Creators Level Up
The socialist pod gathered comrades from across the entertainment spectrum to make Chunks, the first outing from their new production house ColdFeet
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.
