Bainbridge High Grad Ned Thorne’s Long Road to Filmmaking Success and his Involvement in Coyote v. Acme at Lynwood Sunday

The Historic Lynwood Theatre and the Bainbridge Island Film Festival invites the public to a special screening of Coyote vs. Acme, a combination live action/animation comedy based on a New Yorker short story by Ian Frazier and staring Will Forte, Lana Condor, John Cena, and your favorite Looney Tunes characters. The show will air at 7 p.m. Sunday August 30th at the Lynwood.

The plot, in case you didn’t know, or somehow forgot: After Acme products fails him one too many times in his dogged pursuit of the Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote decides to hire a billboard lawyer to sue Acme Corporation for product liability. Set in a world where cartoons coexist with humans, the comedic legal battle blends slapstick chaos with sharp humor and cameos from iconic Looney Tunes characters. It was originally scheduled for release in 2022.

“Despite positive audience test screenings, Warner Bros. dropped a massive anvil on Coyote vs. Acme, flattening the already-completed film by canceling its release for a tax write-off,” says Kathleen Thorne, who ran Celluloid Bainbridge, the predecessor of the Bainbridge Island Film Festival, for years. “But thanks to a very public backlash, the movie was finally acquired by plucky independent distributor Ketchup Entertainment for release nation-wide on August 28. The Lynwood Theatre’s August 30 screening will include a Q&A with First Assistant Editor (and Bainbridge expat) Ned Thorne. (Under full discloser, Ned is Kathleen and David Thorne’s son).

“Now the question is Will justice win out for Wile E. the way it has for the film?” asks Thorne. “Find out soon this coming Sunday at the Lynwood Theatre! Beep beep!”

So how did this all come about? Ned Thorne, who grew up on Bainbridge Island, had a lot to do with it. Ned’s a picture editor, assistant editor, writer, and director based in Los
Angeles. He cuts features, shorts, trailers, and just about everything else. He has an impressive list of past clients including Apple TV+, Blumhouse, Warner Brothers, CBS, NBC, FOX, and
BET/Paramount, among others. He released his first feature, “419,” that was shown at the 2012 Seattle Internation Film Festival.

When not in a small dark room looking at film footage, he enjoys hiking, reading, photography, playing music, and finding new ways to improve a breakfast sandwich.

Ned cut his film​making teeth, as it were, on Bainbridge Island. “While in middle school, I began making small films with my friend Marshall Langohr and a few other kids: wonderfully silly productions shot on Sony Handycams and sometimes a Panasonic DVX100 if we could get our hands on one. They usually involved flagrant abuse of stunt dummies made from stuffed up sets of clothing held together with safety pins, and were driven as much by whatever youthful energy and creativity we possessed in the moment more than any particular narrative
plan.

“But, simple as those early projects were, they did help cement a love of the process that has never left,” Ned says.  “Around the same time, I landed what might have been my first-ever job (apart from delivering the Bainbridge Review around Eagledale on my bike in grade school), at the Lynwood Theatre. I slung concessions, cleaned up after the shows, and helped keep things running smoothly, and as a bonus, got to spend the summer of 1999 seeing movies for free.

“As I got older, I explored other creative avenues – theatre, dance, writing, music, photography – but I always found myself drawn to the love of combining some or all of
them at once. Filmmaking, at its best, allows one to become a Rube Goldberg, piecing together a contraption that may seem to the outside observer as ridiculous, nothing but a collection of barely interlocking parts cobbled together from scraps, luck, and not enough money, but when turned on somehow settles into an exquisite and harmonious expression at which that same incredulous viewer now weeps, utterly verklempt, and swears that they knew it would work all along.

“That’s the ideal, anyway. The reality was somewhat more piecemeal. When I was older, I was able to hook up with some local filmmakers who were making actual movies including Garrett Bennett, whose feature “FAREWELL TO HARRY” was shot entirely on the Island and in Port Townsend and Seattle. I was but a lowly production assistant, of course, but I got to watch the pros work from just a few feet away, which was pretty amazing.

“I went off to Whitman College for Theatre and English, continuing to make films in my spare time; honing my craft, such as it was, through my graduation in 2005. On to the Big Apple. Eventually, I was connected to Bryan Gunner Cole, a locally- raised filmmaker then based in New York City and starting on the production of his first scripted feature as director (and editor). Would I like to assist him (as an intern for no pay)? I leapt at the chance, and in February of 2006 shipped out to New York and the next stage of my life and career.

“The feature was DAY ZERO, an independent drama starring a then-unknown Jon Bernthal, Elisabeth Moss, soon to win fame on MAD MEN,
AMERICAN PIE’s Chris Klein, ZOOTOPIA’s Ginnifer Goodwin, and, perhaps most excitingly for me, Elijah Wood – Frodo himself, from the LORD OF THE RINGS films.

