In 2022, Ian Frazier, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, received an email from a friend named Hannah Albee in Albuquerque, N.M.
They had met years earlier at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Manhattan, where Frazier was a volunteer and Albee was an employee.
“Congrats,” she wrote. “They’re filming ‘Coyote’ on my street.”
Albee was referring to “Coyote vs. Acme,” a potential summer blockbuster featuring the Looney Tunes characters Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.
The movie is based on a humor piece Frazier wrote more than three decades ago. In it, he imagines Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Corporation for the many harms he has suffered while stalking his prey with the help of its malfunctioning devices.
It appeared in The New Yorker’s 65th anniversary issue, dated Feb. 19, 1990. Then it was optioned for film. And then it fell into an endless-seeming Hollywood limbo.
When Frazier heard from his friend, a movie version was the last thing on his mind.
“I had actually forgotten about it,” he said over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Montclair, N.J., where he lives with his wife, the novelist Jacqueline Carey.
“Coyote vs. Acme,” a blend of live action and animation, will finally be released on Aug. 28 — 36 years after he tapped out his idea on an Olympia manual typewriter.
‘Quite Preposterous’
Frazier, 75, doesn’t fit the usual idea of the urbane New Yorker writer. Known to friends as Sandy, he has a manner suggestive of his upbringing in Hudson, Ohio. But beneath the mild exterior is the idiosyncratic mind that produced the humor collection “Dating Your Mom” and perhaps his best known book, “Great Plains,” a sprawling meditation on the Midwest.
From small-town Ohio, he made his way to Harvard College. He wrote for The Harvard Lampoon and became friends with Jim Downey, who would go on to be one of the most prolific writers at “Saturday Night Live.” After graduating in 1973, Frazier put in some time writing captions for a pornographic magazine, Oui. Then he found a professional home that suited him better, The New Yorker.
He distinguished himself with pithy dispatches for the Talk of the Town section, stylish feature stories and reliably funny humor pieces. In 1990, his thoughts turned to Wile E. Coyote.
He was 39, living with his wife and infant daughter in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In those days, he was a regular reader of American Lawyer, copies of which he borrowed from a downstairs neighbor. He was especially drawn to the legal arguments of Gerry Spence, a silver-tongued cowboy lawyer who defended Imelda Marcos on racketeering charges. Frazier decided to write something in the voice of Wile E. Coyote’s lawyer.
“The idea was to take the language of an opening statement to describe something quite preposterous,” he said.
Like the millions of Americans who had grown up watching Saturday morning cartoons, he was deeply familiar with the beleaguered Wile E. Coyote. The creature tries — and repeatedly fails, in disastrous ways — to catch his fleet-footed nemesis, Road Runner, using a variety of Acme gizmos.
“It occurred to me that if you take a pair of roller skates and put small jet engines on each skate, obviously something is going to go wrong,” Frazier said. “The Acme Corporation suddenly became a character in my mind.”
Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner were created for Warner Bros., the company behind the Looney Tunes franchise, by the animator Chuck M. Jones and the writer Michael Maltese. In his memoir, “Chuck Amuck,” Jones wrote that he drew inspiration from Mark Twain’s 1872 book, “Roughing It.” Twain described the coyote as “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton” and “a living, breathing allegory of Want.”
Frazier knew the Twain passage and suspected it had an influence on the character. He saw in Wile E. Coyote’s all-consuming desire a kind of pathos. “He’s trying to be murderous, but there’s something about him — he’s just can’t be murderous enough,” he said. “And there is that peaceful moment of knowing. Sometimes he gets very peaceful at the end, when he runs off the cliff. The moment of realization is always very touching.”
The story, which he titled “Coyote v. Acme,” came quickly, at just 1,600 words. Frazier photocopied his pages and trudged off to the mailbox, wondering if what he had written would impress his editor at The New Yorker, Veronica Geng, an acclaimed humor writer herself. “Her ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on an idea would totally determine if it was worth doing,” he said.
Soon after the piece appeared in the magazine, it became the subject of a literary contretemps: Another humor writer, Joey Green, gave interviews to Newsweek and The New York Observer in which he accused Frazier of plagiarism.
In 1982, Green had published a three-part series, “Cliffhanger Justice,” with the very same premise in The National Lampoon. “I loved the Road Runner cartoons, and the big question was why Coyote hadn’t sued for faulty merchandising,” Green said in an interview from his home in Florida.
Frazier said he was unaware of Green’s piece before he wrote “Coyote v. Acme.” Over lunch in Montclair, he still seemed pained by the accusation. “How do I prove a negative?” he said. “I wasn’t reading National Lampoon. It was a complete bummer, to be honest.”
It was a bummer for Green, too — especially when “Coyote v. Acme” gained more attention as the title story of Frazier’s 1996 humor collection, a book that won the inaugural Thurber Prize for American Humor.
