The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 76

E14 MOVIES LOSANGELESTIMES FALL SNEAKS By John Horn Times Staff Writer HE Taj Mahal built in a day, and it looks as if going to take much longer than that to torch it. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the TV series and movie, are scurrying to finish their next film, theaction satire America: World and the Taj Mahal making their destructive work any easier. The central conceit by one-third scale marionettes dangled over miniature sets has been far easier to dream up than execute, and withtwo weeks left to complete principal photography for its Oct. 15 premiere, Stone and Parker are running out of time, money and energy. Like the most hackneyed Hollywood popcorn movie, the world will go up in smoke unless Team crime-fighting puppets single-handedly come to the rescue.

Stone and villain puppet, Kim Jong Il, is as ruthless as he is diminutive, and is laying waste to familiar sights spanning the globe. The North Korean leader already has obliterated Big Ben and onion-domed landmark is the next to be vaporized, assuming Parker and Stone can figure out how to blow it up. For the better part of an August morning ona Culver City soundstage, Stone has rehearsed a sequence intended to turn an enormous scale Taj Mahal model into rubble, but what sounds like a teenage pyro prank is proving much more complicated than that. The Launching a small-scale offensive THE GANG IS BACK WITH MORE OF ITS RAUNCHY, IRREVERENT SHTICK. BUT THIS TIME THEY RECRUITED PUPPETS TO DO THE DIRTY WORK.

Melinda Sue Gordon Paramount Pictures AMERICA: WORLD The feature-length film spoofs topical events, action movies and anything else Stone and Parker decide to set their sights on. movie sends up show business whenever possible, and the filmmakers are trying to jam in as many visual allusions as feasible. Stone, who co-wrote and serves as its second unit director, wants the Taj Mahal scene to be a recognizable homage to the nuclear shockwaves leveling Baltimore in Sum of All a great Stone says of the of All blast. probably the only good part of the Stone loads a of All DVD into his laptopand reviews the key scene with co- writer and director Parker, who is filming another segment on an adjacent set inside the same soundstage. Special-effects technicians have ringed the Taj Mahal replica with compressed-air canisters designed to generate a sequence of debris-filled shockwaves that will wipe out the innocent marionettes strolling past the Islamic shrine.

After a quick safety speech, the fireworks begin. A smoky explosion rips across the stage with a roar, the lifeless puppets collapsing in a tangled mass in the Taj reflecting pool. Parker says, punching his chair as the scene is replayed on a video monitor. puppet screwed up the whole The video replay reveals that the instant the explosion hit, the hands of one of the six puppeteers flinched just a few inches, sending his marionette skyward a split second before the shock waves arrive. more, the debris is out of scale, and the explosion bright enough.

It seems absurd to say, but the sequence looks Even though is by outward appearances a feature-length joke, the film is painstakingly well made, from intricate costume designs to high-speed chase scenes performed in remote-control cars. One tiny Uzi cost $1,000 to construct, and Kim Jong eyeglasses are made with hand-ground prescription lenses. Given their obsession with detail, craftsmanship and whatever passes for verisimilitude in a puppet movie, Stone and Parker immediately realize that as hopelessly overcrowded as their remaining production schedule might be, they must redo the whole Taj Mahal scene. movie is a nightmare to says Stone. not just explosions that have proved challenging.

To ensure Paramount would give enough money to maintain high production standards, Stone, Parker and producer Scott Rudin waived their collective fees of some $7 million. is nothing in the a weary Parker says, would ever make me want to make another puppet AMETHOD TO THEIR MADNESS EOPLE unfamiliar with the work habits of Stone, Parker and longtime writing partner Pam Brady might assume the trio simply guzzles enough beer and takes sufficient bong hits until crazy ideas start flowing. How else to explain episode Passion of the or the turning Saddam Hussein into gay lover? But a few days with Stone and Parker on the set proves that underneath their frat-house fascination with language and sexuality so coarse it might make John Waters blush, they take moviemaking quite seriously. The production boasts some of the top artists in every trade: Cinematographer Bill Pope is coming off and movies, while pyrotechnics supervisor Joe Viskocil worked on and 2: Judgment easy to forget Parker and Marc song from movie was nominated for an Academy Award (Shaiman also is composer). Stone, Parker and Brady spent nearly two years perfecting the script.

For influences, they studied scores of recent action and disaster movies, from to to To help shape the archetypal heroes (from the true believer to the reluctant hero to the guy who sells out his friends for greater glory), they read Joseph Campbell. More than anything else, as they constantly reworked the script, they asked themselves questions. Are puppets inherently Melinda Sue Gordon Paramount Pictures APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION: Team America members Chris, left, and Joe, decked out in their color-coordinated uniforms, check out the battlefield..