This Was Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s One Note for the Casa Bonita Documentary

If you love stories about wealthy cartoonists pouring millions of dollars into Mexican novelty restaurants riddled with building code violations, boy do we have the movie for you. The new documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! chronicles South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s efforts to renovate Denver’s giantest, pinkest eatery, in defiance of all common sense and financial logic.

The movie is undoubtedly funny, engaging and even heartwarming, but it also feels like a fairly calculated promotional tool for the restaurant which, perhaps not coincidentally, opened to the public in the very same week that the documentary was released. 

According to the film’s director, Arthur Bradford, there’s a very good reason for this. Speaking with The Wrap, Bradford revealed that the project began, not as a feature film, but as an “online marketing video” for Casa Bonita, one that could be shown inside the restaurant while diners waited for their food. Bradford only realized that he had something more substantial on his hands during the editing process, first envisioning a Kitchen Nightmares-type reality show. He even edited the footage into “three 45-minute episodes” that focused more on the specifics of the renovation. But after screening the episodes for Parker and Stone, the director discovered that the core of the story was really Parker’s nostalgia-fueled passion, rather than the restaurant itself.

“It was really apparent, even just from watching that, the most interesting stuff was Trey. There was this emotional aspect to it with Trey. His obsession with (Casa Bonita) was so great that it actually did have the depth that a real documentary demanded,” Bradford explained. 

Once it became a doc, Bradford recalled that Parker and Stone were fairly hands-off during the editing process, and were never “controlling” in terms of how they were portrayed in the finished film. Oddly, the only note the pair gave to Bradford was to include more scenes where they looked “stupid or silly.” 

“Most people don’t have the confidence to give that kind of note,” Bradford acknowledged. “To them, the most important thing is telling a good story and for it to be compelling.” Of course, as we previously pointed out, it would have been nice if Parker and Stone’s lack of self-consciousness had extended to the point of allowing for some screen time to be devoted to Casa Bonita’s highly publicized employee wage dispute. 

Apart from wanting the doc to make them look more like total dum-dums, Parker also had an idea for how to wrap up the documentary, which (spoiler alert for a movie that basically just ends with a restaurant opening) concludes with Parker lamenting that he can no longer visit Casa Bonita anonymously, like he did when he was a kid, because he’s essentially become another attraction for visitors to gawk at. “I feel like Trey wrote that ending himself. He knew that was a cool ending for it, and he did it spontaneously,” Bradford stated.

Say what you will about Trey Parker, but the son of a bitch knows story structure. 

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