Go Into The Story Interview: Chris McCoy

My conversation with the 3-time Black List writer.

Chris McCoy is pretty unique among screenwriters in that he has three scripts that have made the Black List: “Get Back” (2007), “Good Looking” (2009), and “Good Kids” (2011). That alone is enough to warrant significant curiosity about this young writer. The fact his screenplays are highly entertaining, distinctive, and filled with quirky characters and strong dialogue makes it even more so.

Here is my interview with Chris.

Scott Myers: Let’s start with this: In reading “Get Back,” “Good Looking,” and “Good Kids,” I have come to one inescapable conclusion: You’re really funny. Do you have any idea how that happened or is a good sense of humor simply in your DNA?

Chris McCoy: I come from a somewhat enormous family of Boston Irish Catholics, and I do think there is something to the idea this particular group has a good sense of humor built into its DNA. I’m actually nowhere close to being the funniest person in my family — my mother was the youngest of nine and she has me beat by a mile. Bad weather and guilt seem to serve as a nice petri dish for humor.

Scott: What are some of your favorite movie comedies and why?

Chris: The first comedy that blew my mind was “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which might speak to the Catholic thing — I couldn’t believe that those guys were able to hide such brilliant commentary in this blanket of absurdity.

After I saw “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” in the theatre, I spent a week just walking around San Francisco thinking about it. I felt like Kaufman rewired my idea of what movies were.

Finally, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” was a massive influence on me as a kid. I’d love to pretend I was shaped by Woody Allen and Preston Sturges — but if I’m honest with myself, I spent a lot of time watching Bill & Ted.

Scott: What is it about comedy that appeals to you as a story genre?

Chris: Comedy is such a great delivery system for subversive ideas — as long as you make people laugh, you can say whatever you want.

Scott: Let’s go back a bit. When did you first realize that somebody was responsible for writing a movie?

Chris: Junior year of high school, when I joined the theatre club and started getting my hands on plays. That’s probably when I made the leap that there was a secret recipe to drama.

Scott: When and how did you decide you wanted to try your hand at screenwriting?

Chris: In Massachusetts, we had a competition called the “Massachusetts High School Drama Festival” where schools would stage productions of one-act plays and compete with each other in a sort of knockout tournament. The festival held a playwriting competition as part of the festivities. I’d always enjoyed writing, so I wrote a play and entered the competition, where I did pretty well.

So I discovered that I enjoyed playwriting, and I’d always wanted to go to college in New York. With a little research, I found the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and that’s where I started learning the craft of it.

Scott: What was your big break that helped to kick-start your career as a Hollywood screenwriter?

Chris: The “big break” was a long road. Hollywood is the ultimate who-you-know place, and if you don’t have any connections in the industry or your dad isn’t somebody famous, you have to figure out how to do it yourself.

My road was this: after college, I was broke, so I worked the overnight shift at the Stop & Shop in my hometown stocking groceries, until I had enough money to move west.

I worked in San Francisco for a year at Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine “Zoetrope: All Story,” where I was technically “Associate Editor,” though I was really just a glorified intern, though the perks of wine were great. I was also making ends meet by going door-to-door for Sierra Club, which was not a career with a lot of growth potential, so I decided to move to Los Angeles and try to use my degree.

I didn’t know anybody in LA, so I went to the Friedman Agency, which is this entertainment industry staffing service that puts connection-less individuals into random temp positions. Through them, I got a job as an assistant at CAA.

There’s sort of an unspoken rule in the agency business that after a year of working for someone, you’re allowed to ask for a favor. I wanted to write, so when I was thirteen months in, I got the name of three good lit managers from a friend of mine at the company. I went into my boss’s office and asked him to call the numbers and pretend I was just some good writer he knew who needed representation. My boss had barely read anything I’d done — maybe some McSweeney’s stuff — but to his credit, he just went “done!” and he picked up the phone and called the managers and said, “I’ve got this guy…”

And that’s how I met my manager, which started everything. Thirteen months of work for three phone calls, but my boss was awesome about it.

Scott: You have the rare distinction of having three original screenplays on the Black List. How has your scripts’ presence on the Black List influenced your experience as a screenwriter and the perception of you as a writer by the industry?

