Q&A: Screenwriter Chris McCoy, Part 2 | Go Into The Story

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. Therefore I was quite happy when Chris agreed to do a GITS Q&A.

In this 5-part series, which will run today through Friday, we cover Chris? background as a writer, reflections about each of his Black List scripts, and his insight into the craft of screenwriting.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

What?s the status of ?Get Back??

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.

Tomorrow in Part 3: Chris talks about his screenplay ?Good Looking?.

Please visit comments with your observations and question, and be sure to thank Chris for his time.

Source: http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/02/qa-screenwriter-chris-mccoy-part-2.html

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