{"id":556551,"date":"2026-07-18T20:50:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T20:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/556551\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T20:50:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T20:50:20","slug":"chapo-trap-house-team-on-their-first-movie-chunks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/556551\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Chapo Trap House’ Team on Their First Movie, ‘Chunks’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s a Friday afternoon, and Amber A\u2019Lee 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<\/a> Chapo Trap House was just coming off tour with the pod. She\u2019d already been considering a change of coasts \u2014 she\u2019d been living in New York City for almost a decade \u2014 and when Covid hit, she realized it was time. \u201cI was like, I don\u2019t believe in the universe or signs or anything, but I think my chapter is done here,\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe plan when she got out West was to start a production company for the Chapo-verse; they\u2019d long been told that they should turn their podcast into a movie. Though they knew that would never work \u2014 Chapo\u2019s success was built on the friendly political banter among Frost and her co-hosts, Will Menaker, Felix Biederman, and Matt Christman, which they didn\u2019t think could translate into any kind of narrative feature \u2014 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. \u201cI remember making a PowerPoint, which is a very weird thing to have to present to your friends of many years,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n\tSitting across from her at the diner, Chris Wade, the podcast\u2019s longtime producer and another somewhat recent West Coast transplant, remembers it well. \u201cAmber had the idea of an anthology comedy film\u201d \u2014\u00a0a collection of shorts packaged together as a single movie \u2014 \u201cwhich made sense to a lot of us,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019d be a great venture to bring a bunch of different people on, who can all contribute to a single project.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThen came the development meetings, and more development meetings, and the waiting, waiting, waiting. With the podcast, which launched in 2016, they\u2019d been able to record, edit, and publish within a matter of hours. They quickly found out Hollywood didn\u2019t work like that. \u201cEvery meeting we had with higher-ups, they\u2019re like, \u2018That\u2019s amazing. We love it. Write it and make it, and then we\u2019ll take 10 percent,\u2019\u201d Frost says with a scoff.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tColdFeet producers (with their pets) Androsky, Frost, and Wade.<\/p>\n

\n\tSix years later, things are falling into place. Now, under the banner of ColdFeet Productions, they\u2019ve 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\u2019re part of the team producing Raccoon, a new movie starring Tim Heidecker that\u2019s hitting the festival circuit this fall; and they\u2019re working with Sony to turn Justice Warriors, the independent comic series from their friends Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson about a police officer made of poop, into an animated series. But the thing they\u2019re 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. \u201cThings, generally speaking in this town, do nothing, and then they all happen at once,\u201d says Frost. \u201cWe\u2019re in the all-happening-at-once period.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tChunks premieres July 19 on Patreon<\/a> 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 \u2014 a collection of six surreal shorts cobbled together to look like the cable-access and PBS fare Frost grew up on. There\u2019s a tragic take on a classic toilet paper commercial in an animated segment from fellow \u201cdirtbag left\u201d 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 Eephus, 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 \u2014 if you\u2019ve ever wondered what kind of jokes get cracked at the local DSA chapter meetings, this is your chance to find out \u2014 which feels both futuristic and like a throwback, similar to the off-kilter humor being brought to life on The Onion\u2019s new InfoWars reboot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt seems like a lot of people are working with parallel missions to create a reinvention, or reinvigoration, of this kind of weird short-form,\u201d says Wade. \u201c[It\u2019s] more subversive than you can necessarily get out of traditional entertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 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. \u201cWe approached it like, \u2018Make something that could theoretically be a pilot, and you own it,\u2019\u201d says Frost. \u201cWe basically have broadcast rights, and if it gets developed into a show, we get our nickel. So we\u2019re a micro Patreon \u2014 except we give people startup money.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tThis, overall, was the plan with ColdFeet: to create a space for other lefty creators to take their work to the next level. \u201cWe both just really want to get stuff made,\u201d says Wade. \u201cHonestly, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOr as Frost puts it, \u201cYou know, like a production company.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a Friday afternoon, and Amber A\u2019Lee Frost is scouring the large, colorful, laminated menu in a Greek…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[235353,93,61,60,270,5596],"class_list":["post-556551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-democratic-socialists-of-america","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}