Chasing the Story of Chop & Steele

Documentarians have a complex relationship with story. They may know whose story they’re telling, but that’s about it. Austin-based filmmaker Ben Steinbauer knows that conundrum well. “I’m always attracted to stories that are unfolding,” he said, “and it’s really hard to predict when they’re gonna end or how they’re gonna end.”

Finding the subjects for Chop & Steele, the new documentary by Steinbauer and his longtime producing partner Berndt Mader (available now on VOD), was easy. Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett are probably best known as the VHS-hoarding historians of the bizarre behind the Found Footage Festival, and Steinbauer had known the duo since they had been part of his 2010 documentary Winnebago Man. Yet Chop & Steele centers on a different aspect of their career: their life as pranksters, and how much unanticipated trouble it got them into.

Life happens, as the saying goes. For example, Steinbauer recently became a father, and he recalled advice to young filmmakers from Francis Ford Coppola: “If you want to be serious about your filmmaking, get married and start a family, because then it forces you to really deliver and be serious about your craft, and not just float around and experiment.”

That focus is vital for documentarians, as the film they start making is rarely the one that makes it to the screen, and they need to find the story in motion. In late 2017, Prueher and Pickett were being sued by Gray Television for pranking the morning show on WEAU-TV by pretending to be Chop and Steele, the world’s weakest strong men, explained Steinbauer, “and right about then is when they call me.” He was already contemplating a film about their pranks, “so when they got sued it was a David and Goliath story that would be easy to follow.”

However, Steinbauer almost got dragged into their drama when Prueher and Pickett suggested the film feature a protracted series of pranks at the expense of Sinclair Media, the right-wing owners of many local TV stations. Steinbauer said, “We tell our entertainment lawyer what is going on – we’ve given her lots of gray hairs over the years – and she goes, ‘You guys are idiots, and if you are knowingly filming something where they are most likely to get sued, then you are going to have to create a firewall between this production and your company.”

So the initial idea for what Steinbauer called a “Michael Moore-type piece, very knowingly making a point,” soon collapsed through legal practicalities. However, he also realized that Prueher and Pickett’s story wasn’t what he thought. “They kept saying, ‘Well, it would be funny, but we’re more concerned about it being funny than being political or making a point. We only want to do it if it’s going to be fun for us to do.’”

So Chop & Steele became a personal piece about two goofs navigating a strange career. However, with the lawsuit still swirling in the background, Steinbauer said he knew that he could never completely remove the political component of their misadventures. “It’s a way to look at the First Amendment with two guys who are completely apolitical. They have no agenda other than trying to make each other laugh, and there’s something about that which is more interesting than if they had gone out there, trying to prove a point.”

Not that their media-pranking days were completely over. Chop & Steele becomes centered on the duo’s grandest hoax yet, on America’s Got Talent – but there was a scheme even closer to home. This time, the plan would have Steinbauer as victim.

Which, as this interview was being conducted, was news to Steinbauer.

“I remember calling Ben’s wife and being like, ‘Hey, what if we conspired with Nick and Joe to prank Ben in some epic fashion, to provide some sort of climax to this movie?’” said Mader. “That idea had already crossed Joe and Nick’s minds, but I was ready to start work with them.’”

“You called Katie?” Steinbauer replied, in mild disbelief. “I just put you on mute and asked my wife, who is sitting here next to our baby, ‘Wait, you were going to prank me? Why didn’t you tell me?’ And she said, ‘Well, I thought it might still happen.’”

“That just shows how desperate for an ending we were,” said Mader, “but then the pandemic happened.”

“And I hate to say that anything about the pandemic was a gift,” Steinbauer added, “but it brought to a head a conflict that had been brewing under the surface with these childhood best friends for years and years and years … This stress around their business, and this thought about, ‘Is this working, should we look to do something else?’”

But the filmmaking duo were facing their own stresses, as the movie that was set to be their big break – a big name subject, big name backers, and even talk of big festival premieres – suddenly imploded. It was late 2019 and some old associates of theirs (“who I’ll not mention by name,” Steinbauer said, “but they’re very successful comedy directors”) invited them to direct the first film for their new documentary shingle: a biography of Kid Rock.

Yup.

“We entered into it very skeptically,” said Steinbauer. “We flew to Nashville, met Kid Rock, got the green light, and were all set to make this film about his final tour, his final album, and him building a version of Graceland to himself. This was February of 2020, so then the next month the world stops and we started making this film about him. We made this very critical, funny, and kind of redemptive portrait of this really complex character, and we made something together that was this true collaboration that felt really great, and we were really proud of, and we got to the director’s cut phase, and everybody from Kid Rock all the way down to the big Hollywood folks behind it were really excited and talking about a Sundance premiere.”

And then in June 2021 a drunken Rock got on stage at FishLipz Bar & Grill in Smithville, Tenn., and hurled homophobic slurs at the audience. “The whole movie fell apart from there,” said Steinbauer. “The production company took their name off of it, nobody wanted to touch him or be associated with him after that, and so the movie we had worked so hard on fell apart.”

Luckily, Steinbauer had already been working on Chop & Steele, “So I went to Berndt and said, ‘Let’s finish this out together. This is a movie about two best friends who have a company, and we’re two best friends who have a company, and it feels like we missed the boat on this other movie, and so let’s do it with this movie.”

For Mader, this was simply about extending the work they already do together through The Bear, their production company. “Whenever we do a personal project, the other partner is an executive producer. So all along as Ben was making [Chop & Steele] I was chiming in as an EP. I would watch edits, I would hear about what he was thinking of doing and what was happening, so I was very informed all along.”

And, in other coincidence of timing, this all happened as Steinbauer had gone through a cancer scare. “It gave me this sense of what was important to me, and I realized that what was important to me was to make things with my friends.”

It’s strange to think that the film finally became what it was because/in spite of Kid Rock, but there was one more figure, another celebrity, involved in an equally bizarre and unexpected fashion: comedian and America’s Got Talent host Howie Mandel. He’s one of the many talking heads – including celebrity fans of the Found Footage Fest – that became part of the movie after Mader joined, and basically demanded the duo’s contact list. “I was just unabashed,” he said, “Ben, at that point, was like, ‘Dammit, I know I’ve asked you guys for these things before’ and was hesitant, I was just like, ‘We need this.’”

But Mandel was different – not a friend, but the victim of their biggest, most daring prank. Yet, somehow he had always been part of their story: He was the next guest after the pair when they appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and in the film, as the pair tour their collection of old VHS tapes, the first that comes to hand is an old parenting video hosted by Mandel himself. When he agreed to be part of the documentary, Steinbauer said he saw it as “the documentary gods smiling on us.”

“He was excited to talk about them because he loves pranks,” Mader said, “but while we’re there he learns that Joe and Nick are the guys who do VCR Party, which is this YouTube show that they do, and Howie Mandel is a fan of theirs, and has pinged them on their YouTube channel, but he doesn’t know that the guys he follows on VCR Party are the same guys that pranked America’s Got Talent – until the day we show up there, and he puts it all together.”

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Chop & Steele is available on VOD now.