Chris: The nice thing about the Black List is that it provides an industry shorthand that means “This Is A Script Worth Reading,” and by association, “This Is A Writer Worth Reading.” It’s a huge benefit for writers like myself, who have written stuff that people like, but haven’t got anything produced yet, and therefore can’t be pitched by their produced credits.

I have no clue how representatives sold up-and-coming writers before the Black List. There must have been so much “you’ve got to take my word for it!” The Black List has this in-built stamp of approval.

As for being on it three times… I hope it’s just seen as a mark of consistency. I care tremendously about my work, and I hope inclusion on the list reflects that.

Scott: Each of your three Black List scripts are comedies, yet each is different in their own way. “Get Back” is very high concept with a time travel device taking the lead characters back to England in 1966. “Good Looking,” which is set a “half-beat in the future,” also has a high concept at its core — a company that guarantees it will “match you with your soulmate” — but feels almost like a satire. “Good Kids” is a contemporary mainstream teen comedy in the vein of American Pie. Are the differences in narrative approach and tone between each script part of a conscious decision on your part to explore various types of comedies or is it a reflection of simply writing story ideas that appeal to you?

Chris: The guiding mantra for my career thus far has been to write movies that I actually want to see, which sounds simple enough, but I think it’s kinda easy out here to fall into the trap of writing stuff that you would never plop down $12.50 at the theatre to watch, and that’s when your work can really start going off the rails.

The nice thing about writing specs is that you can show people exactly what you want to show them. You’re doing it for free, so there’s no reason not to. I’d get bored if I was continually using the same kind of narrative approach or tone, and if I’m bored writing something, people will be bored reading it.

Scott: Let’s look at each of these three scripts starting with “Get Back” which made the Black List in 2007. Here is a logline I found: “Centered on the discovery of a time machine by two die-hard Beatles fans, who travel back in time to prevent John Lennon from meeting Yoko Ono, who they blame for the break-up of the Fab Four.” How did you come up with that story concept? What about it made you think, This is a movie?

Chris: I started Get Back when I was broke, had no manager or agent, and I was still working eleven-hour days at CAA. I was out surfing with my roommate on a weekend, and we were talking about music because we’re both big music fans, in addition to being atrocious surfers. So we were hiding from the waves, talking about the Beatles, and I told him — “I’m going to solve this John and Yoko thing once and for all.” I just thought it was a funny idea.

The nice thing about being certain that you’re doomed for failure — as I was at the time — is that you can kinda write what you want, because hey, nobody is going to see it anyway. I essentially wrote “Get Back” to make my friends laugh and solve one of rock and roll’s burning questions, and then when I got my manager Shawn Simon, I gave it to her and she did amazing things when it came to getting the script out there.

Get Back taught me that it’s far better to write to make your friends laugh, rather than trying to write to make everybody laugh. There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote about this that I love:

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

That is so great.

Scott: After you came up with that core concept, can you remember how other major story elements emerged. For example how did you decide on Ted and Piero as the lead characters, and what was key in your mind about their buddy dynamic? How did you come up with the Parliament/Funkadelic Mothership time travel machine?

Chris: There was a record store called “Spinnaker Records” in my hometown that I went to all the time, which is the name of the store in the script, and I just sort of modeled Ted on the guys I saw working there. “High Fidelity” nailed the record store clerk mindset, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t use that movie as a reference point when I was constructing my characters. For the Piero character, I used the name of my friend Piero from college — again, when you think that nobody is going to read your script, you can do whatever you want.

The buddy dynamic I was going for with the two of them was that of a couple of guys who both thought they had been born at the wrong time in history, but for different reasons. One guy thinks that he would have been able to participate in the culture of the sixties, while the other guy thinks he would have been able to get girls. Both of them end up being right, in their own way.

As for the Mothership, when I was outlining the script, I was trying to think of a rock and roll way to get these guys back to 1966 in a “rock and roll” kind of way, and it just sort of popped into my head — the Mothership!

So I started researching the Mothership, and I discovered that the original Mothership had indeed been lost somewhere out in the woods in Maryland, which I thought was the single funniest thing I’d ever read — arguably the most famous prop in the history of rock and roll, and when the band ran out of money, one of their roadies hauled it away and ended up losing it.

