Ted Kramer: Where are you going?
Joanna Kramer: I don’t know.
(Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979)
The casting director Juliet Taylor often scouted talent at the theater, and, after witnessing Meryl Streep on stage, Taylor put the promising young actor on a flight to England to meet Fred Zinnemann about a role in the director’s new film, Julia. If everything worked out, soon Meryl could be starring opposite Jane Fonda as a woman who joins the Resistance ahead of World War II.
Allow me to describe the plot of this 1977 gem of a movie that you should drop everything (except this book) and watch immediately: Adapted from a chapter in Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, a memoir that flirted with fiction, Julia tells the story of the deep, undying friendship between childhood friends Lillian and Julia, who left the United States to study at Oxford and the University of Vienna. When Lillian, a playwright, learns that Julia has been injured in a Nazi attack at her school, she flies to Vienna—but there is no trace of Julia. Later, Lillian receives an invitation to a writers’ conference in Russia, and Julia resurfaces with a dangerous assignment to smuggle money out of Berlin en route to Moscow as part of a mission to help Jewish people targeted by fascists. I’m not about to spoil the ending, but know this: Lillian’s train ride into Russia is one of the most suspenseful moments in cinema. I will forever be haunted by it and in awe that a period picture showcasing brave women fighting evil, rather than discussing men, was even made at all.
Julia had everything: Drama. Mystery. Intrigue. Heroines on the right side of history. JANE FONDA.
A few weeks passed until Meryl heard from Zinnemann. He delivered the news that the venerable Vanessa Redgrave was going to play Julia to Jane’s Lillian. Would Meryl accept a smaller role?
“Well, you know, I’ll check my book,” Meryl recalled herself saying. She liked the part—snobby girl-about-town Anne Marie—and she found a celebrity mentor in Jane, who took the rookie under her wing. “She had an almost feral alertness, like this bright-blue attentiveness to everything around her that was completely intimidating and made me feel like I was lumpy and from New Jersey, which I am,” she remembered.
Meryl, then twenty-eight, was to film all of her scenes with Jane. The prospect induced anxiety, which manifested itself in hives. On her first day, she and Jane rehearsed just once before shooting a scene. By the second take, Meryl was loosening up, feeling good, when Jane told her, “Look down.” What? “Over there. That green tape on the floor—that’s you. That’s your mark. And if you land in it, you will be in the light. And you will be in the movie.”
Jane encouraged Meryl to improvise; the rookie made her laugh so hard she cried. After Julia wrapped, Jane spread the word around Los Angeles. “I found out she’d gone back to California and told everyone who would listen about this girl with a weird last name. And opened more doors than I probably even know about today,” Meryl said.
Unwittingly, Jane imparted an object lesson in kindness. As a result, she inspired Meryl to pay it forward when setting an example for younger, less experienced costars (most of whom were terrified to breathe the same air as she).
Alas, Zinnemann was forced to cut Meryl’s role. She briefly appeared in two scenes and oozed passive-aggression during an encounter where Anne Marie insults Lillian’s spirit sister: “By the way, I tried to see Julia again but she wouldn’t see me,” sneers the socialite, sporting a fur stole, pearls, ginormous red hat, and unflattering black wig. “She’s leading a strange life, pretending not to be rich. Doing something called… anti-fascist work.”
Despite mixed reviews, Julia garnered eleven Oscar nominations and a Best Supporting Actress trophy for Redgrave.
Meryl, meanwhile, was uncertain about this whole movie thing. She made her screen debut in the March 1977 made-for-TV sports drama The Deadliest Season, playing the wife of a hockey pro who accidentally kills another player on the ice. Julia premiered that October. It unsettled her that in its final cut, the dialogue she spoke in one scene had been transferred to another. She thought, “I’ve made a terrible mistake, no more movies, I hate this business.” Unlike doing a play, where she unleashed her energy in two or three hours, making movies was a tedious, drawn-out process that required a lot of waiting. It seemed like the only people having fun were the gaffers and lighting technicians. Meryl would not have fun until she mastered the tricks of the trade.
