South Park and Book of Mormon masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced today that they're forming their own production company, with the power and money to approve movie, TV, and stage projects. The new company is called Important Studios and has $300 million in revenue built from South Park and Mormon. Parker and Stone joked in their company's press release that "Having worked with several different studios over the years, we came to realize that our favorite people in the world are ourselves." Stone told The NY Times, "Ten years ago, you needed that studio machinery to start cranking its marketing muscle. Now we could market a [...]
Louis C.K. won the Best Comedy Album Grammy for Hilarious, although he was too busy making gluten-free chicken fingers to care. (That's what "gf" stands for, right? That or "God Fuckingdamn, why am I heating up chicken fingers, I just won a Grammy. I should be in a technicolored limo somewhere between Adele and Kanye.") The Book of Mormon won best Musical Theater Album and Betty White's If You Ask Me (And Of Course You Won't) also beat Tina Fey's Bossypants for Best Spoken Word Album. No word on what foods they were cooking when they found out.
The Book of Mormon's three-week run in Denver sold out in five hours. Five hours! That's probably less time than it takes to read the actual Book of Mormon.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are today's GQ Men of the Year, and here's how Jon Stewart describes their Broadway debut The Book of Mormon in his piece about the pair:
A doctoral dissertation in funny-as-shit satire. A hysterical, full-throated defense of faith that somehow also manages to make perfect sense of a lyric involving eye-fucking God. When you witness a work of such quality—and this is coming from someone who traffics in their field—there is only one thing to say, and I cannot say it emphatically enough: Fuck those guys.
Yeah, fuck them! I like this way of complimenting people. Fuck you! All of you! You're great! [...]
Notes from the first preview of The Book of Mormon give more reasons to be optimistic about the Broadway musical from the South Park boys: "Judging by the roars of laughter and applause throughout the first performance, the audience seemed less offended than delighted. Not even a technical malfunction could dim their enthusiasm: When a sound glitch about ten minutes into the first act forced the show to restart from the beginning, the crowd cheered in support as one audience member shouted, 'Blame Canada!'"