So I built the whole first act around these guys tramping through the Maryland woods, searching for the Mothership because they think finding it will solve all their problems. And then when they do find it and get it working… it turns out it’s a time machine that runs on funk. People have always seemed to respond to that logic — the band was from Motown and knew guys who built cars, and everybody was taking a lot of LSD at the time. Building cars + LSD = time machine.

Scott: How much research did you do about England in 1966? About John Lennon, Yoko Ono and The Beatles?

Chris: A ton. I basically lived at the Santa Monica Public Library while I was writing that script, reading everything I could find. I wanted their voices to feel authentic, and I was focused on capturing the mood of Carnaby Street and the energy of the time.

Scott: There’s a Forrest Gump type dynamic to the story in that Ted and Piero intersect with a whole host of actual historical figures such as The Beatles, George Martin, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, and James Brown. Was that something you realized early on you could exploit or did that emerge later in your writing process?

Chris: I realized it early on. Writing that script was wish-fulfillment of the highest form: What would I do if I was around during this time? I realized I would probably mess everything up, and that’s what went into the script. It’s such a natural source of conflict, interacting with your heroes when you’re not supposed to.

Scott: From a writing standpoint, what was the biggest challenge in crafting this story?

Chris: Because people have such preconceived notions about Yoko Ono, it was a challenge to turn her into a love interest. I worked hard to show why Lennon loved her, which allowed me to show why my protagonist would have fallen in love with her too.

Scott: I thought one of the funniest bits in the script is how Ted’s plan to separate Yoko and John backfires so that via an iPod, Ted and Piero can see some Beatles songs in an alternate future including titles like “Love, Love, Superlove (Rainbow)”. Did you just come up with those titles or could you hear some version of those songs in your mind? And how much fun was it thinking of early Wings-type, McCartney influenced song titles?

Chris: Some of those titles are real! For instance: “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reggae” is the B-side to the single of “Wonderful Christmastime.” Because it’s a Christmas song, it might have been a little unfair for me to include it with those other titles, but I couldn’t help myself.

But yes, even though Paul McCartney is a legend, it was fun to come up with alternate Wings song titles. Things kind of went off the rails for all the Beatles in the mid-70s.

Scott: What’s the status of “Get Back”?

Chris: Ask me in a couple of weeks. It was at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment until recently, but the option lapsed, so now we’re looking at other places for it. Getting a movie made is hard.

Scott: Moving onto “Good Looking,” which made the 2009 Black List, there is this excerpt from a Hollywood Reporter article on the sale of that script to DreamWorks:

In a funky tweak on “Minority Report,” McCoy’s newest project posits a future dating service that matches soulmates around the world without fail. The story line follows a guy who has the audacity to reject the person chosen for him.

McCoy developed the idea last year while on a working vacation in London, where he noticed the city’s near-universal coverage by surveillance camera to deter crime. He started musing on alternative uses for that collected personal information.

“If someone could organize that information and know what everyone in London was doing and eating and who they’re dating and who they’re going home with, then that’s an incredibly powerful tool,” McCoy said. “I think I have an oddball brain or something, but then I started thinking about how all that stuff could be applied to matchmaking. It would totally subvert Match.com and eHarmony, (where) I think people lie about who they are or they say what they think people will want them to be. But ‘Good Looking,’ my service, knows who they are and can put them together.”

So your “oddball brain” went from surveillance cameras everywhere in London to a service that guarantees to match people with their true soulmates. What appealed to you about that story concept as a potential original screenplay?

Chris: In my work, I like introducing a big concept — i.e. a service that matches you to your soulmate with 100% accuracy, which changes the world overnight — and then getting that concept out of the way as quickly as possible in order to focus on the characters.

I thought this particular idea could be a screenplay when I realized the heart-versus-mind conflict such a service would create for the protagonist. “I love this girl… but my soulmate is that that girl.” That’s a tough spot for a character.

Scott: How soon in your process did you realize, Okay, I want my Protagonist to find his soulmate, then reject her?

Chris: It would have been a very short movie had the protagonist met his soulmate, and then lived happily ever. It was my goal at the beginning of the writing to set up an unconventional love triangle, and nothing is more unconventional than rejecting the person you know is your soulmate.