But the theater devotee continued to take high-profile work on camera, joining her partner, John Cazale, in the Vietnam War epic The Deer Hunter. She played Linda, a small-town girl whose boyfriend, Nick (a foxy Christopher Walken), goes AWOL following a traumatic experience overseas. Linda seeks comfort in the arms of Nick’s best buddy, Mike (an emo Robert De Niro), but he is more devoted to his missing friend. (Mike returns to Vietnam to find Nick; it does not end well.) Unlike the guys’ roles, Linda barely existed on the page. “She’s the kind of girl I went to high school with,” observed Meryl, who also drew from her cheerleading past. “The kind who waits to be asked to the prom, who waits to be asked to get married, and who waits for her lover to come back from the war.”
After seeing Meryl on Broadway in The Cherry Orchard, De Niro encouraged director Michael Cimino to bring her aboard Deer Hunter. “They admitted they didn’t have any idea what the girl would say in any of these situations,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Whatever I thought—would be appropriate. On one hand, you could think of it as negligence. On the other hand, it was great artistic freedom for me because I really could make my performance.”
There are a lot of tears shed in Deer Hunter, but, to me, the biggest heartbreaker happens at the very beginning: The submissive Linda, who lives with her abusive, alcoholic father, is getting ready for a friend’s wedding when she discovers the deadbeat in a drunk, incoherent state. She tries to put him in his bed, but he smacks her to the ground. She gets up, forces a smile, and pleads, “Daddy, no, it’s me!” He slaps her again, screaming, “All bitches, I hate ’em!” Including his own daughter. In the span of a few minutes, Linda’s despair—familiar to women stuck in toxic relationships from which they can’t escape—elicits as much audience empathy as does the pain endured by Vietnam veterans Michael and Nick, though hers is less central to the story line.
A cautious Linda, wearing a bruise on her cheek, asks Nick whether she can stay in his trailer. Nick, who is gentle and loving, rejects her offer to pay rent, consoling, “It’s me you’re talking to.” It’s no wonder Linda’s drawn to him. Nick makes her feel safe. Working with minimal dialogue and maximum emotion, Meryl helps us understand why Linda would wait for her lover to come back from the war instead of catching a bus to literally anywhere else—and never looking back. (The thing is, nobody ever told Linda she could do that—just leave. As part of her bleak character study, Meryl put Linda’s voice and agency on mute to reflect an authentic female experience for women rooted in their hometowns, conditioned to serve men, for better or worse.) “I wanted the audience to feel another dimension to her,” Meryl explained. “She’s the forgotten person in the screenplay and also in the characters’ lives.”
Off camera, she endured heartbreak in real time: Cazale was suffering from lung cancer. Despite his illness, he wanted to do what he loved with the person he loved. Cimino, who cast him as Stan, a working-class Pennsylvania townie, arranged the shooting schedule to film Cazale’s scenes first. De Niro paid the insurance required to keep Cazale in the film. Meryl paid his medical bills. After wrapping Deer Hunter, Meryl traveled to Vienna to film a role in the NBC miniseries Holocaust as the Christian wife of a Jewish artist (James Woods) sent to a concentration camp. The shoot took 2 ½ months, and Meryl ached to get home. Returning to New York, she cut back on work to take care of Cazale, whose disease had spread to his bones. “She was always at his side,” Joe Papp later said. “It was such a statement of loyalty, of commitment. She never betrayed any notion that he would not survive. She knew that he was dying, but he knew only in the way that a dying man knows it. She gave him tremendous hope.”
With Meryl nearby, Cazale closed his eyes in the middle of the night on March 13, 1978. A doctor said he was gone. Meryl was so overcome by grief that she pounded on his chest, crying. But then, reported Michael Schulman in Her Again, Cazale opened his eyes briefly and said, “It’s all right, Meryl,” before closing them forever.
Afterward, in a wounded state of mourning, she stayed at a friend’s house in the Canadian countryside where she drew sketches of Cazale and Joe Papp.
The next month, Holocaust aired in four installments. The series was hugely popular, snagging Meryl an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series. But she refused to accept the honor at the televised ceremony later that September, declaring, “I don’t think performances should be taken out of context and put up against each other for awards.”
Money motivated her decision to appear in Holocaust, and she wasn’t about to apologize for needing the cash. As her profile rose, she started to get recognized on the street—that made Meryl uncomfortable. One day, she was riding her bike in Chelsea when four men in a Volkswagen began yelling out the window at her. Hey, Holocaust! Hey, Holocaust! “It’s absurd,” she complained, “that that episode in history can be reduced to people screaming out of car windows at an actress.”
