THEY'VE GOT SOME PULL NO ONE IS SAFE AS TREY PARKER AND MATT STONE LET IT ALL HANG OUT IN `TEAM AMERICA'.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

One of ``Team America: World Police's'' funniest lines isn't even in the movie. It comes from minds far more feverish than those of anarchic geniuses Trey Parker and Matt Stone, those responsible for the new film as well as for ``South Park'' and probably the decline of Western civilization.

The line comes from the Motion Picture Association of America, explaining why the film received its (well-earned) R rating:

``Graphic, crude & sexual humor, violent images & strong language - all involving puppets.''

``Isn't that great? That is so ridiculous,'' says a laughing Stone a mere 72 hours after finishing the film, ending what he declares ``the worst year of my life'' thanks to a legion of unexpected logistical problems involved in manipulating the film's marionettes. And you thought working with actors was difficult.

``Team America,'' which opens today, is a typical Parker/Stone provocation, depicting the planet's gravest challenge - global terrorism - with puppets, in the context of a really dumb action movie (one of the film's songs mocks ``Armageddon'' and ``Pearl Harbor'' director Michael Bay). Yet amid the unbridled idiocy, Parker and Stone, as usual, slip in some subversive ideas.

As Team America, a sort of puppet Interpol (only scratch the coalition of the willing), battle terrorists across the globe, they manage to destroy the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and a pyramid or two, wryly mirroring the ``In order to save Iraq, we had to destroy it'' neo-con mind set.

Mindless, jingoistic patriotism is mocked in the film's song with the most profane title. Liberals are likewise savaged: Peacenik thespians from Alec Baldwin to Janeane Garofalo as well as Michael Moore (who featured the filmmakers in his documentary ``Bowling for Columbine'') are depicted as clueless dupes of North Korean president Kim Jong Il's plot to destroy the world. The film concludes with a heartfelt (if obscenely anatomical) speech that explains America's place in a post-9/11 world more honestly than either George Bush or John Kerry have managed.

Naturally, cheek this outsize cannot go unpunished, and the MPAA slapped the film with an NC-17 rating for its gyroscopic sex scene, which was trimmed but will return on the DVD. Parker and Stone endured a similar roundelay with the ratings board when they released ``South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut'' in 1999.

The pair sat for an interview, relieved simply to be done with the movie. Their sense of freedom ``is almost surreal,'' marvels Parker, opening a split of merlot and pouring himself a glass, then diluting it a smidgen with some water. ``I'm still having nightmares that I'm back on the set.''

Q: You should tour with the MPAA to discuss the ratings system, but I don't know if the format should be debates or tag-team wrestling.

STONE: We would, but who are they? I would gladly do that because then the ratings board would have to come out from the shadows and reveal who they are.

Q: So what was cut from the film?

PARKER: The only thing they had trouble with was the sex scene. There was twice as many positions - really creative ones.

STONE: We actually had a ``Kama Sutra'' on the set. We went through it and found positions.

Q: If there hadn't been a song over the sex scene, would the sound effects have been squishy or clacky?

PARKER: (Laughs) It's funny, we went back and forth - should they be plastic-y sounds or human sounds? And we made the sounds sound like a real movie. The overriding joke of the movie is the ridiculousness of the image you're seeing juxtaposed with the seriousness and earnestness of what they're saying.

Q: Sort of the reverse of a Michael Bay movie. As much grief as you give him, this film owes a lot to him.

PARKER: Totally. We watched all the (Jerry) Bruckheimer movies and saw the Bruckheimer formula - the coolest thing was realizing they were all musicals. Because rather than having his characters break out in song, he'd have an Aerosmith song. You just stop the movie while you have a song and cool images; they spend a few minutes telling you how everyone's feeling - ``It's great now''; ``Everything sucks now.'' As soon as we saw that, I knew I could make this a musical.

Q: The film's also a cousin to your sitcom parody ``That's My Bush,'' which, by placing world affairs in the context of a bad sitcom, trivialized them.

PARKER: This is more a comment on movies, especially those Bruckheimer movies, than on politics, and that's what 'That's My Bush' was, too. It was a comment on sitcoms and that kind of humor and it was funny to take the president and put him in that.