Scott: Was the instinct to go that route a conscious choice to satirize the traditional romantic-comedy model or was it simply a matter of following your creative impulses for where you thought this particular story should go?

Chris: Yeah, it was a conscious choice to try and use the tropes of romantic comedy in a different way. Probably more than any other genre, people are used to the rhythm of a romantic comedy — when the guy is supposed to meet the girl, how those cute moments that show them falling in love are supposed to feel, how the declaration of love at the end is supposed to play out — so when you don’t do what you’re supposed to do with those beats, people really go, “wait… what is happening here.” Sometimes that can backfire, because readers start howling about structural flaws, and rightfully so, but I feel like it’s important to experiment sometimes.

Scott: In “Good Looking,” the Protagonist is Will who is engaged to Emma. They are extremely different personality types: Will works in financial services, refuses to own a cellphone and other modern technological devices, and as a hobby is trying to build a violin that rivals the sound of a Stradivarius; Emma is a cop and an assertive personality who has a passion for exercise and watching 80s action movies like Red Heat and Days of Thunder. In a typical rom-com, that feels like the classic “guy with the wrong gal” set-up. How conscious were you of that dynamic when developing these two characters?

Chris: Very conscious. Again, it’s just flipping standard conventions — the things that in another romantic comedy would be indicators that these two people aren’t supposed to be together, here end up being the things that show they should be together.

Scott: Another unusual choice you made was to introduce Sophie, the Protagonist’s semi-official love interest on page 60. Was this a conscious decision to break that conventional wisdom about introducing all the major characters by the end of Act One or do you just not care about supposed screenwriting rules of thumb like that?

Chris: I care very deeply about the rules of screenwriting, and I actually love having a structural framework within which you have to work. It forces you to get creative.

When I first wrote Good Looking, my plan was to direct it myself, so I was screwing around with the rules more than I normally would. Sometimes you shrug and just go — why not?

When I rewrote the script after it sold, I gave it a more conventional structure… you meet the rival love interest much earlier, at the end of the first act. I also had to change the protagonist to a female and set it in the present instead of a half-beat in the future, so quite a bit of work has been done, to say the least.

Scott: The founder of the Good Looking company is a guy named Theodore. Is it fair to say he functions as a sort of dark wisdom character, that is he has insight into the world, but in the case of Will, it happens to be the wrong insight?

Chris: Technology is becoming increasingly powerful and is being incorporated more and more into our lives. I think the point of Good Looking is to say that there is something about being human that can’t be quantified with data or algorithms.

Scott: What’s the status of “Good Looking”?

Chris: We just put a terrific director named Randall Einhorn on it — he does a lot of “Parks & Recreation” episodes and the entire series of “Wilfred.” We’re out to cast, so I’m excited to see how it comes together.

Scott: In terms of “Good Kids,” which made the 2011 Black List, here is a logline I found: “The story of four overachieving high school students on Cape Cod who reinvent themselves the summer after graduation. This is SAY ANYTHING meets EASY A.” If you were forced at gunpoint to come up with a two movie mash-up for “Good Kids,” would it be Say Anything meets Easy A, or two other movies?

Chris: First of all — that would be the strangest demand to receive at gunpoint ever, though I love the idea of an armed criminal going around Hollywood holding up writers and ordering new loglines.

A big reference point for “Good Kids” was “American Graffiti” — that summer after high school but before college, when you’re kinda seeing your friends in the context that you’ve previously known them for the last time — so maybe I’d include that in the blank-meets-blank formula. I kinda hate that way of pitching projects, because you always have to reference hit movies. You can never say what something actually is — “This is Kazaam meets The Rum Diary,” or something like that.

I may write that script.

Scott: Of the three scripts, “Good Kids” seems like the most mainstream story, slotting right into that R-rated comedy frenzy that has hit Hollywood since the success of The Hangover and Bridesmaids. Were you specifically trying to write with that trend in mind or is this an example of you just following a story you came up with you thought was interesting?

Chris: I’m glad you think it’s so commercial! Other people thought it was pretty indie, so that’s good to hear.

