Ian Frazier and Samy Burch on “Coyote vs. Acme”

0:00Samy Burch:This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O-D-O-O dot com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

0:39Ian Frazier:This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And in 1990, years before I was editing this magazine, staff writer Ian Frazier published a brilliant piece about a legal case. Case number B-19294. Judge Joan Kajava presiding. Wile E. Coyote plaintiff. It was the opening statement of a lawyer representing Wile E. Coyote, the clever but very unlucky Coyote of the old Warner Brothers cartoons. Mr. Coyote states that on 85 separate occasions, he has purchased, of the Acme Company, herein after defendant, certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labeling.

1:29Ian Frazier:Such injuries sustained by Mr. Coyote have temporarily restricted his ability to make a living in his profession of predator. It's a classic work of humor, one of my favorites, an ingenious premise that Frazier carries out totally straight-faced. He never breaks character. At that moment, the animal he was pursuing veered sharply to the right. Mr. Coyote vigorously attempted to follow this maneuver but was unable to due to poorly designed steering on the rocket sled and a faulty or non-existent braking system. Shortly thereafter, the unchecked progress of the rocket sled brought it and Mr. Coyote into collision with the side of a mesa.

2:16Ian Frazier:He goes into legal detail that can only be called excruciating. The premature detonation of Defendant's product resulted in the following disfigurements to Mr. Coyote. 1. Severe singeing of the hair on the head, neck, and muzzle. 2. Sooty discoloration. 3. Fracture of the left ear at the stem, causing the ear to dangle in the aftershock with a creaking noise. 4. Full or partial combustion of whiskers, producing kinking, frazzling, and ashy disintegration. 5. Radical... Ian Frazier, Sandy to his friends, says he watched the cartoons over and over to get it all right. Well, I was dealing with my parents' estate in 88, and I was back in Cleveland in their apartment, and they had a cassette from our childhood of just Coyote Roadrunner cartoons.

3:10Ian Frazier:And I just watched those cartoons over and over. And at some point, the two things I was doing, you know, reading and talking to the lawyer about the will and watching these wonderful cartoons, which I think are great works of American art, and somehow the two things sort of blended. More than 20 years later, director Dave Green made a movie based on Coyote v. Acme. It's a satire of legal thrillers with cartoon characters alongside actors like Will Forte and John Cena. But there was also some drama. After production, Coyote v. Acme was shelved by its studio as a tax write-off, and public outrage soon followed.

3:51Ian Frazier:It even reached Congress. Joaquin Castro of Texas called for an investigation. He said the, quote, tactic of scrapping fully-made films for tax breaks is predatory and anti-competitive. So after three years in limbo, Coyote vs. Acme is now being released by another studio. The screenwriter on this project, who reimagined Ian Frazier's New Yorker essay as a film, is Sammy Birch. Birch was nominated for an Oscar for her very first film, the drama May-December. And the other day, Sammy Birch sat down to talk with Ian Frazier.

4:27Samy Burch:Hi.

4:28Ian Frazier:Hi.

4:30Samy Burch:So nice to meet you.

4:31Ian Frazier:It's really nice to meet you. I saw the movie, finally, and it's really funny. Back when it was optioned a long time ago, I was thinking, how would you ever make a movie out of that? And I knew May, December, which I thought was great and blew me away. Thank you. Were you writing both of them at the same time?

4:56Samy Burch:Yes. It was very funny. And they were really on the same course for a long time. They shot the same year. I thought there was a chance they would come out in the same year. It felt like they were intertwined. And then Coyote was thrown into the vault.

5:11Ian Frazier:In 23, right?

5:13Samy Burch:In November of 23, the same month. that May December premiered. The day that we got the news that they were putting it in the vault, that was the same day the SAG-AFTRA strike ended, which was fantastic news. And it was like these highs of, oh, they're going to get to come to the premiere. You know, Natalie Portman. And it was such a happy day. And then, so it was kind of a whole, the ups and downs of a life in about one hour.

5:42Ian Frazier:Did you get to live in Albuquerque when you did this?