Nevertheless, Meryl jumped into work: she shot The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda shortly after Cazale’s death, which left her devastated but determined to heal. In Joe Tynan, she adopted a butterscotch Louisiana accent to charm Alda’s Joe Tynan, a liberal US senator and presidential hopeful, into cheating on his wife. Alda had written a star vehicle for himself, and, in his screenplay, the Other Woman was an ambitious labor lawyer named Karen Traynor. “When I want something, I go get it—just like you,” she tells Joe. Karen wore elegant separates and her hair upswept in a chignon. In a 1980 Newsweek interview, John Lithgow, a theater colleague, described Meryl’s angst over a love scene with Alda: “It’s a scene that demands tremendous high spirits and a good deal of sexual energy, and at the same time, right after John Cazale had died, Meryl was in no mood for either. And she was embarrassed by the scene. She said she would perspire until she was dripping wet from embarrassment.”
Juliet Taylor also tapped Meryl for a small but memorable role in the Woody Allen comedy Manhattan. For his leading ladies, Woody ensnared Diane Keaton and Mariel Hemingway in a love triangle with his alter ego, divorced forty-two-year-old comedy writer Isaac Davis, at the center. Mariel was sixteen years old, an age difference that seemed to unsettle Meryl, even in those wild and woolly times. “When people asked me what it was like to work with Mariel Hemingway on Manhattan, I said, ‘I never even met the child,’” she told Cue magazine. The hyperefficient writer-director had an aloofness that irked Meryl. She tried improvising to no avail. Woody wanted actors to stick to his script. (Meryl later “realized Diane Keaton could say whatever she wanted.”) She deemed him “a womanizer, very self-involved,” at the expense of his art. “It’s sad, because Woody has the potential to be America’s Chekhov,” she said in 1980, raising eyebrows among cinephiles who admired him. “But instead, he’s still caught up in the jet-set crowd type of life and trivializing his talent.” Where other actors might refrain from knocking Woody in public, lest they get blacklisted, Meryl didn’t appear to care: “I don’t think Woody Allen even remembers me.”
The camera certainly worshipped her. As Isaac’s ex-wife, Jill, she had never looked more glamorous, radiating urban goddess energy with cool, collared blouses and hair as long as Rapunzel’s. Jill had left Isaac for a woman, marking Meryl’s first gay role, and she panicked the neurotic by writing a tell-all book, Marriage, Divorce, and Selfhood—an early inspiration, I like to think, for Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a thinly veiled account of her disastrous split from Carl Bernstein. Jill was fierce, angry, strong, and cold, the Ice Princess who rejected Yale professor Allan Miller.
According to Bob Greenhut, Manhattan’s executive producer, Meryl never had to read for Jill. Taylor, Woody’s longtime casting guru, had said, “There’s this wonderful Yale grad who’s just, like, knocking everybody’s socks off in auditions and everything and you really should take a look at her.” Greenhut told me, “Boy, was she attractive. I mean, everyone was, like, in love with her. ‘Who is this girl?’ And plus, she nailed the part.”
Meryl in 1979 looking normcore-fabulous outside the Public Theater.
Growing buzz—and a pushy agent—got her in the door to see director Robert Benton, producer Stanley Jaffe, and their star, Dustin Hoffman, about Kramer vs. Kramer, a drama based on Avery Corman’s controversial novel depicting a housewife and mother walking out on her family. The story is told from the male perspective, a one-sidedness angering feminists, who complained that the wife had been shamed for wanting her own career and identity outside of marriage. It was zeitgeisty as hell. A “male nightmare”—to borrow a favorite Ephron-ism—plaguing husbands anxious that the women’s movement of the 1970s would lure their wives away from home, leaving behind chores, child-rearing, and other unpaid labor.
Benton and Meryl shared a powerful representative: Sam Cohn, who dominated the New York talent market at ICM, despised Los Angeles, and had a curious habit of eating paper. Benton came very close to casting Charlie’s Angels star Kate Jackson, but producer Aaron Spelling would not alter his TV production schedule to accommodate Jackson. That was after Jackson and Dustin reportedly partied at Studio 54 after reading together. Sensing an opening, Sam phoned Benton.
