On the third Tuesday of January 1987, Peter Landau sat in a booth at the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard and looked at the contract on the table in front of him and told himself it was just this once. The contract was from Paramount Pictures, and it offered him seventy-five thousand dollars to rewrite the third act of a romantic comedy called Summer Plans, a script that had been written by a young woman from Ohio whose name Peter had already forgotten. The producers were unhappy with the ending, which was ambiguous and melancholic and probably truthful, and they wanted Peter to make it happy. Not dishonest, they said. Just happier. Audiences wanted to leave the theatre feeling good about themselves and their lives and the forty-seven dollars they had spent on tickets and popcorn and parking, and an ambiguous ending did not facilitate that feeling. Peter read the script that night in his apartment on Fountain Avenue, a one-bedroom with exposed brick walls and a view of the Hollywood sign that was partially obstructed by a billboard for a Bank of America credit card. The original ending was lovely. The couple did not end up together, not exactly, but they ended up somewhere adjacent to together, in a state of unresolved tenderness that felt like life. Peter highlighted the final twelve pages and wrote in the margin, in the shorthand he had developed over a decade of script doctoring: Brighten. He wrote the new ending in four days. The couple ended up together. The audience would leave the theatre feeling good. Peter deposited the cheque and told himself it was just this once.

On the third Monday of March 1987, Peter Landau sat in a conference room on the Paramount lot and listened to a producer named Marty Feinberg explain that they needed a dialogue polish on a thriller called The Killing Hour, a script that had gone through seven drafts and four writers and had arrived at a state of functional incoherence. The problem, Marty explained, was not the plot or the structure or the character arcs, which were all perfectly serviceable. The problem was the protagonist. The protagonist was a man who had done something terrible in his past and was trying to atone for it, and the script insisted on making the audience sit with his guilt, to feel the weight of what he had done. What the audience wanted, Marty said, was a protagonist they could root for. Someone who was maybe flawed but fundamentally good, someone whose terrible thing turned out to have been a misunderstanding or a necessity or something that happened to someone who deserved it. Peter took the script home and read it and understood immediately that Marty was wrong about the script but right about the audience. He rewrote the protagonist's backstory in a weekend. The terrible thing became a mistake, the atonement became heroism, the guilt became righteous anger directed at the real villain, who was a secondary character Peter elevated and made more villainous. The script tested well. The film was released in the autumn and grossed eighty-two million dollars domestically. Peter received a bonus and a new contract and a reputation as someone who could fix things, and he told himself that he had not changed the script so much as sanded its edges, rounded its corners, made it safe for consumption. Which was the job. Which was what everyone did.

On the second Friday of May 1987, a junior writer named Maria Estevez came to Peter's apartment on Fountain Avenue with a script she had been working on for two years. She was twenty-six years old and had graduated from the UCLA film school and was working as a production assistant on a sitcom that filmed on the Paramount lot, and she had brought the script to Peter because a mutual acquaintance had told her that Peter was generous with his time and his advice and might be willing to read her work and offer feedback. The script was about a Mexican-American family in East Los Angeles in the 1970s, and it was raw and specific and alive in a way that made Peter uncomfortable, because it reminded him of the kind of scripts he had wanted to write when he was twenty-six, before he had learned that the industry did not want raw and specific, it wanted processed and universal. He read the script twice over the weekend and called Maria on Monday and told her it was wonderful and then called his agent and told him about it, framing it as a favour to a promising young writer who needed representation. His agent read the script and agreed. Peter became attached as co-writer, a condition the agency insisted on because Maria had no track record and no negotiating leverage and no choice. Peter's name went on the title page alongside Maria's, and when the script sold to Columbia for two hundred thousand dollars, Peter's share was sixty-five percent based on his prior credits and his role in "developing" the material. Maria received thirty-five percent and a "story by" credit and a lesson in how the industry worked. Peter told himself that this was how the industry worked, that Maria would not have sold the script at all without his involvement, that he was doing her a favour really, and the rationalisation was so smooth and so complete that he almost believed it.

