Background and career
Matthew Richard Stone (born May 26, 1971) is an American animator, filmmaker, songwriter and actor. He studied film and mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he met his creative partner Trey Parker. As students, they made the independent film Cannibal! The Musical (1993). They found fame with the animated satire South Park (since 1997) and the film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999). Their satirical action film Team America: World Police (2004) stars a cast of marionettes. With Robert Lopez, they co-created the musical The Book of Mormon (2011). Stone is the recipient of numerous accolades, including five Primetime Emmy Awards and a Peabody for South Park and three Tony Awards and a Grammy Award for The Book of Mormon. In 2026, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.
Matthew Richard Stone was born on May 26, 1971, in Houston, Texas, the son of Sheila Lois (née Belasco) and Gerald Whitney Stone Jr., an economist. He is of Irish-American heritage from his father's side and Jewish heritage from his mother's side. The South Park characters Gerald and Sheila Broflovski were named after them. Stone and his younger sister Rachel were raised in Littleton, Colorado, a Denver suburb, where they attended Heritage High School. He played drums, and early musical influences included Rush and The Police. He attended the University of Colorado Boulder. His father, fearing his son would "become a musician and a bum", insisted that he major in something "practical". Stone graduated with a double-major degree in mathematics and film in 1993. At CU, he met Trey Parker, and the pair bonded over anti-authoritarian ethos and love of Monty Python. They studied with the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whom they cast in their first feature film.
In 1992, Parker, Stone, Jason McHugh and Ian Hardin founded a production company, Avenging Conscience, named for a film which the group hated. Its first production was The Spirit of Christmas (1992, referred to as Jesus vs. Frosty), a short pitting the religious figure against Frosty the Snowman. Observing the showdown are four foulmouthed friends who would feature in their later work. The quartet created a three-minute trailer for a fictional film, Alfred Packer: The Musical. Alfred Packer, the "Colorado Cannibal", was a prospector convicted for consuming his companions during a harsh winter (the CU cafeteria is named for him). The trailer became a sensation among students and Virgil Grillo, the chairman and founder of the film department, convinced the quartet to expand it into a feature film. Parker was a longtime musical theater fan and dreamed of doing something in the genre. Stone had a "musical-deprived childhood" (aside from Fiddler on the Roof and Monty Python numbers) but Parker showed him the ropes. Parker, under the alias Juan Schwartz, starred, directed and co-produced, creating an Oklahoma!-style musical with ten original show tunes. The movie was shot on Loveland Pass as winter was ending, and the crew endured freezing weather. Filming locations included the Lake City, Colorado courthouse where Packer was tried. Stone and McHugh costarred, and Brakhage had a bit part. Alferd Packer: The Musical premiered in Boulder, Colorado on October 31, 1993. The group submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival, which did not respond. Parker said he had a "vision" they needed to be at the festival, so the group rented out a conference room in a nearby hotel and put on their own screenings. MTV did a short news segment on The Big Picture about the film, and they made industry connections through the festival. 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 best-selling title. It has become a cult classic and adapted as a stage play by community theater groups and even high schools nationwide.
Following the succès de scandale' of Cannibal!, the group, sans Hardin, moved to Los Angeles. Upon arrival, they met a lawyer for the William Morris Agency who connected them with producer Scott Rudin. The duo acquired a lawyer, an agent and a script deal. 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 a mattress. They unsuccessfully pitched a children's program, Time Warped, which would have involved fictionalized stories of historical figures, to Fox Kids. The trio created two separate pilots, spaced a year apart, and despite the approval of executive Pam Brady, the network disbanded Fox Kids. David Zucker, who was a fan of Cannibal!, asked the duo to make a 15-minute film for a party celebrating Seagram's acquisition of Universal Studios. Due to miscommunication, they improvised much of the film an hour before it was shot. Your Studio and You is a spoof of 1950s educational films starring Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore, Steven Spielberg and others. Parker recalled, "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." Between shooting the pilots for Time Warped, Parker penned Orgazmo, about a Mormon missionary moonlighting as a porn star. When it entered production, half of the budget came from Kuki, a Japanese porn company which wanted to feature its performers in mainstream Western media. Independent distributor October Films purchased the film rights for one million dollars after its screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film received an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, which resulted in poor box office performance. Parker and Stone attempted to negotiate with the organization on what to delete from the final print, but the MPAA would not give specific notes. They reasoned that the organization cared less because it was an independent distributor which would bring it significantly less money. Brian Graden (then at Fox) asked the duo to produce a video Christmas card that he could send to friends. The Spirit of Christmas (1995, referred to as Jesus vs. Santa), is a variation on the theme of their earlier short. Graden sent copies to Hollywood executives; meanwhile, someone digitized it and put it on the internet, where it became one of the first viral videos. George Clooney is said to have made 300 copies for friends. Parker and Stone began talks of developing the short into a television series. Comedy Central's Doug Herzog said of the short "It literally was the funniest thing I'd ever seen. We said, 'Develop a show.'"
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, and animation took place in a small room at Celluloid Studios in Denver during the summer of 1996. Like Parker and Stone's Christmas shorts, the original pilot was animated entirely with cutout animation. The idea for the town of South Park came from the Colorado basin where a lot of folklore and news reports originated about "cattle mutilations and UFO and bigfoot sightings". The setting provided a home for the show's surreal, subversive humor. Starring are four foul-mothed friends, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick. 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. The show transformed the then-fledgling Comedy Central into "a cable industry power almost overnight". At the time, the cable network had a low distribution of just 21 million subscribers. Comedy Central 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. Due to the success of the series' first six episodes, Comedy Central requested an additional seven; the series completed its first season in February 1998. 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. Their philosophy of taking every deal (which had surfaced as a result of their lack of trust in the early success of South Park) led to their appearances in films, albums and outside script deals. Among these was BASEketball (1998), a comedy which was a critical and commercial flop. Stone was a fan of Primus and asked them to do the South Park theme song. Comedy Central released spinoff albums, including Chef Aid: The South Park Album and Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics, in the late 1990s. The song "Chocolate Salty Balls" (sung by Isaac Hayes's Chef) was released as a single in the UK in 1998 and became a number one hit. He directed many of the show's musical guests, like Hayes and Radiohead.
Parker and Stone signed a deal with Comedy Central in April 1998 that contracted the duo to producing South Park episodes until 1999, gave them a slice of the lucrative spinoff merchandising the show generated within its first year, as well as an unspecified seven-figure cash bonus to bring the show to theaters. 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, figuring the phenomenon would be over soon, they decided to write a personal, fully committed musical, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The duo 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. The film opened in cinemas in June 1999, receiving critical acclaim and grossing $83 million at the box office. "Blame Canada", cowritten by Parker and Marc Shaiman, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The duo attended the ceremony in drag and on LSD.
