I remember about 30 seconds when I actually believed I was Jennifer Lopez.''

That seemed so long ago. For now, Mr. Stone sighed and turned back to his work. ''I've never worked harder in my life,'' he said. ''This is relentless. It's like being at war, but nowhere near as important. It's just a dumb puppet movie.'' (Except he added a four-letter word.)

Photos: Well, it looked easy: Matt Stone and Trey Parker found that their feature film ''Team America'' was no walk in South Park, even though the actors couldn't talk. Top: the puppet cast on the Paris set. (Photo by Daniel Longmire/Comedy Central); (Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount)(pg. 20); The counter-terrorist puppets of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's film ''Team America.'' (Photo by Paramount)(pg. 1)