I try not to write with a trend in mind, because by the time you’re done with the script, the trend is somewhere else. I can see how The Hangover would pop into your head at the beginning of “Good Kids” because of the flash-forward story frame, which is effective as hell, but is admittedly probably being used a bit too much these days. But on the whole, I have to connect with a story or find it interesting in order to force myself to sit down for a couple hundred hours and write it.

Scott: Speaking of story concept, how did you come up with this one?

Chris: I grew up on Cape Cod and I was very much a good kid growing up — never drank, never partied, just wanted to get the hell out of town and go to New York. I had several friends who were the same way, so it felt natural to write those characters. The group of us had a kind of perspective-shifting summer before college, and in “Good Kids” I kinda took that seed and pushed it to its extreme.

Plus, there’s sort of a wish-fulfillment aspect to it — my summer job was a tennis pro, so that’s where that stuff in the script came from. The nice thing about writing is your characters can do the stuff you never did. Ha.

Scott: One distinguishing dynamic of “Good Kids” as compared to the other two scripts the ensemble nature of the Protagonist group. What was your experience working with a group of main characters and their multiple subplots?

Chris: When you’re working with a bunch of characters, it’s important to really have their arcs hammered out beforehand so you don’t lose them within the context of the scene. As long as you know where they’re all going eventually, you have a sense of what you need to do with them when they’re together.

Scott: There a lot of complications, plot twists and turns in this story, as well as setups, payoffs, and callbacks, befitting a movie in the tradition of a classic farce. What are the particular challenges of writing a script where you have to interweave a complicated plot?

Chris: If your main priority is building characters who are well-rounded and whose actions feel believable, a lot of those setups and callbacks will take care of themselves. If you’ve constructed the right kind of foundation, you can get away with those big, broad set pieces down the road.

Scott: There are some elements common to all three scripts. For example, a male Protagonist finds himself in a tense situation in which he may or may not be involved in a relationship with the right woman. What about that dynamic appeals to you as a writer?

Chris: Ha. When you’re dating in your twenties, I think it’s probably just something that’s on your mind a lot. I wrote “Good Looking” after the breakup of a long-term relationship, so that’s where that idea of am-I-with-the-right-person came from. I think whatever you’re going through in your personal life naturally informs your writing whether you want it to or not.

Scott: Another area of commonality is the quirky nature of your characters in that each of them has some highly specific and unusual traits, hobbies, or habits. And once again, we hit that question: Is this a conscious thing on your part or more a reflection of your creative instincts?

Chris: When I’m building a character, it takes me a little time to get to know him or her, but eventually I get to a point where I say “okay, this is how this woman speaks… this is what this guy’s home looks like…” Once I understand the characters world, those hidden traits and talents begin to reveal themselves, which can be a little bit strange sometimes — like looking into the private life of someone who you are actually creating. But that’s why it’s important to be as specific as you can with your characters — the more specific you make them, the more ideas will pop into your head about who they are, which makes them even more specific. It’s like a character development feedback loop.

Of course, sometimes you use traits that you have in yourself or you see in your friends. For instance, I’m very good at catching food with my mouth. It’s a useless talent. But I thought it was a logical trait to give the protagonist in “Good Kids,” because it would allow an entire party to be watching him at the same time, waiting to see if he’s going to catch a gummi bear thrown from a great distance.

Scott: What is the status of “Good Kids”?

Chris: I wrote “Good Kids” with the intention of directing it myself, so I’m putting it together with the guys over at Depth of Field, which is Chris and Paul Weitz’s company. Directing is a new world for me, but they’ve been incredibly supportive and smart about the process.

“But that’s why it’s important to be as specific as you can with your characters — the more specific you make them, the more ideas will pop into your head about who they are, which makes them even more specific. It’s like a character development feedback loop.”

Scott: A few craft questions. Are you one of those writers who works out your story before you start writing it or do you prefer to type FADE in and see where that takes you? If you do spend a lot of time in prep, could you describe how you approach that process?

Chris: If I’m writing a spec, my outline is looser than it would be if I was writing an assignment. Because you have to pitch to get studio jobs, it means that you’ve extensively worked out the beats of what you’re going to do, so you’ve got this long, in-depth document to use as a reference.

