For a few days, Trey Parker was self-admittedly “giddy.” The co-creator of South Park, one half of the duo behind the Broadway juggernaut The Book of Mormon and the person who wrote the immortal lyric “A-mer-i-ca!/ Fuck yeah!”, was going to take his nieces and nephews to a restaurant in Denver, Colorado. Not simply any restaurant, thoughts you — this one was distinctive. Parker had grown up going to this magical place within the ’70s and ’80s, and it held a very particular place in his coronary heart. So, understanding that these younger guests from Los Angeles could be experiencing one thing actually distinctive and probably lifechanging for the very first time, he was already getting excited 48 hours forward of the meal.
“I wasn’t going to tell them anything about it,” Parker says, lounging in an outside patio on a sizzling August day in Telluride, Colorado. His inventive associate in crime, Matt Stone, is sitting subsequent to him, leaning again in his chair and listening intently to his good friend spin this yarn. “One of them was six, one was eight, one was nine, so they were just the right age. I simply told them, ‘OK, so were going to this restaurant. You know the McDonald’s that has, like, a playground in the parking lot? It’s kind of like that.’ I just couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces. That’s always my favorite part.”
The place Parker was taking them to was known as Casa Bonita, and for many years, this consuming institution was a Denver establishment. Built in 1974, it was a Mexican restaurant positioned in a downtown strip mall that, unfold out over 52,000 sq. toes, featured arcades, animatronic puppets, ground exhibits involving a Western outlaw named Black Bart, a man in a gorilla swimsuit greeting patrons, and cliff divers leaping off large indoor waterfalls. The meals was legendarily dangerous. But the expertise, in case you had been a child with a boundless creativeness like Parker was, might be transformative. And the Man Who Would Be Cartman was anxious to watch his younger daughter and her three cousins go up the ramp main from the entrance doorways to the regionally themed wonderland inside and have their tiny minds blown. First, nonetheless, he needed them to meet the fortune-telling parrot.
“There was always this bird that, when you walked in, would give you your fortune,” Parker remembers, getting visibly excited on the reminiscence. “I was like, ‘You guys are going to have a lot of fun, but you have to get your fortune told first!’ So we walk up to the bird, and we press the button, and the bird goes …” Parker proceeds to mime the herky-jerky demise rattle of a robotic creature shuffling off this mortal coil. He then adopts the voice of an excited however confused baby: “‘What’s the bird gonna do, Uncle Trey?!?’ Apparently, it’s going to do absolutely fucking nothing! Because it’s fucking broken. Of course, they run off and have a great time for the next three hours. And I’m sitting there texting our guys, going ‘God-fucking-dammit, nothing fucking works!'”
Stone begins laughing so onerous that you just fear he’s going to fall out of his leaned-back chair. “Trey and that fucking bird, oh, man,” he says. “I’m going to make a sitcom that’s just Trey and the malfunctioning fortune-telling bird. It would be the funniest show on television.”
This was not the primary time the parrot refused to inform somebody their future, nor would it not be the final. And had the fowl revealed to Parker and Stone what they had been stepping into again within the autumn of 2021, when the duo went from longtime followers of Casa Bonita to changing into its new house owners, they may not be sitting right here immediately, cursing its identify. Casa Bonita Mi Amor! chronicles their resolution to save the Denver landmark from terminal extinction after the pandemic shut its doorways for a number of years and its mother or father firm filed for chapter. For Parker, the possibility to purchase this storied establishment of his youth was the equal of buying Disneyland. Once he and Stone started to cope with the fact of a restaurant in a state of disaster-level disrepair and the value tag that comes with a stem-to-stern restoration, nonetheless, the collaborators shortly discover themselves within the center of a money-pit nightmare.
And watching the documentary about the entire endeavor, which hit theaters on Sept. 13, you get to journey shotgun with Parker and Stone from the second they announce the information in a livestreamed Facebook interview with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to their discovery of countless setbacks and sticker-shock moments. “There’s a point in the doc where Matt says, ‘Some new carpets and paint, that’s all it’s going to take,'” Parker says. “And I already had a list of, ‘Oh, I want to do this, and improve this, and make that a hundred times better!’ But we’ve built and bought and redone enough houses to know that it’s never that easy. I think we truly believed this would be, ‘Let’s just reopen it and then we can be creative.’ That quickly turned into: ‘Oh, we are totally and utterly fucked here, aren’t we?'”
