Chop and Steele
Directed by Ben Steinbauer and Berndt Mader
Unrated
Runtime: 81 minutes
Theatrical tour at Alamo Drafthouse theaters starting April 13, On demand on May 9

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

What's the worst reaction you've had to being tricked? I've been embarrassed and maybe a little angry, but then I've never been fooled into giving a platform to a fake strongman duo. If that happened, who knows, maybe I'd pull out all the stops, run to my parents and get them to sue the strongmen into oblivion. That's what happened to Joe Pickett (aka Chop) and Nick Prueher (aka Steele) and that's the spine of Ben Steinbauer and Berndt Mader's new documentary Chop and Steele. The story is honestly inspiring and the documentary is the funniest thing I've seen in years.

Nick and Joe run the Found Footage Festival, where they cut together weird moments from corporate training videos, public access TV and highly specific thrift store finds into collages of perfect nonsense. (Full disclosure, I hired them to perform at my wedding rehearsal dinner). They tour the world showing clips of megachurch preachers trying to be funny with puppets and newscasters struggling to say the name "Phoebe Weebee" without cracking up and, in the process, spend more time with each other than you or I do with anybody.

To promote their live dates, they made appearances on morning news shows, which they quickly came to hate. They had to wake up at the crack of dawn, talk with disinterested TV hosts and hope a few people in the home audience were intrigued enough to come to a performance. Promotion turned into pranks when Nick and Joe began showing up as characters with fake careers. Their friend Mark Proksch portrayed Kenny "K-Strass" Strasser, a yo-yo expert who raised money or awareness or something for the environment with tricks that never went off as intended. Strasser had mini-meltdowns on camera without ever mentioning the Found Footage Festival.

Then came Chef Keith, where Nick prepared grotesque foods out of Thanksgiving leftovers and encouraged TV hosts to drink things with names like "turbogravy." Chef Keith led to Chop and Steele, strongmen played by Nick and Joe who promoted exercise by throwing sticks at each other's backs, slamming plastic bats into tires and stomping on Easter baskets. In the process of pulling these pranks, they realized a few things, namely that stations care more about filling time than they do about conducting background checks. Chop and Steele's press materials included easily verifiable items that went uncontested. As long as Chop and Steele said they had won America's Got Talent, stations were happy to have them. On reaching out to morning shows, Nick and Joe got 12 positive responses in 24 hours.

Four months after one of those shows aired, the station's parent company, Gray Television, sued the Found Footage Festival for bizarre things like copyright infringement and fraud.

Chop and Steele the movie is primarily about the 2017 lawsuit that Nick and Joe faced over Chop and Steele the characters. The lawsuit itself fades into the background as the years drag on (I assume some of this has to do with any party's ability to legally talk about what's happening) but the stress of the thing hangs heavy over every scene. The guys are staying in shitty motels with broken in-room condom dispensers while on tour, faced with legal fees that could take their business out forever. Nick is deposed for 12 hours, Joe for 6, and you laugh when lawyers ask them to explain why they're selling frisbees printed with the title "Frisbee Fuckers" (a reference to a German porn), but you're also aware they could lose their livelihood.

Friends and admirers like David Cross, PFFR, Bobcat Goldthwait and The Yes Men praise the two while acknowledging how scary it is to be sued over a joke. This, I think, is one of the keys to the movie's success–it explains the feelings its subjects are experiencing, rather than the jokes they make. So many comedy documentaries use talking heads to kill jokes, to have people talk about why something is funny. Nick and Joe never intellectualize their work and their circle of like-minded artists don't try to draw everything out and explicate something you already felt in your gut. This isn't Jerry Seinfeld and Ricky Gervais talking about the specific words they use in their jokes.

Which is not to say the Found Footage guys don't think about this stuff. At one point, Joe says that if he shaved male pattern baldness into his head for the Chop character, the laughs would increase "72%," and when he throws the number out, it seems like he's only half-kidding. That difference, between watching a person's brain work and having them narrate their brain as it's working, is the difference between a great movie and an insufferable one. One of Chop and Steele's directors, Ben Steinbauer, made the similarly funny and incredible documentary Winnebago Man, which, incidentally, culminated in a Found Footage show. He and his co-director Berndt Mader deserve credit for making a film as engaging as its subject is hilarious.

As the story continues and especially as COVID-19 sets in, the Found Footage Festival is complicated. Joe may have to move to Los Angeles after his wife gets a job there. Nick may move to Austin to work with the Alamo Drafthouse folks on board games. Joe was offered a writing job on The Office when the K-Strass videos went viral, but turned it down to stay in Brooklyn with the Found Footage Festival. He didn't want a boss; Nick says he would have jumped at the opportunity. They both talk about wishing they didn't have to work so hard. It isn't that the relationship is fracturing, it's that the realities of supporting yourself with creative work set in and decisions have to be made. Getting sued by a massive television company makes their financial instability as clear as it's ever been.

The movie is ultimately about the friendship between these two men and their drive to do bizarre stuff and to find human disasters. It isn't a film about a lawsuit, it's a film about the way Nick and Joe respond to a lawsuit. The legal intricacies are explained in terms a person like I can understand so that the emotional drive of the film can focus on other things. I don't wish that lawsuit on anybody, but I absolutely wish we got more documentaries this good.