Trey Parker facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Trey Parker
Parker at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con
Born	Randolph Severn Parker III (1969-10-19) October 19, 1969 (age 55) Conifer, Colorado, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Colorado Boulder (BA)
Occupation	Actor animator writer producer director musician
Years active	1992–present
Works	Filmography and awards
Spouse(s)	Emma Sugiyama ​ ​ (m. 2006; div. 2008)​ Boogie Tillmon ​ ​ (m. 2014; div. 2019)​
Children	1

Randolph Severn "Trey" Parker III (born October 19, 1969) is an American actor, animator, writer, producer, director, and composer. He is known for co-creating South Park (1997–present) and co-developing The Book of Mormon (2011) with his creative partner Matt Stone.

Parker has received five Primetime Emmy Awards for his work on South Park, four Tony Awards and a Grammy Award for The Book of Mormon, and an Academy Award nomination for the song "Blame Canada" from the South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut movie, co-written with Marc Shaiman.

Early life

Parker was born in Conifer, Colorado, the son of insurance saleswoman Sharon and geologist Randolph "Randy" Parker. He was a shy child who received "decent" grades and was involved in honors classes. He idolized Monty Python, which he began watching on television in the third grade. His later ventures into animation would bear considerable influence from Terry Gilliam. In the sixth grade, Parker wrote a sketch titled The Dentist and appeared in his school's talent show. He played the dentist and had a friend play the patient. The plot involved what can go wrong at the dentist; due to the amounts of fake blood involved, Parker's parents were called and were upset, with Parker later recalling that "the kindergartners were all crying and freaking out".

Parker has described himself as "the typical big-dream kid" who envisioned a career in film and music. He made short films on the weekends with a group of friends, beginning when he was 14. His father had purchased him a video camera and the group continued making films until graduation. He became interested in pursuing music at 17, but only comedy-centered songs; he wrote and recorded a full-length comedy album, Immature: A Collection of Love Ballads For The '80's Man, with friend David Goodman during this time. As a teenager, Parker developed a love for musical theatre, and joined the Evergreen Players, a venerable mountain community theater outside of Denver. In high school, he also played piano for the chorus and was president of the choir counsel. As Evergreen was nationally known for its choir program, Parker was a very popular high school student, connected to his position as the head of the choir. He was typically the lead in school plays and was also prom king. While in school, Parker had a part-time job at a Pizza Hut and was described as a film geek and music buff.

Following his graduation from high school in 1988, Parker spent a semester at Berklee College of Music before transferring to the University of Colorado at Boulder. During his time there, he took a film class in which students were required to collaborate on projects. In the course, he met Matt Stone—a math major from the nearby town of Littleton. Parker's first film was titled Giant Beavers of Southern Sri Lanka (1989), parodying Godzilla-style rampages with beavers; fellow student Jason McHugh later remarked that the idea nearly got him laughed out of class. Parker and Stone wrote and acted in many short films together, among those First Date, Man on Mars and Job Application. Parker later remarked that he and Stone would shoot a film nearly every week, but he has since lost most of them. Parker first used a construction paper animation technique on American History (1992), a short film made for his college animation class. It became an unexpected sensation, resulting in Parker's first award—a Student Academy Award.

Career

Career beginnings

Cannibal! The Musical (1992–1994)

In 1992, Parker, Stone, McHugh, and Ian Hardin founded a production company named the Avenging Conscience, named after the D. W. Griffith film by the same name, which all four actively disliked. Parker again employed the cutout paper technique on Avenging Conscience's first production, Jesus vs. Frosty (1992), an animated short pitting the religious figure against Frosty the Snowman.

The quartet created a three-minute trailer for a fictional film titled Alferd Packer: The Musical. The trailer became somewhat of a sensation among students at the school, leading Virgil Grillo, the chairman and founder of the university's film department, to convince the quartet to expand it to a feature-length film. Parker wrote the film's script, creating an Oklahoma!-style musical featuring ten original show tunes. The group raised $125,000 from family and friends and began shooting the film. The film was shot on Loveland Pass as winter was ending, and the crew endured the freezing weather. Parker—under the pseudonym Juan Schwartz—was the film's star, director and co-producer.

Alferd Packer: The Musical premiered in Boulder in October 1993. 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 biggest-selling title. It has since been labeled a "cult classic" and adapted into a stage play by community theater groups and even high schools nationwide.

The Spirit of Christmas (1995–1997)

Following the film's success, the group, sans Hardin, moved to Los Angeles. 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 to purchase a mattress.

David Zucker, who was a fan of Cannibal!, contacted the duo to produce a 15-minute short film for Seagram to show at a party for its acquisition of Universal Studios. Due to a misunderstanding, Parker and Stone improvised much of the film an hour before it was shot, creating it as a spoof of 1950s instructional videos. The result, Your Studio and You, features numerous celebrities, including Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore, and Steven Spielberg. "You could probably make a feature film out of the experience of making that movie because it was just two dudes from college suddenly directing Steven Spielberg," Parker later remarked, noting that the experience was difficult for the two.

Parker and Stone also made a short film called The Spirit of Christmas (although it is now usually called Jesus vs. Frosty). Brian Graden (then at Fox) liked this short and asked Parker and Stone to produce a video greeting card (for which he paid with his own money) he could send to friends, this film is now usually known as Jesus vs. Santa. Both Jesus vs. Frosty and Jesus vs. Santa had The Spirit of Christmas as opening credits. Graden sent the film on VHS to several industry executives in Hollywood; meanwhile, someone digitized the short film and put it on Internet, where it became one of the first viral videos. As Jesus vs. Santa became more popular, Parker and Stone began talks of developing the short into a television series called South Park. They first pitched the show to Fox, but the network refused to pick it up due to not wanting to air a show that included the talking poo character Mr. Hankey. The two were initially skeptical of possible television deals, noting that previous endeavors had not turned out successful, but then entered negotiations with both MTV and Comedy Central. Parker preferred the show be produced by Comedy Central, fearing that MTV would turn it into a kids show. When Comedy Central executive Doug Herzog watched the short, he commissioned for it to be developed into a series.

