RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media A Real Live Smackdown! The Farrelly Brothers vs. The South Park guys!

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'Ringer' of Truth

EW Exclusive: Did ''The Ringer'' rip off ''South Park'' -- or vice versa? Matt Stone and Trey Parker respond to claims by the writer of Johnny Knoxville's upcoming comedy that they took his idea for an episode
by Chris Nashawaty

Is something rotten in South Park? Well, aside from the lunchroom slop Chef serves up? One Hollywood screenwriter thinks so.

Ricky Blitt, the scribe behind the subversively silly new Johnny Knoxville comedy The Ringer, says he was shocked when he recently came across a post bashing him on the Rotten Tomatoes website. The post, from an irate South Park fan, urged the animated show's creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, to sue the makers of The Ringer (including producers Peter and Bobby Farrelly) for ripping off an episode of the Comedy Central show in which Eric Cartman pretends to be mentally challenged in order to qualify for the Special Olympics — a premise that mirrors the concept of the Fox Searchlight film, due to hit theaters Dec. 23.

But Blitt, who claims he had the idea first, says it was Stone and Parker who ripped him off. And that he's the one who should be suing. Let the feud begin.

''My friends told me to get over it,'' Blitt says, ''but all of these people are going to think that I'm the one who took it from [South Park] because theirs came out first and ours took seven years to make. I thought I could handle it. But long story short, I couldn't.''

Blitt, who has also written for Family Guy, says that he first hatched the idea of a loser who feigns a mental disability to scam the prize money from the Special Olympics more than a decade ago. And indeed, The Ringer has been in development with the Farrelly brothers at Fox since at least 2000.

But adding a whole other level of intrigue to the he-said/they-said dispute is that Blitt alleges his Special Olympics story was actually pitched to someone at Stone and Parker's company (although not to Stone and Parker themselves) via independent producer Robert Kosberg in 1999 — five years before their Cartman episode aired. Kosberg, who is no longer involved with The Ringer, backs Blitt's claim.

The South Park guys aren't buying it. ''I don't even know how to respond to this,'' says Stone, laughing. ''I'm totally sympathetic to the fact that you make a film and you go online and people say you ripped it off.'' But, he adds, referring to Blitt, ''I've literally never heard of him.''

So what about being pitched The Ringer in 1999? ''I don't remember that at all,'' says Stone. ''I don't think it ever happened. That's just not the way we work. Trey and I pitch movies mostly, we don't take pitches.''
 
But Blitt doubts two distinct parties could come up with such a unique idea. And when the screenwriter first saw the South Park Special Olympics episode, titled ''Up the Down Steroid'' (which first aired on March 24, 2004), he says he was sick to his stomach. ''I started watching it but I had to turn it off,'' says Blitt. ''I thought, 'How could they do this?' As writers, all we have are our ideas. They started off as these edgy guys and now they've gone to the other extreme of being these mainstream guys who are stealing stuff.''

But Stone swats away those charges, saying that he and his partner have been trafficking in material dealing with mental disabilities for years, citing their involvement as executive producers for the 1999 documentary about mentally and physically disabled reporters How's Your News? ''It's a part of comedy that we have been...well, obsessed with is too strong a word, but not by much, for years.'' Plus, Stone adds, ''I think the idea of pretending to be handicapped to get out of something is not that unique an idea.''

So let's get this straight. To prove his innocence, Stone is basically saying he and Parker aren't very original?

''Yeah!'' laughs Stone.

As proof, Stone points to a South Park storyline he and Parker once brainstormed where Cartman plans to block out the sun over Kyle and Stan's part of town, only to be told that the same exact thing had been done on The Simpsons. Another time, they were going to have Randy pulled over by a cop for DUI and forced to drink a beer can full of his own urine, but were informed the Farrellys (oh, sweet irony!) used a similar gag in Dumb and Dumber. ''We've had to ditch tons of ideas because somebody already did them,'' says Stone. ''When you sit around and talk about this stuff you end up at the same places.''

Blitt says that's baloney. ''Maybe they're so busy and years go by and they forget it, I'll give them any out they want, but it was pitched and that's 100 percent fact.'' Blitt says he isn't trying to shake down Stone and Parker for money, nor is he planning to take legal action. He only wants to set the record straight so that when The Ringer comes out, critics and moviegoers won't jump to the same conclusion he found posted on Rotten Tomatoes: that his movie is a South Park knockoff. ''All I want is what's right,'' he says. ''It's an ego thing. I don't want to be known as the hack that ripped these guys off.''

As for the South Park boys? Stone shrugs, ''I don't have a problem with him letting people know that he didn't rip it off. But just don't accuse us the other way.'

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