STONE: The early drafts of the script were a lot more political - Trey and I would sit around and talk about politics for three hours, then realize, 'This is so retarded.' We're talking about something we don't know that much about. What we are good at is writing stories and characters, and as soon as we started making everything a metaphor, everything started working. The same thing happened with 'That's My Bush.' As soon as we figured out how to play politics out as a sitcom, it worked.

Q: If Bush used the speech at the end of the film, he might win over some people who are against him.

PARKER: (Laughs) I think so, too. That's why we kept Bush out of the movie - we didn't want it to be about him, but about America. At the end of the day, it was more interesting to ask the question, ``How do I feel about being an American?'' That's what the speech is for. If Kerry wins, people are still going to be ripping on us for being World Police, we'll still be (jerks) to them.

STONE: It's a movie with a very American point of view. I don't think you'll really get it unless you've had those feelings about America - Am I ashamed? Am I proud?

Q: It hasn't even opened yet, and yet it's started a furious, serious debate online. Not bad for a puppet movie.

PARKER: That's why it's fun. That's why we do this stuff. For us, it was all about making a funny movie that makes fun of movies, but it's just inflammatory to put that kind of subject matter into it. You're going to get people going. To us, it's the only time we feel like artists. That's what art should do - get a lot of people yelling at each other. That's why we don't do shows like 'Friends.' We want to do something that sparks more than that.

Q: Given your popularity, why don't more people in Hollywood emulate your sensibility?

PARKER: A lot of people are worried about their careers.

STONE: We're lucky that we don't care. From the first day we came to Los Angeles, we were ready to leave. That's the big reason - people are worried about p---ing off certain people and we don't care.

PARKER: We didn't care about our careers because we didn't believe we were going to last anyway. We thought, let's just get whatever we can on the air and then we'll get kicked out. And when we did the ``South Park'' movie, we thought, OK, this is it. We're done; we'll never do anything again. And now, we have money, so we really don't care.

Q: Given that, how much longer do you want to keep ``South Park'' going?

PARKER: About eight more months (laughs wearily). We're going into this season - we have to have an episode in two weeks - and we are so burned out. We almost feel like we want to start this season with a disclaimer: ``Understand, we're burned out and these will not be the greatest shows you'll ever see.''

Q: You've said there's no way you'd ever work with marionettes again, but what if you're offered insane money for a sequel?

PARKER: What we would do is figure out who we hate more than anyone, which is probably Tom Shadyac or Steve Oedekerk (director and writer, respectively, of both ``Patch Adams'' and ``Bruce Almighty''), and say, ``We really want you to do this.'' Because it is a level of hell you cannot imagine.

David Kronke, [phone]

david.kronke(at)dailynews.com

`America' the beautiful - and complicated

Never again, say Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The pair call the year they worked on ``Team America'' the worst year of their life.

What could engender such bile from guys who usually dispense it with such glee? Building a hydroelectric dam with hairpins? Negotiating peace in the Middle East?

Nope: Working with marionettes.

When the two cooked up the idea of depicting the war on terror with puppets, it seemed a larky gas. How hard could it be? After all, the cheesy TV series ``Thunderbirds'' did it for years.

Here's how hard: ``We just about killed ourselves on this movie,'' Parker says. ``In making this look as beautiful as it does, you have to backlight everything, which 'Thunderbirds' never did,'' he continues - problem is, that creates a new set of problems involving how the puppets' wires come across.

Manipulating the marionettes was also more difficult than expected. ``Thunderbirds'' put its characters through simple maneuvers on simple sets; Parker and Stone were far more ambitious. ``We had Paris,'' Parker says of the sprawling set in the film's opening sequence, a spectacular battle between Team America and terrorists involving martial arts, gunplay, rocket launchers, aerial dogfights and the Eiffel Tower toppling onto the Arc de Triomphe.

``We had our puppeteers up on cherry pickers working two stories high, trying to manipulate these things,'' Parker says, sighing.

``It's satisfying for us to do something no one's ever done before,'' Parker says. ``We always get ourselves in that situation and always hate ourselves for doing it. We like trying to figure out how to do stuff, which is usually fun, but here it just was not.''

- D.K.

CAPTION(S):

4 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) PUPPETRY OF THE MEANEST

Trey Parker and Matt Stone take no prisoners in `Team America: World Police'

(2) Trey Parker, left, and Matt Stone on the set of ``Team America: World Police.''

(3) no caption (puppets)

(4) no caption (puppet)

Box:

`America' the beautiful - and complicated