The thing about compromise, Marty Kellerman had learned, was that it never announced itself. It didn't arrive with a fanfare or a telegram or a phone call in the middle of the night. It came in small increments, each one defensible, each one reasonable, each one so modest that to refuse would be to admit you were unreasonable. And then one day you looked up from your desk in your office on the Paramount lot, and the person you had been when you started was gone, and the person you had become was someone you would not have recognized five years ago.

Marty was thinking about this because he was sitting in a producer's office on the morning of June 12, 1987, looking at a stack of script notes that had been delivered by messenger that morning. The script was called "The Abyss Dialogues," and it was about a marine biologist who discovered that the organisms at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean were communicating in a language that was not human but was not inhuman either — a language that existed in the space between categories, in the gap where the familiar ended and the incomprehensible began. Marty had written the first draft in six weeks, fuelled by black coffee and the conviction that he was doing something important. That draft was now unrecognizable.

The notes on the top sheet were in the handwriting of Bob Silverman, the head of development, a man who had been in the business for thirty years and had the instincts of a shark and the soul of an accountant. "Marty," the notes read, "this is powerful stuff. Really. But we need to talk about the audience. Who is this for? The ending is too ambiguous. The audience needs to feel that the hero has won. Can we add a scene where the biologist uses the alien language to stop a military attack? That would give us a set piece for the third act. Also, we need to cast someone bankable. Think Tom Cruise as the biologist. He's hot right now."

Marty read the note twice. The scene Silverman was describing would undermine everything the script was trying to say. The whole point of the alien language was that it couldn't be used — it could only be experienced. It wasn't a weapon. It wasn't a tool. It was a door, and once you opened the door, you couldn't close it again. That was the horror of it, and the beauty of it, and the reason Marty had written it in the first place.

He called Silverman. "Bob, about the notes."

"Marty! Good, you got them. Listen, we're excited about this. We really are. But we need to make it commercial. You understand."

"I understand," Marty said, and this was the first compromise. He understood. Of course he understood. He had been in Hollywood for twelve years. He knew how the business worked. You didn't get to make art on someone else's dime. You got to make product, and if you were lucky, the product had enough art in it to let you sleep at night.

"Great," Silverman said. "Do the pass. Get it back to me by Monday."

Marty did the pass. It took him three days. He added the scene where the biologist uses the alien language to stop the military — a Navy SEAL team that had been sent to destroy the deep-sea research station. He wrote it straight, no irony, no subversion. The language functioned like a weapon in the scene: the biologist speaks it, and the SEALs drop their weapons, overcome by the strangeness of what they're hearing. It was a good scene, actually. Tense. Dramatic. It completely contradicted the premise of the script, but it was a good scene.

The second compromise came a week later, at a lunch meeting at The Ivy. Marty was sitting across from Silverman and a man named Gary Fujikawa, who had been brought on as an executive producer because he had a relationship with Tom Cruise's agent.

"Tom's people read the new draft," Gary said, picking at his endive salad. "They're interested. But they have some concerns."

"Concerns," Marty said.

"Tom doesn't want to play a scientist. He wants to play someone more active. A Navy diver. Someone who can do things."

"The character is a marine biologist. That's the whole point. He's a man of thought, not action."

"Marty," Silverman said, his voice taking on the patient tone of a man explaining arithmetic to a child, "Tom Cruise is not going to play a man of thought. Tom Cruise is going to play a man of action. If you want Tom Cruise, you make the character a Navy diver. If you don't want Tom Cruise, you keep the character as a marine biologist and you make the movie for three million dollars and it plays at Sundance and nobody sees it."

Marty ordered another drink. A vodka martini, very dry. He'd been drinking more lately, but that was Los Angeles. Everyone drank more lately. It was the eighties. Excess was the point.

"Fine," Marty said. "Make him a Navy diver."

"Great," Gary said. "Also, the alien language thing. Tom's people feel it's too cerebral. They want something more tangible. More visual. Can we make it a physical substance? Something that glows, something you can see on screen?"

"The point of the language is that it's linguistic. It's about communication across the boundary of species. If you make it a physical substance, you lose—"

"Marty." Silverman raised his hand. "Visual. Tangible. This is a movie, not a dissertation."

