It’s a Friday afternoon, and Amber A’Lee Frost is scouring the large, colorful, laminated menu in a Greek diner in Silverlake, Los Angeles, talking about why she decided to move to L.A. It was 2020, she remembers, and the co-founder and at the time co-host
of the mega-hit socialist podcast Chapo Trap House was just coming off tour with the pod. She’d already been considering a change of coasts — she’d been living in New York City for almost a decade — and when Covid hit, she realized it was time. “I was like, I don’t believe in the universe or signs or anything, but I think my chapter is done here,’” she says.
The plan when she got out West was to start a production company for the Chapo-verse; they’d long been told that they should turn their podcast into a movie. Though they knew that would never work — Chapo’s success was built on the friendly political banter among Frost and her co-hosts, Will Menaker, Felix Biederman, and Matt Christman, which they didn’t think could translate into any kind of narrative feature — the idea of expanding past the chat-show, audio-only format felt exciting. She immediately put together a presentation for the group about her idea for a movie. “I remember making a PowerPoint, which is a very weird thing to have to present to your friends of many years,” she says.
Sitting across from her at the diner, Chris Wade, the podcast’s longtime producer and another somewhat recent West Coast transplant, remembers it well. “Amber had the idea of an anthology comedy film” — a collection of shorts packaged together as a single movie — “which made sense to a lot of us,” he says. “It’d be a great venture to bring a bunch of different people on, who can all contribute to a single project.”
Then came the development meetings, and more development meetings, and the waiting, waiting, waiting. With the podcast, which launched in 2016, they’d been able to record, edit, and publish within a matter of hours. They quickly found out Hollywood didn’t work like that. “Every meeting we had with higher-ups, they’re like, ‘That’s amazing. We love it. Write it and make it, and then we’ll take 10 percent,’” Frost says with a scoff.
Six years later, things are falling into place. Now, under the banner of ColdFeet Productions, they’ve got a lot of plans on the horizon: They co-produced Eephus, a movie about a scrappy paint-store baseball team that premiered at Cannes last year; they’re part of the team producing Raccoon, a new movie starring Tim Heidecker that’s hitting the festival circuit this fall; and they’re working with Sony to turn Justice Warriors, the independent comic series from their friends Matt Bores and Ben Clarkson about a police officer made of poop, into an animated series. But the thing they’re most excited to talk about today is Chunks, the subject of that early L.A. PowerPoint, which, thanks to a collaboration with their longtime partners at Patreon, is finally seeing the light of day. “Things, generally speaking in this town, do nothing, and then they all happen at once,” says Frost. “We’re in the all-happening-at-once period.”
Chunks premieres July 19 on Patreon at 8 p.m. ET, through a new feature from the subscriber platform that allows people to buy tickets to digital-only events (it will be available to stream for a fee after the premiere). The movie itself is strange — a collection of six surreal shorts cobbled together to look like the cable-access and PBS fare Frost grew up on. There’s a tragic take on a classic toilet paper commercial in an animated segment from fellow “dirtbag left” podcaster Nick Mullen, which tackles Bernie-esque critiques of the healthcare industry; a flight into the afterlife with comedian and writer Sandy Honig that flips Sartre on its head; and a streaming poker night gone wrong with a crew including Nate Fischer, co-writer of Ephus, that puts the viewer in the company of the worst people on the internet. Each segment dresses up a critique of our current late-stage capitalist hellscape — if you’ve ever wondered what kind of jokes get cracked at the local DSA chapter meetings, this is your chance to find out — which feels both futuristic and like a throwback, similar to the off-kilter humor being brought to life on The Onion’s new InfoWars reboot.
“It seems like a lot of people are working with parallel missions to create a reinvention, or reinvigoration, of this kind of weird short-form,” says Wade. “[It’s] more subversive than you can necessarily get out of traditional entertainment.”
In making the film, which Frost and Wade co-produced with Josh Androsky, they also hoped to have the individual segments stand on their own, with the potential to be developed into longer stand-alone projects. “We approached it like, ‘Make something that could theoretically be a pilot, and you own it,’” says Frost. “We basically have broadcast rights, and if it gets developed into a show, we get our nickel. So we’re a micro Patreon — except we give people startup money.”
This, overall, was the plan with ColdFeet: to create a space for other lefty creators to take their work to the next level. “We both just really want to get stuff made,” says Wade. “Honestly, my biggest ambition with this company is to build a self-sustaining thing that can get stuff made in some capacity, and then help other people get things made.”
Or as Frost puts it, “You know, like a production company.”
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