Anyone who’s lived close to Denver since Casa Bonita first opened its doorways again within the Nixon period will attest to what a large deal a go to to this kid-friendly restaurant was. Growing up in Littleton, Stone says, he remembers visits close to the top of soccer seasons together with his whole workforce; Parker remembers an ongoing quid professional quo cope with his classmates with reference to birthdays. “We had an agreement in the school that, like, ‘I’ll invite you to my Casa Bonita birthday, but you have to invite me to your Casa Bonita birthday,'” he says. “It started to become, like, ‘OK, how many Casa Bonita parties am I gonna get this year!? As long as I invite so-and-so, then they have to invite me to theirs!'”
This particular reminiscence was half of what led to “Casa Bonita,” the 2003 South Park episode the place Cartman methods Butters into pondering the world is ending so he can take his place at a Bonita celebration. It ends with him bum-rushing the restaurant and leaping off the indoor waterfall’s cliff earlier than getting arrested. For followers of the present who’d by no means tasted the restaurant’s signature sopapillas or marveled at its faux-Mexican pueblo structure, this was their first publicity to Parker’s childhood model of Shangri-La. “We thought people would be like, ‘Oh, it’s this weird thing,'” Parker says. “But it really helped Casa Bonita. I think they actually stayed in business because of that episode.”
Still, after the place modified administration a quantity of instances over time, Casa Bonita grew to become each run-down and considerably of a joke. Both Parker and Stone recall taking faculty buddies from California and the East Coast to the landmark with the intention of a purposefully kitschy night time out. “It was like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to take you here because you just can’t wrap your head around it,'” Parker says. “Not in a cool way, but more like, ‘Wait, this literally stinks and the food’s bad and why is there a random guy in a gorilla suit running around?’ But that was all kind of part of the experience.”
“‘We’re gonna go to this place to eat that’s so shitty,‘” Stone pipes in, enthusiastically. “‘It’ll be awesome!'”
But as Casa Bonita, Mi Amor! exhibits, the fantasy of having the keys to the dominion by no means actually left Parker’s thoughts. The doc kicks off with the fellows dropping by the place proper after The Book of Mormon‘s opening, and Parker ruminating on having the ability to purchase his childhood obsession. After Summit Family Restaurants, which then owned the institution, filed for Chapter 11 in April 2021, Stone known as his good friend. There was a probability they may grow to be partial buyers if this new firm purchased it.
“That was the initial conversation,” Parker says. “Slowly over time that became, ‘Well, they might not be doing it anymore … and we’d be the only investors.’ Then it was: ‘OK, those guys are out completely. We’d actually just be doing it ourselves.’ And most of the time I’m just like, ‘Yep. Cool. Of course we’re doing this!'”
“We did zero due diligence,” Stone provides, shaking his head. “It was very much like, ‘We bought Casa Bonita, sweet! You know, we’ll fix it up and Trey can make a new and improved Black Bart’s Cave. How hard could it be?’ Well … you’ve seen the movie. The answer is millions and millions and millions of dollars’ worth of hard.”
The concept of filming the renovation and reopening of Casa Bonita wasn’t one thing that they had mentioned initially — they only occurred to have an previous good friend with a digital camera tagging alongside as inspections revealed foundational rot, Parker grew to become more and more annoyed with the mounting obstacles, and what began as a $10 million undertaking quickly quadrupled its proposed finances. Parker and Stone had recognized Arthur Bradford since their pre-South Park days, again when the filmmaker was in a creative-writing program at Stanford. The duo helped fund a TV undertaking Bradford did within the early 2000s known as How’s Your News?, and he later shot 6 Days to Air, a 2011 behind-the-scenes take a look at South Park‘s hectic manufacturing schedule. Bradford quickly grew to become their unofficial filmmaker-in-residence. Mounting a Tony-winning musical, taking part in a Twenty fifth-anniversary live performance at Red Rocks, scrapping and immediately redoing an episode devoted to Hilary Clinton profitable the 2016 election when actuality handed them a totally different ending — each time Parker and Stone did one thing outdoors of the places of work and/or outdoors of the norm, their good friend was normally there, capturing it for posterity.