But if I’m just at home fiddling around with an idea, I like giving myself some room to explore. What I typically do is have an outline with the big plot points — the inciting event, where we’ll be at the end of the first act, some of the second act rising action beats, the impossible situation at the end of the second act and what the climax will look like.

And then I try to find the most creative path between those big moments. My feeling is that if I can surprise myself when I’m connecting these dots, then hopefully I’ll surprise the reader. If I’m just putting words on the page, I’ll always have a couple of weird ideas that pop into my head that I probably wouldn’t have gotten had I just been putting index cards up on a wall.

Scott: You write such interesting, unique characters. What are the key aspects of your character development process (e.g., questionnaires, biographies, interviews, monologues)?

Chris: If I’m creating a character from scratch, I’ll usually start by thinking about people I know, or I’ll use some version of myself, mining my own fears and neuroses and building outwards from there. I’ve never really been somebody who writes with an actor in mind, because my feeling is it’s better to create someone on the page who an actor can inhabit. Plus, chances are you’re not going to get the actor you want anyway.

Before I start writing, I create character profiles that I’ll refer back to throughout the process, describing what the character wants, what the character does for a living, what he or she looks like, and so forth.

After I construct these basic bones, I’ll start fleshing them out with more unique personality traits, which can come from anywhere — something you noticed in somebody on the street, something you read about in a magazine. I collect books of anecdotes and miscellanea, which always seem to give me a lot of character ideas. I also live in Venice Beach, which is essentially an open-air lunatic asylum, so there’s no shortage of interesting people around.

Once I’ve come up with a rough sketch of the characters, I’ll write out what their relationships are to each other, and how they’ll complicate each other’s lives. Once I have those dynamics figured out, I’ll start writing, and that’s when the character will invariably offer up more information who they are.

Scott: While most of the humor in your stories arises from situations, you also write entertaining and funny dialogue. Is that just an innate talent or have you had to work on this area of the craft? If the latter, what tips do you have about how to develop one’s ability to write good dialogue?

Chris: I think that good dialogue comes from character development — the better you know your character, the more specific the dialogue is going to feel.

Scott: How do you go about the process of plotting a story? Are there any specific structural paradigms or theories you rely on when you write?

Chris; The theory I always end up coming back to is Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules of Writing Fiction, which I’ve had up on my wall in front of my computer for years.

The idea I mentioned earlier about writing to please just one person is in those rules, as are other gems: “Start as close to the end as possible…” “Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of…” And so forth. They’re really useful.

Scott: What’s your take on the idea of “theme”? How important are story themes to you when developing and writing a script?

Chris: A story theme is tremendously important, because it’s what you’re trying to say with the work as a whole. If there’s no theme, there’s nothing holding the script together.

Scott: What do you like about screenwriting?

Chris: I love that there is a technical aspect to it — you have to learn structure and how to set up reversals and how to build towards this hopeless moment at the end of the second act where you have no idea how the protagonist is going to get out of the mess he finds himself in. But once you understand structure, you can start playing with it. It’s a little bit like being a tradesman — if you’re a blacksmith, you have to learn how to build a blade before you can get creative with the hilt. (Obviously, I’m using this reference because I’ve been in a Game of Thrones hole recently).

I love writing dialogue. I love figuring out how the puzzle of a story goes together. I feel grateful that I get to tell stories for a living, and I hope that I have the chance to keep doing it.

Scott: What do you hate about screenwriting?

I hate that once you hand your work over to a producer or a studio, your fate is in their hands.

I hate that my parents have no idea what to tell their friends I do for a living at cocktail parties.

More than anything, I hate when Final Draft does that thing where it screws up dialogue being carried over from one page to the next, and then the lines suddenly disappear, and I have to minimize the window to get them to come back.

Scott: One last question: What is the single best piece of advice you can give to aspiring screenwriters?

Chris: I’d just say it’s important to actually finish your scripts, instead of perpetually tinkering with them. It’s hard to consider something done and show it to people, but the thing about being a screenwriter is that it’s never done. Whatever you’re working on, you’ll have to do fifty more drafts. But you can’t move forward with your career if nobody ever sees what you’re writing. It’s a long road, so you need to keep writing and getting material out there. You never know what’s going to pop.

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.