They Got Game

The Marx Brothers. Laurel and Hardy. Abbott and Costello. Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Huh?

The “South Park” guys, those icon-slandering, potty-joke-loving subversives, mentioned in the same breath with the legendary film comics? Well, yes. At least in the opinion of director David Zucker, on the set of his new comedy “BASEketball.”

Parker and Stone, creators and producers of Comedy Central’s equal-opportunity offender “South Park,” are emerging from behind their computer screens to star in Zucker’s sports satire, which is scheduled for a July 31 release.

“Everybody is surprised at how well these guys come off on film,” says the director of the “Naked Gun” movies and co-director of the comedy classic “Airplane!” “As far as what they do for the ‘90s, I’d put them up against anyone: what the Marx Brothers were doing in the ‘30s, or Abbott and Costello in the ‘40s, or whatever. They’ve become well-known as behind-the-scenes guys, [but] they’re first-rate comic actors too.”

As a movie, “BASEketball” is Zucker’s colossal conceit. He took a driveway game he invented in the ‘80s and, after failing to turn it into a TV game show (Chris Rock was in the pilot) or an HBO series (the script didn’t work), convinced Universal to make it into a feature film starring then-unknown actors Parker and Stone.

The game, “a sport for guys with bad knees and bad backs,” says Zucker, grafts baseball concepts--singles, doubles, triples, home runs, bunts--onto traditional backyard hoop-shooting. It caught on with neighbors and friends, and by the early ‘90s, Zucker and company were wearing uniforms, playing tournaments, keeping meticulous statistics and even publishing a magazine.

Zucker thought “BASEketball” could be the basis for a vehicle about the madness that has enveloped professional sports in the ‘90s.

“It’s such a ripe target,” he says during a break in shooting at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown L.A. “Players changing teams, the outrageous behavior, outrageous salaries, the commercialization--it’s totally changed from when I was a kid. I wanted to take out all my frustrations somewhere.”

Zucker ruled out using a baseball, football or basketball team as his centerpiece as being too specific to a single sport. But a fictitious one that contained familiar elements, he reasoned, would be broad enough to cover everything that annoys him about today’s overpaid athletes and corporate-logo mentality.

The movie extrapolates Zucker’s personal experience into a nationwide phenomenon. Parker and Stone play a couple of slackers who invent a driveway game that grows far beyond their dreams. Robert Vaughn plays a wealthy industrialist who sees the commercial possibilities in the game; Jenny McCarthy, Yasmine Bleeth and Ernest Borgnine are also in the cast, and sportscasters Bob Costas and Al Michaels play themselves.

On the set, Stone and Parker are dressed in the red, white and blue uniforms of their team, the Milwaukee Beers, which is playing the L.A. Riots. (Among the other franchises in “BASEketball”: the New Jersey Informants, Miami Dealers, Dallas Felons and Roswell Aliens).

Between setups, they are on cell phones transacting “South Park” business or working on the new season of the animated series.

After each take, they gather around the video playback monitors with Zucker, his co-writers and producers, and howl with laughter.

Unlike “Airplane!” or the “Naked Gun” movies, Zucker explains, “BASEketball” is not a spoof--but it seems apparent that, like those earlier movies, this one will be jammed with gags ranging from the sophisticated to the sophomoric.

That suits the “South Park” pair, who take pains to point out that their casting is not a matter of cashing in on their newfound fame.

“We got offered this movie when we were doing the first two episodes of ‘South Park,’ ” says Parker, 28. “At the time it was nothing. It hadn’t been on TV yet.”

In fact, Zucker originally asked Parker to direct the film based on the duo’s earlier work, including the low-budget “Cannibal: The Musical” and an in-house Universal spoof, “Your Studio and You.” But, up to their necks in “South Park,” Parker declined. A few weeks later Zucker offered them the starring roles.

“We thought, ‘That’s kinda cool, that’ll be easy, it won’t take much time and it’ll be fun,’ ” Parker says. With shooting scheduled for January--then six months away--it seemed to fit right into their schedules. “We basically thought ‘South Park’ would be canceled by then,” adds Stone, 26. “Six and out. On to the next thing.”

Nobody predicted the sensation that “South Park” would become, making magazine covers from Newsweek to Rolling Stone and becoming the target of parents’ groups and conservative critics. That part of the “South Park” story rankles the duo.

“People don’t understand that we’re not psyched about all the press,” says Parker. “We don’t like being everywhere. And it’s a drag because everyone’s now starting to take shots at us.” And, he adds, “BASEketball” won’t be “an hour and a half of ‘South Park.’ That’s what we’re doing the ‘South Park’ movie for.”

But it may be inevitable that “BASEketball” contains something of their cutting-edge sensibilities. First, the plot is more than a little ironic.

“This was done way before ‘South Park,’ ” says Parker, “but now all of a sudden here we are playing two guys that invent something that gets really huge and they’re stuck in the middle of it.”

Second, Zucker and friends rewrote the script for them and their Colorado chum Dian Bachar (the self-described “punching bag” for Stone and Parker; “they just rip on him constantly,” adds Zucker). And there is plenty of on-set tinkering with the script, with the other three writers, Stone and Parker all contributing.

Zucker claims that the “BASEketball” shoot has been his most enjoyable time in the movie business. “What’s going on creatively on this movie, I haven’t experienced, really, since ‘Airplane!’ There are so many comedic minds working,” he says.

Parker and Stone say they wanted to do this movie because they revere the Zucker style of comedy and felt that being around a Zucker film would be a great learning experience--with an eye toward their own careers as filmmakers.

Says Stone: “As hot as ‘South Park’ is, the Zucker legacy is way bigger than we are. People know ‘Airplane!,’ ‘Top Secret,’ ‘Naked Gun.’ People know that style much better than our style of humor.”

Adds Parker: “We told Comedy Central, ‘You’ve got to let us go do this.’ You know, Matt and I don’t really necessarily want to be actors. We never did. But having the opportunity to be on a studio set and not be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m the director!’ freaking out. Just being like, ‘Tell me what to do, show me how to do it,’ having that experience, is so invaluable.”

After “BASEketball,” Parker and Stone are scheduled to write the “Dumb and Dumber” prequel. Their porn-film sendup “Orgazmo” is scheduled for release by October Films later this year.

To Zucker, Parker and Stone are the next generation of comics. “They’re kind of like Monty Python. They not only think like satirists, they live it. They’re poking fun at a lot of conventions--the stuff that we [Zucker, his brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams] did when we first came out here. We were the people who said the emperor has no clothes. That’s what satirists do. That’s what also makes them down to earth.”

Enthuses Parker: “We feel like we’re a punk band doing a country album. Which, if we were a punk band, we’d want to do a country album.”