“Would you look at this young actress, Meryl Streep?”
“She’s a lovely actress,” said Benton, who had seen Meryl in The Cherry Orchard. Now she and Raul Julia were sparring in an electric revival of The Taming of the Shrew in Central Park. Still, he thought it was too late in the process to consider her.
“Please do it for me,” Sam implored.
As a favor, Benton and company agreed to meet Meryl at the Sherry-Netherland on Fifth Avenue.
“Meryl showed up and she sat there,” he recalls. “I don’t think the interview took more than 15 or 20 minutes maximum, and it was… the worst single interview I have ever had with an actor in all my years in Hollywood. The worst. The worst. She walked out the door, and Dustin looked at me, and I looked at Dustin and we said, ‘That is Joanna Kramer.’”
Stanley Jaffe pulled strings at the studio, Columbia Pictures, urging executives to take a risk on an unknown actress with an unconventional face. Neither The Deer Hunter nor The Seduction of Joe Tynan had been released in theaters yet.
Bigger names had been considered for Joanna: Ali McGraw. Faye Dunaway. Jane Fonda, although Jane projected an inherent strength—a feral alertness, if you will—undermining her believability as the fragile Joanna. Fragility. That’s the essence of what Benton desired in his female lead but couldn’t articulate until Meryl sat down. Dustin, trained in the Method at the Actors Studio, would go deep into Ted Kramer, blurring the line between character and self. At the time, his separation from wife of nearly ten years Anne Byrne, the mother of his two daughters, was giving him plenty of material to mine. Anne yearned to focus on her career in show business; in Meryl, he viewed a partner in pain. He was aware that she’d lost Cazale earlier that year and, based on her behavior, observed a lingering numbness. She could use that. And Dustin would have something real to act against.
Although Dustin remembered Meryl not saying a word at the meeting, in her recollection, she aired concerns about the screenplay. Joanna came across as the bad mommy—a selfish princess who requests custody of seven-year-old son Billy after a year of “finding herself” in California. The ensuing courtroom battle echoed a Salem witch trial. Meryl had read Corman’s book, which Ms. lambasted as “an antifeminist backlash novel” riding a wave of hatred toward women, and thought Joanna should be treated sympathetically in the script. Internally, she wondered, “The woman in Kramer is like a Tennessee Williams person, one who bruises. How can I play her? I’m not a mother.… I don’t live on the Upper East Side. But people outside of an experience sometimes have a greater insight than those living it.”
With whirlwind speed, Meryl was running toward motherhood. Don Gummer, a handsome sculptor and friend of her brother Third, helped mend her broken heart. “Three weeks after John’s death, a former girlfriend of John’s materialized from California and reclaimed our apartment,” she recalled in an interview with Ladies’ Home Journal. “It turned out that she and John had signed a lease together a few years earlier, but had never lived there together.” Third, a modern dancer, had moved into Cazale’s Tribeca loft. “Then suddenly when this woman appeared, we had to leave. So within a period of three weeks, I not only lost John but our home.”
Don offered to help Meryl and Third move their stuff to storage, and anything left over he would keep safe in his Soho loft/studio. Meryl went off to Washington and Baltimore to shoot Joe Tynan, and, when she got back to Manhattan two months later, Don told the Streep siblings they could live at his place while he embarked on a trip around the world.
“I started writing to Don while he was away,” she said. “He and my brother had been friends for years and I had met Don two or three times, but I honestly didn’t remember him. We really got to know each other through our letters. Then when he returned to New York, he built me a little room of my own in the loft, and told me I could stay. And twenty minutes later we got married! No, actually, it was two months later. It just seemed right. A lot of men had asked me to marry them, but it had never really seemed right before.”
Dear reader, I know what you’re thinking. If Meryl was still grieving over Cazale, how on earth could she move on to another man so quickly?