South Park

The pilot episode of South Park was made on a budget of $300,000, and took between three to three and a half months to complete, and animation took place in a small room at Celluloid Studios, in Denver, Colorado, during the summer of 1996. Similarly to Parker and Stone's Christmas shorts, the original pilot was animated entirely with traditional cut paper stop-motion animation techniques.

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. Parker and Stone became celebrities as a result of the program's success.

Parker (left) and Matt Stone (right) continue to do most of the writing, directing and voice acting on South Park.

Although initial reviews for the show were negative, the series has received numerous accolades, including five Primetime Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and numerous inclusions in various publications' lists of greatest television shows. Though its viewership is lower than it was at the height of its popularity in its earliest seasons, South Park remains one of the highest-rated series on Comedy Central. The show's twenty-third season premiered on September 25, 2019.

Television and film projects

That's My Bush! (2000–2001)

In 2000, Parker and Stone began plotting a television sitcom starring 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. Parker said the producers did not want to make fun of politics: the main goal was to parody sitcom tropes, such as a lovable main character, the sassy maid, and the wacky neighbor. 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.

Although That's My Bush!, which ran between April and May 2001, received a fair amount of publicity and critical notice, according to Stone and Parker, the cost per episode was too high, "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. Parker believed the show would not have survived after the September 11 attacks anyway, and Stone agreed, saying the show would not "play well". During this time, the duo also signed a deal with Shockwave.com to produce 39 animated online shorts, in which they would retain full artistic control; the result, Princess, was rejected after only two episodes.

Team America (2002–2004)

In 2002, the duo began working on Team America: World Police, a satire of big-budget action films and their associated clichés and stereotypes, with particular humorous emphasis on the global implications of the politics of the United States. The film was inspired by the 1960s British marionette series, Thunderbirds.

Starring puppets, Team America was produced using a crew of about 200 people, which sometimes required four people at a time to manipulate a marionette. Although the filmmakers hired three dozen highly skilled marionette operators, 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 successfully. The deadline for the film's completion took a toll on both filmmakers, as did various difficulties in working with puppets, with Stone, who described the film as "the worst time of [my] life", resorting to coffee to work 20-hour days and sleeping pills to go to bed. The film was barely completed in time for its October release date, but reviews were positive and the film made a modest sum at the box office.

Broadway and film studio

Parker at a ceremony for Penn & Teller to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013

The Book of Mormon

Parker and Stone, alongside writer-composer Robert Lopez, began working on a musical centering on Mormonism during the production of Team America. Lopez, a fan of South Park and creator of the puppet musical Avenue Q, met with the duo after a performance of the musical, where they conceived the idea. The musical, titled The Book of Mormon: The Musical of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was worked on over a period of several 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, producer Scott Rudin planned to stage The Book of Mormon off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop in summer 2010, but opted to premiere it directly 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 on Broadway at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on March 24, 2011. The Book of Mormon received broad critical praise for the plot, score, actors' performances, direction and choreography. A cast recording of the original Broadway production became the highest-charting Broadway cast album in over four decades. The musical received nine Tony Awards, one for Best Musical, and a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. The production has since expanded to two national tours, a Chicago production, UK production, and as of 2014 Parker and Stone had confirmed that a film adaption was in pre-production.

Important Studios and future projects

Parker (left) and Stone (right) at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2016

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.

On April 13, 2016, Universal Pictures announced Trey Parker would voice the villain Balthazar Bratt in Despicable Me 3. The film, released in June 2017, was Parker's first voice role not scripted by either him or Matt Stone.

On January 13, 2022, it was announced Parker will produce an untitled film with Matt Stone through their now-renamed production company Parker County and Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free's multi-disciplinary media company PGLang. It will be distributed by Paramount Pictures. The live-action film comedy, written by Vernon Chatham, addresses racial issues. Production is expected to begin in the spring of 2024.

Personal life

Parker married Emma Sugiyama in 2006. The officiant was 1970s sitcom producer Norman Lear. The marriage ended in divorce in 2008.

Parker subsequently began a relationship with Boogie Tillmon, whom he later married in 2014. Parker gained a stepson through this relationship. Their daughter, Betty Boogie Parker, was born in 2013. The couple divorced in 2019, citing irreconcilable differences. While they remain divorced, they have since reconciled to co-parent their child.

Parker resides in Los Angeles, California. He owns properties in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; Kauai, Hawaii; Seattle, Washington; and Midtown Manhattan in New York City.

Discography

Albums

Soundtrack albums

Cast recording

Filmography and accolades

• Cannibal! The Musical (1993)
• BASEketball (1998)
• South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)
• Terror Firmer (1999)
• Run Ronnie Run! (2002)
• Team America: World Police (2004)
• The Aristocrats (2005)
• Despicable Me 3 (2017)
• South Park: Post Covid (2021)
• South Park: Post Covid: The Return of Covid (2021)
• South Park: The Streaming Wars (2022)
• South Park: The Streaming Wars Part 2 (2022)
• South Park: Joining the Panderverse (2023)
• Untitled Kendrick Lamar film (TBA)

See also

In Spanish: Trey Parker para niños