Marty thought about the choices he had made to get to this point. He had come to Los Angeles in 1975, fresh out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, with a novel about a family of farmers in the Dust Bowl and a conviction that art could change the world. The novel had sold six hundred copies. The screenwriting had paid the rent. He had started with small jobs — rewrites, polishes, script doctoring on films that were already in production. He had been good at it. Too good. Fixing other people's problems was more lucrative than creating his own vision, and gradually the fixing had become the job, and the vision had become a thing he talked about at parties.

He had told himself it was temporary. He had told himself he was learning the business. He had told himself that one day he would make something that mattered. And now here he was, at a table in The Ivy, agreeing to turn his meditation on alien consciousness into a Tom Cruise action vehicle with a glowing physical substance instead of a language, and he was telling himself it was necessary, it was practical, it was how the business worked.

"Fine," he said. "A physical substance. Something they find at the bottom of the ocean."

"Now you're thinking," Gary said.

The third compromise was the cocaine.

It wasn't really a compromise. It was just something that happened. Everyone did cocaine in Hollywood in 1987. It was on the desks of studio executives and in the glove compartments of BMWs and at the parties in the Hollywood Hills where the deals got made and the scripts got read and the careers got destroyed. Marty had avoided it for years, out of some vestigial Midwestern puritanism, but after the meeting at The Ivy he went to a party at a producer's house on Mulholland Drive and someone offered him a line and he thought, why not, and he did it, and it was fine, and he did another one, and that was fine too, and by the end of the night he had rewritten the third act of "The Abyss Dialogues" on a cocktail napkin and he was convinced it was brilliant.

The next morning he looked at the napkin. The third act now involved the Navy diver (formerly the marine biologist, whose name had been changed from Dr. Alan Stern to Lieutenant Jake Rourke) discovering that the glowing substance from the ocean floor was the fossilized communication medium of an ancient civilization, and that by ingesting it, he could gain access to their knowledge. The climax involved Jake Rourke ingesting a massive dose of the substance and using his newfound powers to prevent a Soviet submarine from launching nuclear missiles at the American coast.

It was completely insane. It was also completely commercial. And Marty, looking at the napkin through the haze of a cocaine hangover, could not tell the difference anymore.

He turned in the script. Silverman loved it. Gary loved it. Tom Cruise's people loved it but wanted more scenes where Tom Cruise was shirtless. Marty added the shirtless scenes. That was the fourth compromise. Or maybe the fifth. He had lost count.

The film went into production in September of 1987. They were shooting on location in the Bahamas, where the water was the colour of a tourist brochure and the crew spent their evenings at a bar called The Drunken Parrot drinking rum out of coconuts. Marty was on set every day, making changes to the dialogue as the actors stumbled over his lines, watching his script become something he barely recognized.

One night, sitting at the bar with the cinematographer, a New Zealander named Colin who had worked on two Peter Weir films and was slumming it for the paycheck, Marty tried to explain what the script had originally been about.

"It was about communication," he said. "About the idea that there are forms of consciousness so different from ours that we can't even recognize them as consciousness. And when we encounter them, we're changed. Not because they do something to us, but because the encounter itself changes what we are. You can't meet the incomprehensible and stay the same person."

Colin nodded and ordered another rum. "Sounds like a good movie."

"It wasn't a movie. It was a script. A script is different from a movie. A script is what you intend. A movie is what you end up with."

"What do you think you'll end up with?"

Marty looked at his drink. "A Tom Cruise action picture where he saves the world from Soviet missiles by eating alien goo."

Colin laughed. Marty didn't.

The fifth compromise — or the sixth, or the seventh, the number no longer mattered — came during post-production. The first cut of the film was two hours and forty minutes. The studio wanted it under two hours. They cut forty-five minutes, most of it the quieter scenes, the character moments, the passages where the script had tried to suggest that the alien substance was not a weapon or a tool but a language. What remained was a series of action set pieces connected by expository dialogue.

"It's cleaner now," Silverman said at the test screening. "The audience knows what they're watching."

"What are they watching?"

"A summer movie. A hit. That's what we always wanted, wasn't it?"

Marty didn't answer. He had stopped knowing what he wanted sometime around the third rewrite, around the second line of cocaine, around the fourth meeting with Tom Cruise's people. The compass had spun, and he had lost his bearings, and he was navigating by dead reckoning through water he did not recognize.