The thirty-one-year-old Yale School of Art graduate projected an alluring groundedness. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised among five brothers in Indiana, where he married his college sweetheart. A divorce followed after he moved to the East Coast to expand his horizons at the Boston Museum School and Yale. He found his artistic voice creating large-scale, abstract sculptures crafted from such natural materials as wood, stone, and soil. Don’s aesthetic impressed Richard Serra, who selected him to launch a solo show in 1974 at Artists Space on Wooster Street. Don grew up assembling model airplanes and tree forts, and he was destined to build things with his hands. During the day, he worked as a union carpenter in Midtown Manhattan’s Olympic Tower. He had a dark mop of curly hair and a quiet, calm demeanor—like Meryl, he would shatter the notion that an artist had to be a wild neurotic to be successful.
“He’s like me,” she gushed. “I mean, he’s very private. And he never says anything he doesn’t mean. He’s warm, strong, gentle, funny, kind, understanding, very creative. I couldn’t live with someone who wasn’t creative.”
She felt as though she’d “fallen into heaven.” When you know, you know. Also, Meryl disliked dating, preferring the stability of marriage and the contentment it brought her. They exchanged vows in an Episcopal ceremony at her parents’ Connecticut home on Saturday, September 30, 1978. Don was on crutches from a motorcycle accident in Thailand. The speedy progression to the altar appeared to perplex Meryl’s mother, who asked Joe Papp, “What is she thinking about?” Weeks before on the set of The Taming of the Shrew, Papp noticed she was still mourning Cazale. But he supported her decision. “She does the right thing for herself at the moment,” the producer would say.
Several days after saying “I do,” Meryl went back to work.
Perhaps you’re aware that Meryl and Dustin clashed on the set of Kramer vs. Kramer. If not, prepare for a cautionary tale in how not to treat your coworker.
Several years before, Meryl encountered Dustin while auditioning for a Broadway play he directed called All Over Town. She was in school at Yale; he made a terrible first impression. “I’m Dustin Hoffman,” he said, burping and groping her breast. Little did she know that someday this brute would be her movie husband. (Dustin is said to have apologized later for that incident.)
Like Billie Jean King preparing to outplay Bobby Riggs, Meryl had done her warm-ups. She hung around Upper East Side playgrounds to watch young, nonworking moms dote upon their kids and began to empathize with her character’s internal struggle: “Joanna’s daddy took care of her. Her college took care of her. Then Ted took care of her. Suddenly she just felt incapable of caring for herself.” Meryl, of course, had experienced none of that in her scrappy life. “I wanted to play a woman who had this feeling of incapability, because I’ve always felt that I can do anything.”
On the second day of shooting, Dustin crossed a line. They were filming Joanna’s dramatic exit at the very top of the film, when a distressed Joanna, trying to keep it together amid tears, bluntly informs Ted that she doesn’t love him and she’s leaving—without their son, Billy. According to Meryl, “We were supposed to emerge out into a hall, so we started out in the room, behind the door, and they said ‘Action,’ and Dustin turned around and… slammed me in the face.” The slap left “enormous red finger marks on my cheek,” she said. Benton was in shock. Meryl, ever the professional, continued with the scene, which involved Joanna escaping down the elevator in the hallway outside the Kramers’ apartment. Later, as the camera captured her emotional goodbye, she heard Dustin, the Method man, attempt to provoke her by mentioning Cazale. Such was his warped approach to get under Meryl’s skin and elicit the performance that he wanted.
Dustin and Meryl.
Meryl hardly needed Dustin’s help. She was angry. After Kramer, Dustin would never push her around again.
“It was overstepping,” she reflected in 2018, months after #MeToo exposed Dustin’s history of sexual misconduct and boorish behavior toward female colleagues. “But I think those things are being corrected in this moment. And they’re not politically corrected; they’re fixed. They will be fixed, because people won’t accept it anymore.”
Another unscripted moment was the restaurant scene where Joanna announces her intent to assume custody of Billy. The screenplay called for Joanna to break the news right away and then explain, “All my life, I’ve felt like somebody’s wife or somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter—even all the time we were together, I never knew who I was.” However, Meryl wanted to say this before dropping the Billy bomb as part of her mission to humanize Joanna. Benton agreed, but Dustin was fuming.
“I finally yelled at her,” Dustin said. “‘Meryl, why don’t you stop carrying the flag for feminism and just act the scene!’ She got furious. That’s the scene where I throw the glass of wine against the wall and it shatters. That wasn’t in the script, I just threw it at her. Then she got furious again. ‘I’ve got pieces of glass in my hair!’ and so on.”
