Трей Паркер: Творческий путь от «Южного парка» до Бродвея

American actor, animator, and filmmaker (born 1969)
the member of the band E. Y. C.

Randolph Severn "Trey" Parker III (born October 19, 1969) is an American actor, animator, writer, producer, director, and musician. He is best known for co creating South Park (since 1997) and The Book of Mormon (2011) with his creative partner Matt Stone. Parker was interested in film and music as a child and at high school and attended the University of Colorado Boulder, where he met Stone. The two collaborated on various short films and co starred in Parker’s feature length musical Cannibal! The Musical (1993). Parker and Stone moved to Los Angeles, and Parker made his second feature length film Orgazmo (1997). Before the premiere of the film, South Park premiered on Comedy Central in August 1997. The duo possess full creative control of the show, and have produced music and video games based on it. A film based on the series, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999), was well received from both critics and fans. Parker went on to write, produce, direct, and star in the satirical action film Team America: World Police (2004), and, after several years of development, The Book of Mormon premiered on Broadway to positive reviews. 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.

Parker was born in Conifer, Colorado, the son of insurance saleswoman Sharon and geologist Randolph "Randy" Parker II. 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. 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. Following his graduation from Evergreen High School in 1988, Parker spent a semester at Berklee College of Music before transferring to the University of Colorado Boulder. Parker majored in both film and Japanese. During his time there, he took a film class in which students were required to collaborate on projects. 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.

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 idea was based on an obsession Parker had with Alferd Packer, a real nineteenth century prospector accused of cannibalism. 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—under the pseudonym Juan Schwartz—was the film's star, director and co producer. They intended to sell video rights to the film for $1 million and spend the remaining $900,000 to create another film.

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; 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. The idea for the town of South Park came from the real Colorado basin of the same name, where, according to the creators, a lot of folklore and news reports originated about "UFO sightings, and cattle mutilations, and Bigfoot sightings." At the time, Comedy Central had a low distribution of just 21 million subscribers. The company 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. 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. During the time, the team was also busy writing the second and third seasons of the series, the former of which Parker and Stone later described as "disastrous". As such, they figured the phenomenon would be over soon, and they decided to write a personal, fully committed musical. Parker and Stone fought with the MPAA to keep the film R rated; for months the ratings board insisted on the more prohibitive NC 17. The film was only certified an R rating two weeks prior to its release, following contentious conversations between Parker/Stone, Rudin, and Paramount Pictures. Parker felt overwhelmed and overworked during the production process of the film, especially between April and the film's opening in late June. He admitted that press coverage, which proclaimed the end of South Park was near, bothered him. Parker and Stone continue to write, direct, and voice most characters on South Park. Over time, the show has adopted a unique production process, in which an entire episode is written, animated and broadcast in one week. Parker and Stone state that subjecting themselves to a one week deadline creates more spontaneity amongst themselves in the creative process, which they feel results in a funnier show. In 2012, South Park cut back from producing 14 episodes per year (seven in the spring and seven in the fall) to a single run of 10 episodes in the fall, to allow the duo to explore other projects the rest of the year. The show's twenty third season premiered on September 25, 2019. South Park has continued, becoming an enterprise worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The franchise has also expanded to music and video games. Comedy Central released various albums, including Chef Aid: The South Park Album and Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics, in the late 1990s. The song "Chocolate Salty Balls" (as sung by the character Chef) was released as a single in the UK in 1998 to support the Chef Aid: The South Park Album and became a number one hit. Parker and Stone had little to do with the development of video games based on the series that were released at this time, but took full creative control of South Park: The Stick of Truth, a 2014 video game based on the series that received positive reviews and for which they shared (with Eric Fenstermaker) the 2014 Writing In A Comedy and Parker won the Performance in a Comedy, Supporting award by National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers (NAVGTR). Broadcast syndication rights to South Park were sold in 2003, and all episodes are available for free full length on demand legal streaming on the official South Park Studios website. In 2007, the duo, with the help of their lawyer, Kevin Morris, cut a 50–50 joint venture with Comedy Central on all revenue not related to television; this includes digital rights to South Park, as well as films, soundtracks, T shirts and other merchandise, in a deal worth $75 million.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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 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.

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. and the crew embarked on the first of a half dozen workshops that would take place during the next four years. After a frantic series of rewrites, rehearsals, and previews, 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. 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. In the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic, Parker, Stone, and Peter Serafinowicz created a web series, Sassy Justice. The series uses deepfake technology to insert unrelated celebrities and politicians into the fictional world of a television reporter. The first episode was posted to YouTube on October26, 2020. The team was originally assembled for a film project that was interrupted due to the pandemic, who made the video based on a series of impressions that Serafinowicz developed of a "sassy" Donald Trump. The creators have a handful of shorter videos alongside a 15 minute first episode that may be turned into an ongoing series, film, or other type of project. In September 2021, Parker and Stone reached an agreement to purchase Casa Bonita for $3.1 million. A group named "Save Casa Bonita" filed an objection to Parker and Stone's purchase, pointing out that they had in fact made an offer first. Their objection was later withdrawn, and the sale was completed by November 19. They spent $40 million renovating the restaurant and hired Chef Dana Rodriguez to update the menu. The restaurant had a soft opening on May 26, 2023. In early June, Casa Bonita began taking reservations although a formal opening date had not been set. Parker and Stone amended the employee compensation system at Casa Bonita, removing the need for wait staff to earn tips, instead paying every employee $30 per hour, much higher than the Colorado minimum wage, $13.65. In January 2022, it was announced Parker will produce an untitled film with Stone through their now renamed production company Park County and Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free's multi disciplinary media company PGLang. It will be distributed by Paramount Pictures.