“With a cast as good as that, but a budget of maybe $1.5 million and a 25-day location shooting schedule, you couldn’t have asked for a better example of classic early 21st century New York indie filmmaking. As Bryan has told me on several occasions, the year I spent working on the film was about as good a film education as I’d have gotten from any film school, and I felt as though I earned my stripes.

“It led to more work (fully paid this time, thankfully), and represented the start of a career that has stretched – horrifyingly – to twenty years as of 2026. I’ve worked in scripted film and TV, documentaries, live events, short films for festivals, advertising – a fairly wide spectrum (many of which projects have been with Bryan – I think he’s probably paid a lot more of my rent than anyone else!). Along the way I met Rachael Hip-Flores, who I’d later marry, and in 2015 we made the move to Los Angeles.

“Incredibly, Bainbridge Island provided once again. Through Marshall, I was introduced to Lauren De Normandie, who grew up on the Island and was now the producing partner to a young director who needed an editor for his direct-to-DVD action thriller.

“We even had a bona fide film legend, Mickey Rourke, in a major supporting role. (To be exact: we had him for 12 hours door to door, he was only in a handful of scenes, and his fee comprised about a third of the film’s miniscule budget, but he was on the poster! This is an object lesson in how these sorts of films tend to work.) Since that first gig, I’ve cut a dozen features (including my first union picture as editor, RUMBLE THROUGH THE DARK, starring Aaron Eckhart, Bella Thorne [no relation], and Oscar nominee Marianne Jean-Baptiste), many more shorts, and served as an assistant editor on major TV shows and films, including the one you’re about to see.

As for Coyote vs. Acme. Ned responded to a Facebook post in 2021 by an editor looking for an assistant, which led to a collaboration and friendship with Carsten Kurpanek, the editor of COYOTE VS ACME. Carsten invited Ned to join him on a $70 million live action/animation hybrid comedy based on a famous New Yorker humor piece by Ian Frazier first published back in 1990 that takes the form of a legal brief describing the suit brought by one Wile E. Coyote against the ACME Corporation, maker of the various equipment, devices, and contraptions he uses in his endless attempts to catch the Road Runner, and which inevitably backfire in
hilarious (but, to him, rather painful and embarrassing) ways.

“Just about everyone who saw the film as it progressed through its various stages loved it. It tested consistently high – and higher with each screening. And yet, someone at Warner Brothers, the studio behind the film, felt differently: that the budget was too high and there would simply be no way to finish and market the film effectively and still hope to see a reasonable return.

“But instead of finding a way to address these concerns before the film went into production, they chose instead to flag the project as problematic.,” Ned explains. “David Zaslav, head of
Warner Brothers Discovery and staring down a mountain of company debt (in the tens of billions of dollars), was looking for any cost-cutting measure he could find. And he found one. COYOTE VS ACME, despite being a totally finished film that had scored with every audience thus far, was shelved.

“I, along with Carsten, the director Dave Green, and the entire cast and crew who had worked to bring the film to life (some of them for years), were shocked, devastated, and angered by the call. The plan was to take a $30 million tax write-off and call it a day. But that’s not what happened. After the news broke that CvA’s release had been canceled, the film community
erupted. It was one thing to cancel a project in its early stages – that, unfortunately, happens all the time. But to allow a film to be totally finished and then simply toss it in the bin – this almost never happened.

“After months of pressure and bad press, Warner Brothers finally caved. They offered to sell the film, essentially, to the highest bidder, so that they could try to recoup some of their losses and perhaps wipe off a bit of the egg on their faces. Several studios and streaming platforms made offers, but Warner Brothers rejected them all as too low. However, as time went on and it became clear that the bad vibes around the film were not going away, Warner Brothers okayed a sale, for $50 million, to Ketchup Entertainment, a small, relatively new distributor who had earlier saved THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP from the dung heap by purchasing the distribution rights. It now rode in on a white horse to do the same for COYOTE VS ACME.

“Thank goodness they did, because without them, we would in all likelihood not be sitting in the Lynwood Theatre this coming Sunday night seeing a work of art by hundreds of talented and dedicated artists. Nobody was sweating the money or the fame; everyone was fully paid for their work and got their credit. All we wanted, like Wile himself, was our day in court, to let the jury – that is, the audience – decide the fate of our film, not some rich studio boss who never even bothered to watch the thing he so readily dismissed for tax purposes. We never
gave up hope that we’d catch our Road Runner, and we finally did. Wile may not be so lucky – after all, if he ever does catch that damn bird, what does he have to live for? –
but he’ll nonetheless endure as an inspiration. As my career continues, I plan to keep him in mind.

After Sunday’s airing, Ned will be doing the Q&A, put together for Kevin Lynch, the manager of The Lynwood. It’s pretty long, but you might be able to use some of it. Here’s a link to the movie’s trailer:  https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2838285081/?ref_=ttvg_vi_3

Courtesy Images: Ned Thorne on the set of Coyote vs. Acme. Ned Thorne and Bryan Gunnar Cole at the Lynwood Theatre screening of Day Zero in January 2008. Latter Photo by Joel Sackett.