For the courtroom scene, Benton—who wrote the script and willingly tweaked it with Meryl’s input—asked Meryl to rewrite Joanna’s monologue on the witness stand. “I think I’ve written it as a man, not as a woman would say it,” he told her. “Take the speech, keeping the points that were made, but put it in a woman’s voice.”
When the time came, Meryl brought a legal pad and a page and a half of handwritten dialogue. Benton thought, Oh my God, what have I done? I’m going to lose a friend and two days of work. This is going to be awful. He braced for the worst. Then he read her revise, and—phew—it was about a third too long but perfect. Even better: he didn’t have to worry about hurting Meryl’s feelings or losing her as a friend. They trimmed the speech together, cutting two lines, and handed it to the script supervisor.
Action.
She nailed the first take, prompting a stunned silence from everybody in the room. Benton began to worry that Meryl would use up all of her powers because this was going to be a long day and he had much more footage to film, including reaction shots. Benton approached her and warned, “Meryl, please don’t. You’re new to this. Please don’t blow this early because there’s a lot.” He urged her to “save it for the close-up.”
Meryl didn’t listen. Take after take, she delivered her lines as if it were the first time she said them. “It was never mechanical,” says Benton. “After maybe the third or fourth time that she did it, I suddenly realized I was scared shitless of her. That control, and the depth, was unbelievable.”
Joanna was coming into her own but in a very different way than Meryl had on the set of Julia. Where the feminist, outspoken Jane Fonda proved an enthusiastic advocate for Meryl, the erstwhile Mrs. Kramer was a lonely island in uncharted seas, advocating for herself without another woman to help her. An excerpt of Joanna’s original speech, as written by Benton: “Don’t I have a right to a life of my own? Is that so awful? Is my pain any less just because I’m a woman? Are my feelings any cheaper?”
Meryl doesn’t get enough credit for her writing skills. The way she tweaked Benton’s attempt, she toned down the theatrics and went straight for the emotional jugular, rendering an utterly sympathetic, discreetly feminist portrait of Joanna that endeared the character to skeptics predisposed to villainize her. “I was incapable of functioning in that home, and I didn’t know what the alternative was going to be,” she wrote. “So I thought it was not best that I take [Billy] with me.… I was his mommy for 5 ½ years. And Ted took over that role for 18 months. But I don’t know how anybody can possibly believe that I have less of a stake in mothering that little boy than Mr. Kramer does. I’m his mother.”
She triggered Benton with the word mommy. And Dustin, up on his old tricks, triggered Meryl with the words John Cazale. He whispered them into Meryl’s ears and briefed her to look directly at him when Ted’s attorney says, “Were you a failure at the most important relationship in your life?”
She followed his advice, and, upon making eye contact, Dustin’s response touched the heart: he shook his head, ever so slightly, creating an interlude of tenderness between the foes—and letting Meryl/Joanna know that he didn’t think she had failed.
Meryl had given him something real to react to. And Benton, eager to keep the magic going, had Dustin repeat his micro-gesture so he could capture it on film.
It seemed as though Meryl, four movies in, was finally getting the hang of it. But the theater held a special place in her heart. There, she didn’t run the risk of losing what made her great. She could let loose and play someone grittier than a supporting starlet who exists only to let the Dustin Hoffmans and the Robert De Niros and the Alan Aldas chew the most scenery.
“Working on movies is very economical, clean, pared down,” she said in 1979. “You can afford to do so little. You don’t even have to be a good actor, or even an actor, to be effective in movies. But when you get a good actor, like Brando or Olivier, there’s a difference—when somebody takes a part by the throat and sings with it. My fear is that in doing so little, I will not be able to do what I do on stage, which is to be brave, to take the larger leap.”
Somewhere around this time, Meryl saw Liza Minnelli perform at the Winter Garden. The ambassador of show tunes, sequins, and classic New York knew how to give it her all. And if you’ve ever seen Liza in concert, you know what that means: A confetti explosion of razzle-dazzle and old-time showmanship. No inhibition. No shame. No dull moments.
It made Meryl think. There was more to acting than focused characterization. You had to give ’em a show. Make it sparkly and exciting. Meryl would take Liza’s cue and attempt to transform Hollywood into Broadway—but on her terms. Impossible, right?