The film opened in July of 1988. It was called "Abyss Rising," because someone in marketing had decided that "The Abyss Dialogues" sounded too intellectual. It made forty-seven million dollars in its opening weekend and went on to gross two hundred and twelve million worldwide. Tom Cruise was nominated for a People's Choice Award. Marty Kellerman bought a house in the Hollywood Hills with a view of the city and a pool shaped like a kidney bean. He bought a Porsche. He bought a cocaine habit that was no longer social but structural, a necessary component of his daily routine.

He did not think about the original script. He did not think about the marine biologist named Dr. Alan Stern who had become Lieutenant Jake Rourke. He did not think about the alien language that had become a glowing physical substance that could be ingested. He did not think about the boundary between self and other, between human and alien, between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible. He did not think about any of it, because thinking about it would mean admitting that each small compromise had been a choice, and each choice had been a step, and the steps had led somewhere he had not intended to go.

And then one morning in August, six weeks after the film opened, Marty woke up in his house in the Hollywood Hills and could not remember who he was.

Not in the metaphorical sense. Not in the sense of having lost touch with his values or his artistic vision. Literally. He woke up in a bed he did not recognize, in a room he did not recognize, and for the space of perhaps thirty seconds, he did not know his own name. The moment passed. The name came back. The room came back. The house came back. But something had shifted, something that would not shift back.

He went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. The face was familiar, but it was familiar the way an actor's face in a movie is familiar — you recognized it, but you did not know the person behind it. He thought about the scene he had written, the one that had been cut from the final film, where the scientist submerged himself in the abyssal plain and realized that the alien language was not something you learned but something you became, something that rewrote you from the inside out, stripping away everything you thought you were and leaving something else in its place.

He had written that scene as fiction. It had not occurred to him that it might be documentary.

He called his agent and said he was taking some time off. He called his dealer and said he was taking some time off from that too. He called no one else, because there was no one else to call — the friends had drifted away, the girlfriends had left, the colleagues had become competitors. The network of his life had contracted to a single node, and that node was flickering.

He spent the next three months doing nothing. He sat by his pool and watched the light change on the water. He went for walks in Runyon Canyon and looked at the city spread out below him, the grid of streets and the haze of smog and the Pacific Ocean glittering in the distance. He thought about the ocean. He thought about the things that lived at the bottom of it — the organisms that had never seen sunlight, that survived at pressures that would crush a human body, that communicated in languages that had no equivalent on the surface.

He thought about the fact that the movie he had made was not about those things. The movie he had made was about a Navy diver who ate alien goo and saved the world from Soviet missiles. But somewhere, buried beneath the rewrites and the studio notes and the cocaine and the compromise, the original idea still existed. The idea that consciousness was not a binary state but a spectrum. The idea that the boundary between self and other was a fiction, a convenience, a story we told ourselves so we wouldn't have to face the fact that we were all connected to things we could not understand.

Marty Kellerman sat by his pool and watched the light change on the water, and he understood that the compromises had not made the idea go away. They had simply buried it, layer by layer, the way the ocean buries things that sink beyond the reach of light. The idea was still there, at the bottom, waiting for someone to dive down and find it.

He was not sure he was that person anymore. He was not sure he had ever been that person. But he was the person who had written the first draft, once, before the compromises started, before the script became a movie and the movie became a product and the product became a number on a box office report. And that person, whoever he had been, deserved at least the dignity of being remembered.

Marty went inside and turned on his computer — a Macintosh Plus, the latest thing, with a screen the size of a shoebox. He opened a new document and typed the words:

"The Abyss Dialogues — First Draft Restoration."

And then he began to type, and what he was typing was not the script but something else — something that had been growing beneath the surface of his life, something that the compromises had been trying to suppress, something that was now rising, slowly, like a body floating up from the deep water, the pressure decreasing with every metre, the form becoming clearer, the voice becoming louder.

The voice was his own. He had not heard it in a very long time.

Outside, the sun was setting over the Pacific, turning the water the colour of flame. Marty typed and did not look up. He had already looked at the ocean for too long. Now he was looking at something else — something deeper, something darker, something that had been waiting for him since the day he had sat down to write the first draft of a script that he had believed, with the conviction of the unreasonably hopeful, would change the world.

It had not changed the world. It had changed him. That was, he realized now, always the point.