“I feel like the Coyote,” Green, 68, said. “The catapult sprang, and the boulder fell on me.” Now that the movie is about to come out, he would like to be paid by Hollywood, just as Frazier was. “If it’s based on his, it’s based on mine,” Green said.
Both stories use deadpan legalese to describe cartoon violence, but Frazier’s light touch made “Coyote v. Acme” a model of humor writing at its smartest and silliest. To wit: “Mr. Coyote lost control of the Rocket Skates soon after strapping them on, and collided with a roadside billboard so violently as to leave a hole in the shape of his full silhouette.”
The novelist Jonathan Franzen considers it a classic of the form. He read the piece aloud on a 2015 episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, calling it “a real high-wire act” and praising Frazier’s deft use of language in the pursuit of “humor for its own sake.”
The Road to Hollywood
In the 1990s, Eric Steel was in the habit of clipping articles that caught his attention and tacking them to the bulletin board in his office. That’s how “Coyote vs. Acme” began its second life.
At the time, Steel worked for the producer Scott Rudin, who would later come under fire for his hostile, demeaning behavior toward staffers. Known as a visionary, Rudin was the force behind mid-1990s hits like “The Firm,” “Addams Family Values” and “Clueless.” Steel imagined that a movie based on Frazier’s story could be something like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” a 1988 blockbuster that featured Looney Tunes characters and set a new standard for live action blended with animation.
“Frazier’s piece worked because it was a clever twist on something we all knew well,” Steel said. “My thought was, What if you did a really big turn? What if you used other Warner Bros. characters, with courtroom drama as the framework?”
In 1998, eight years after the article appeared, Scott Rudin Productions bought the rights to it. Frazier received a modest check, with the promise of a significant payout if a film was made. But there was a complicating factor, Steel noted. The production could not move forward without the approval of Warner Bros.
The option expired after a year. Rudin extended it. Then came a second extension — and a third. Frazier picked up small checks along the way. (He declined to specify dollar amounts.) The only time he really got his hopes up was when a Rudin assistant called to say the producer himself was about to give him a ring. The call never came.
“I was a Scott Rudin cancellation,” Frazier said.
In 2004, Rudin let the option lapse. Steel, who was by then working as an independent producer, took out a new option, only to decide against renewing it when it expired in 2006.
For the next decade, the project lay dormant. Not that Frazier was losing sleep over it. He was busy with New Yorker assignments and a nonfiction book, “Travels in Siberia.” Further, he had no secret desire to become a Hollywood player, though he did act in “Blue in the Face,” an indie movie co-directed by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster. When Frazier saw it at an art house in Missoula, Mont., he was the only person in the theater.
“I don’t go to movies,” he said. “For a long time, I watched one movie a year — ‘Spaceballs.’”
The Big Check
James Gunn, the director of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, was another fan of Frazier’s story. In 2015, he pitched the idea to Warner Bros. itself and got a yes.
“When Warner Bros. came along, I thought, ‘It’s got a better shot,’” Frazier said.
Six more years went by. Multiple drafts. A new production team. A merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery. Finally, in 2022, filming began.
Even then, Frazier’s 1990 story was guiding the approach of the producer Chris DeFaria, the director Dave Green and the screenwriter Samy Burch. “Ian’s piece was always this thing to aspire to, tonally,” Burch said. Green called Frazier’s story “funny and deep all at once,” adding, “It’s the thing that lit my flame and made me laugh out loud, hard.”
After the $70 million movie was shot, a release date was set for July 2023. And then it went over a cliff: Warner Bros. Discovery decided to shelve it, not because “Coyote vs. Acme” was bad (test audiences loved it), but because burying it allowed the company to take a $30 million tax write-down.
Frazier said he was disappointed less for himself than for the cast and crew. “I read that the people who did the explosions were sorry that people weren’t going to get to see them,” he said. “I sympathized with that. I mean, you do a good explosion … ”
The movie spent 2024 in purgatory. Then, showing Coyote-like resilience, it found a new distributor.
Now that the “Coyote vs. Acme” is about to come out, Frazier seems nervous about seeing it. “I feel superstitious,” he said. “I so badly want it to be good.”
Four years ago, when he was tipped off by his friend in Albuquerque, he got in touch with his literary agent, who contacted Warner Bros. Discovery. No one at the studio had bothered to inform him that “Coyote vs. Acme” had started filming, and he had not received the big check that typically goes to the writer of a movie’s source material on the first day of production.
When it finally arrived, Frazier decided to splurge.
He bought a Toyota Camry hybrid.
“I have never loved an object that much,” he said.
The post In 1990, a Writer Had a Funny Idea. Now It’s a Movie. appeared first on New York Times.