So the very fact they had been going to purchase the Xanadu of Mexican eating places was simply one other loopy factor to add to the listing of loopy issues they’d completed over time, which was sufficient for Bradford and his longtime cinematographer, P.H. O’Brien, to embed themselves and begin taking pictures. It was roughly midway by way of the method of restoring Casa Bonita to its former tacky glory, one prohibitively costly step at a time, that Bradford got here to Parker and Stone and instructed that what he was getting had the makings of a function documentary.
“Not something we’d just throw on social media, not a DVD extra, but the potential to be an actual movie,” Stone says. “And he ended up being right — I think the doc really is a work of art. But even before that … I remember sitting in a meeting between us and the contractors, feeling completely miserable. It’s one bit of bad news after the next, these people are all mad at each other, there’s so much tension in the room. Then I catch Arthur and P.H. out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly, it’s like: If I think about this as a movie, then I’m not that bummed right now. If I imagine I am in something like Lost in La Mancha or Hearts of Darkness, that makes me happy. The idea that this sucks, but knowing that Arthur’s shooting it, and we’ll put some funny music behind a close-up of me looking depressed … that was my coping mechanism. I knew we could get something funny out of this eventually.”
Casa Bonita Mi Amor! is nothing if not a real-life cringe-comedy, detailing each newfound downside, each WTF resolution made by the earlier house owners (like, for instance, having the cliff divers exit into a tiny room subsequent to dozens of electrical hazards), each missed deadline to make a Cinco de Mayo opening date, each animatronic parrot that refuses to squawk on cue. Anything that may go improper nearly does go improper, with accrued curiosity.
But it’s additionally a surprisingly transferring testomony to how Parker units out to recapture a misplaced thrill from his personal youth, together with his shut good friend and inventive soulmate, and present what Stone refers to as an “analog immersive experience” for a era who view life primarily by way of their telephones. Both point out the concern that they had proper earlier than Casa Bonita’s delicate opening in May of final yr, that the seven- and eight-years-olds of immediately wouldn’t embrace the possibility to run round, watch goofy puppet exhibits as soon as an hour and discover a maze of caves stuffed with hidden messages and meticulously handcrafted treasures. Both had been extremely relieved to watch gaggles of children go nuts over all of it as soon as extra. For two guys who made their names through an animated present that punctures the idea of kids being candy and harmless, they each appear connected to the thought of youth as a time when indulging in imaginative play was probably the most liberating factor you can do.
“Oh, yeah, man — I’m one of the most nostalgic people you’ll ever meet,” Parker admits when this concept is floated his method. “I still play board games with my friends. We play a lot of D&D. I’m still very much that kid. This is where Matt and I are very different, in that I’m super into Star Wars, I unapologetically love all that stuff from my childhood, and Matt’s more like, ‘Fuck all that shit.…'”
“I’m more nostalgic for my adolescence, given how much I love to drink beer and sit around doing nothing,” Stone jokes. “I’m eternally 17 years old! No, but I know what you mean. Like we say in the movie, there’s a bit of romanticism about Trey’s feeling for this place. Nobody remembers Casa Bonita better than Trey. But I get that nostalgia thing with it, too. My memories of it are like, it’s the best place in the world! And looking back at it, of course it wasn’t — it was gross. But that didn’t matter when you’re seven years old and getting to run around unsupervised.”
As for his or her model of Casa Bonita, full with newly recorded voiceovers for previous Casa characters courtesy of Parker and Stone and a large statue of Cartman, they’ve been doing nice enterprise throughout what they are saying has been a little extra of a yr of a post-soft “preview” opening. (“It was only supposed to last a month, but when people see the film, they’ll know why it’s gone on for that long,” Parker says.) Later within the day, throughout an hourlong moderated dialog on the Telluride Film Festival, they’ll formally announce that Casa Bonita can be utterly open to the general public beginning in October. They’re pleased that they'll lastly share each the resurrected restaurant and the journey to getting it again to form with all people. Just don’t ask them to watch the doc once more.
“I watched it once all the way through, and that’s it,” Parker says. “I can’t. Otherwise, I would just be sitting there going, ‘Well, that still doesn’t work. That still doesn’t work either. They still haven’t fucking fixed that! And don’t get me started on the fucking bird!'”
