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 man 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 just any restaurant, mind you — this one was unique. Parker had grown up going to this magical place in the ’70s and ’80s, and it held a very special place in his heart. So, knowing that these young visitors from Los Angeles would be experiencing something truly unique and possibly lifechanging for the very first time, he was already getting excited 48 hours ahead of the meal.
“I wasn’t going to tell them anything about it,” Parker says, lounging in an outdoor patio on a hot August day in Telluride, Colorado. His creative partner in crime, Matt Stone, is sitting next to him, leaning back in his chair and listening intently to his 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 called Casa Bonita, and for decades, this eating establishment was a Denver institution. Built in 1974, it was a Mexican restaurant located in a downtown strip mall that, spread out over 52,000 square feet, featured arcades, animatronic puppets, floor shows involving a Western outlaw named Black Bart, a man in a gorilla suit greeting patrons, and cliff divers jumping off massive indoor waterfalls. The food was legendarily bad. But the experience, if you were a kid with a boundless imagination like Parker was, could be transformative. And the Man Who Would Be Cartman was anxious to watch his young daughter and her three cousins go up the ramp leading from the front doors to the regionally themed wonderland inside and have their tiny minds blown. First, however, he wanted them to meet the fortune-telling parrot.
“There was always this bird that, when you walked in, would give you your fortune,” Parker recalls, getting visibly excited at the memory. “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 death rattle of a robotic creature shuffling off this mortal coil. He then adopts the voice of an excited but confused child: “‘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 starts laughing so hard that you worry 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 first time the parrot refused to tell someone their future, nor would it be the last. And had the bird revealed to Parker and Stone what they were getting into back in the autumn of 2021, when the duo went from longtime fans of Casa Bonita to becoming its new owners, they might not be sitting here today, cursing its name. Casa Bonita Mi Amor! chronicles their decision to save the Denver landmark from terminal extinction after the pandemic shut its doors for several years and its parent company filed for bankruptcy. For Parker, the chance to buy this storied institution of his youth was the equivalent of purchasing Disneyland. Once he and Stone began to deal with the reality of a restaurant in a state of disaster-level disrepair and the price tag that comes with a stem-to-stern restoration, however, the collaborators quickly find themselves in the middle of a money-pit nightmare.
And watching the documentary about the whole endeavor, which hit theaters on Sept. 13, you get to ride shotgun with Parker and Stone from the moment they announce the news in a livestreamed Facebook interview with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to their discovery of endless 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 near Denver since Casa Bonita first opened its doors back in the Nixon era will attest to what a big deal a visit to this kid-friendly restaurant was. Growing up in Littleton, Stone says, he remembers visits near the end of soccer seasons with his entire team; Parker recalls an ongoing quid pro quo deal with his classmates in regards 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 specific memory was part of what led to “Casa Bonita,” the 2003 South Park episode where Cartman tricks Butters into thinking the world is ending so he can take his place at a Bonita birthday party. It ends with him bum-rushing the restaurant and jumping off the indoor waterfall’s cliff before getting arrested. For fans of the show who’d never tasted the restaurant’s signature sopapillas or marveled at its faux-Mexican pueblo architecture, this was their first exposure to Parker’s childhood version 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 changed management a number of times over the years, Casa Bonita became both run-down and somewhat of a joke. Both Parker and Stone recall taking college friends from California and the East Coast to the landmark with the intention of a purposefully kitschy night 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! shows, the fantasy of having the keys to the kingdom never truly left Parker’s mind. The doc kicks off with the guys dropping by the place right after The Book of Mormon‘s opening, and Parker ruminating on being able to buy his childhood obsession. After Summit Family Restaurants, which then owned the establishment, filed for Chapter 11 in April 2021, Stone called his friend. There was a chance they could become partial investors if this new company bought 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 adds, 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 idea of filming the renovation and reopening of Casa Bonita wasn’t something they had discussed originally — they just happened to have an old friend with a camera tagging along as inspections revealed foundational rot, Parker became increasingly frustrated with the mounting obstacles, and what started as a $10 million project soon quadrupled its proposed budget. Parker and Stone had known Arthur Bradford since their pre-South Park days, back when the filmmaker was in a creative writing program at Stanford.
The duo helped fund a TV project Bradford did in the early 2000s called How’s Your News?, and he later shot 6 Days to Air, a 2011 behind-the-scenes look at South Park‘s hectic production schedule. Bradford soon became their unofficial filmmaker-in-residence. Mounting a Tony-winning musical, playing a 25th-anniversary concert at Red Rocks, scrapping and instantly redoing an episode devoted to Hilary Clinton winning the 2016 election when reality handed them a different ending — whenever Parker and Stone did something outside of the offices and/or outside of the norm, their friend was usually there, capturing it for posterity.
So the fact they were going to buy the Xanadu of Mexican restaurants was just another crazy thing to add to the list of crazy things they’d done over the years, which was enough for Bradford and his longtime cinematographer, P.H. O’Brien, to embed themselves and start shooting. It was roughly halfway through the process of restoring Casa Bonita to its former cheesy glory, one prohibitively expensive step at a time, that Bradford came to Parker and Stone and suggested that what he was getting had the makings of a feature 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 every newfound problem, every WTF decision made by the previous owners (like, for example, having the cliff divers exit into a tiny room next to dozens of electrical hazards), every missed deadline to make a Cinco de Mayo opening date, every animatronic parrot that refuses to squawk on cue. Anything that can go wrong virtually does go wrong, with accrued interest.
But it’s also a surprisingly moving testament to how Parker sets out to recapture a lost thrill from his own youth, in conjunction with his close friend and creative soulmate, and provide what Stone refers to as an “analog immersive experience” for a generation who view life primarily through their phones. Both mention the fear they had right before Casa Bonita’s soft opening in May of last year, that the seven- and eight-years-olds of today wouldn’t embrace the chance to run around, watch goofy puppet shows once an hour and explore a maze of caves filled with hidden messages and meticulously handcrafted treasures. Both were incredibly relieved to watch gaggles of kids go nuts over all of it once more. For two guys who made their names via an animated show that punctures the concept of children being sweet and innocent, they both seem attached to the idea of youth as a time when indulging in imaginative play was the most liberating thing you could do.
“Oh, yeah, man — I’m one of the most nostalgic people you’ll ever meet,” Parker admits when this idea is floated his way. “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 their version of Casa Bonita, complete with newly recorded voiceovers for old Casa characters courtesy of Parker and Stone and a huge statue of Cartman, they’ve been doing great business during what they say has been a little more of a year 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 in the day, during an hourlong moderated conversation at the Telluride Film Festival, they’ll officially announce that Casa Bonita will be completely open to the public starting in October. They’re happy that they can finally share both the resurrected restaurant and the journey to getting it back to shape with everybody. Just don’t ask them to watch the doc again.
“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!’”
From Rolling Stone US