5:46Samy Burch:No, I visited set and it was very funny to be there. I have a picture of a crew guy, a really big guy, holding these huge sacks that say birdseed. They were like props. You know, there were all these craftsmen. There's all these, what do you call it, real practical effects guys that had worked on all these, you know, Star Wars and Roger Rabbit and all these things. And they're, you know, having to figure out, okay, how do we get a car to crunch on its own so we can animate a piano falling on it later? Like, these kinds of problems are so funny to me.

6:26Ian Frazier:But when the piano falls on the car, there's something about just cartoon violence that's just, it makes me sane somehow. Like, just because you're thinking about, there's violence everywhere. And somehow cartoon violence, I don't know. It makes it seem like you're not really subject to violence. I mean, and the fact that cartoon characters can get up and walk away after things happen.

6:56D.H.

6:57Ian Frazier:Lawrence said that the American character was isolate, stoic, and a killer. And Coyote covers the first two. But he can't do the... He's trying. He's trying, God love him, but you've watched him. I have, you know, my whole life from when I was a little kid. And you had no idea that he had such depth. You know, that he was such a soulful individual. I mean, because he's like, I mean, the cartoon did start out with the coyote talking. I mean, the very early ones, he did talk. And he would say, Wile E. Coyote, super genius. Right. Wile E. Coyote, super genius. And then when they silenced him, that's when he became mega, in my opinion.

7:49Ian Frazier:That if he continued to talk, that wasn't going to work. I mean, to me, one of the great moments in the movie is when he just pours gasoline on the torn up check, you know, where they've tried to buy off Will Forte. And it just, blam, it goes up in the sky. Okay, what do you do? And everybody, you know, they're... Because he's not going to settle for that. You know, he's not going to settle for$50 ,000.

8:20Samy Burch:Another, you know, explosion that they had to figure out, I'm sure.

8:24Ian Frazier:When it comes to an explosion, do you just put in the screenplay, explosion?

8:30Samy Burch:Oh, my God. There's so many, like, splat. Boom.

8:36Ian Frazier:But that's in the script itself.

8:38Samy Burch:Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then it's like, have fun. You know, that's a hand it off to the explosion people.

8:45Ian Frazier:I mean, did you write Grand Piano Falls on Car?

8:49Samy Burch:Grand Piano Falls on Car. Yeah.

8:51Ian Frazier:OK. Definitely.

8:52Samy Burch:Everything in the script that's animated is in bold. So there's always kind of a you're trying to keep track of what in the frame is not in person.

9:07Ian Frazier:Screenwriter Sammy Birch of Coyote the Acme talking with Ian Frazier. More in a moment.

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13:23Ian Frazier:This was a first, though. You hadn't ever written this comedy script before?

13:29Samy Burch:Not like this, no. I mean, my real approach was just really thinking about these characters, who Wiley is, who Wilforte is, you know. But, yeah, I don't think I've ever written the word splat or boom.

13:42Ian Frazier:I mean, I picture like a storyboard and you're following this plot and you're following the coyote's secret, you know, intention. Yeah.

13:52Samy Burch:We started with a lot of note cards on the wall. And then it was a month in when the COVID quarantine happened. Oh, wow. So then we all went home and I was watching every legal thriller and every Coyote short I could alternating. Uh-huh. Yeah, just to get in the headspace. And it was really, it was a couple of years of drafts. So it really changed over time. But with your essay at the top of the pyramid and the Looney Tunes as well of just feeling like, okay, we're going to try and take some elements of this as straight as we can. And in the cinematic language meaning, okay, we're looking at Grisham adaptations.

14:38Samy Burch:We're looking at Aaron Brockovich in Dark Waters. Right, yeah. These things of corporate corruption. And I think that can happen where there's almost like people can be moved and then they fall out and go, wait, this is absurd. And hopefully that's part of a bigger joke. Right at the beginning, we were always like, okay, what if Wiley was actually like a Dustin Hoffman character and it's just this guy out in the desert, you know, working on something obsessively like addicted and, you know, like, can we, can that play? Like, if this were humans, would the plot make any sense? And trying to aim for that, really.