On the third Thursday of July 1987, Peter sat in a screening room on the Warner Bros. lot and watched a test audience watch a film he had rewritten the previous spring, a courtroom drama about a woman who murdered her abusive husband and was tried by a system designed to protect men. The test audience filled out cards after the screening, and the cards were collected and processed by a company in Burbank that specialised in converting human reactions into numerical data. The numbers were not good. The ending scored a six point two out of ten overall and a five point one among women aged twenty-five to forty-five, which was the target demographic. The focus group transcripts were worse: Too dark. Too ambiguous. I didn't know how to feel. I wanted her to win but she didn't really win, did she. Peter read the transcripts in the conference room next to the screening room while the producers watched him read, and he understood that he had two choices. He could defend the ending, argue that the ambiguity was the point, that the film was about the impossibility of true justice in an unjust system. Or he could rewrite the ending, give the audience what they wanted, make the woman win in a way that was unambiguous and satisfying and false. He chose the second option. The new ending showed the woman walking out of the courthouse into sunlight, her abuser's family shown in one brief shot looking defeated and ashamed, justice served with the clarity of a logo on a screen. The film tested at eight point seven after the rewrite and opened at number one at the box office and was nominated for two Golden Globes, and Peter told himself that he had served the story by serving the audience, that the numbers did not lie, that six point two was worse than eight point seven by any objective measure, and that the objective measure was all that mattered in a business that measured everything.

On the first Wednesday of September 1987, Peter received a script from an old friend named Jack Delaney. They had met at the AFI Conservatory in 1973, two young men from the Midwest who believed that film could change the world and who had stayed up late in Jack's apartment in Silver Lake arguing about Godard and Cassavetes and the moral responsibility of the artist. Jack had not been as successful as Peter. He had made one independent film in 1979 that had played at Sundance and then vanished, and he had spent the subsequent eight years writing scripts that were too strange or too dark or too honest to sell, and he had supported himself by teaching screenwriting at a community college in the Valley and living in a studio apartment in Van Nuys that Peter had visited only once and had found deeply depressing. The script Jack sent was the best thing he had ever written, a small, perfect character study about a man caring for his dying father in a suburb of Cleveland, and Peter read it in one sitting and cried at the end and then set it aside and did not think about it for three days. On the fourth day, he received a call from a producer at Universal who was looking for something "prestige" to fill a slot in the spring schedule and who had heard through the grapevine that Peter had a script he was shepherding. Peter sent Jack's script to the producer with his name attached as a potential rewrite candidate. The producer read it and loved it and asked Peter to come in for a meeting to discuss the development process, and Peter went to the meeting and spoke about the script as though it were his to develop, as though Jack Delaney were a source of raw material rather than the author of a finished work. The studio commissioned a coverage report, and the coverage report gave the script a score of fifty-eight out of a hundred, noting that the pacing was slow and the subject matter was "challenging for a mainstream audience." Peter did not contest the score. He told the producer that a fifty-eight was a fair assessment and that the script would need significant development work before it was ready for production, and he offered to oversee the development process himself. The producer agreed. Jack's option was not renewed. Peter never called Jack to explain why, and Jack never called Peter to ask, and six months later Peter heard from a mutual acquaintance that Jack had stopped writing and started working at a Barnes and Noble in Pasadena, and Peter felt a brief, sharp sensation in his chest that might have been guilt but might also have been indigestion, and he took an antacid and went back to work.

On the second Monday of November 1987, Peter accepted an assignment to write the novelisation of a summer blockbuster called Galactic Force, a science fiction epic about a team of interplanetary soldiers who fought an evil empire using weapons that made loud noises and generated considerable visual effects. The book was to be published under the film's title with the credit "Based on the screenplay by" followed by the names of the four writers who had contributed to the script, none of whom had any interest in writing a novelisation. Peter had not read a novel in three years. He had not read anything longer than a screenplay in three years. He dictated the novelisation into a tape recorder over the course of two weeks, sitting in his apartment and describing the film's action sequences in the present tense and adding interior monologues for the characters that he invented on the spot, and a typist at the publisher's office in New York transcribed the tapes and formatted the result into chapters, and the book was published in December and sold two hundred thousand copies in its first month. Peter received a royalty statement in January that showed earnings of forty-three thousand dollars from the novelisation alone, and he looked at the number and felt nothing in particular. The number was good. The number was an objective measure of success. The number did not care whether the book had any literary merit or whether its author had any moral integrity or whether any part of the process had involved an actual creative choice. The number simply was, and Peter had learned to trust numbers because numbers did not judge and numbers did not lie and numbers did not ask you how you felt about the person you had become.

On the fourth Thursday of December 1987, Peter Landau sat in a conference room at the Writers Guild of America offices on Fairfax Avenue and testified in an arbitration hearing. A writer named Alan Fischer had filed a grievance against a producer who had allegedly used Alan's script as the basis for a film without giving Alan appropriate credit or compensation, and Peter had been called as an expert witness by the producer's legal team because Peter had done a rewrite on the film in question and could attest to the extent of the changes that had been made. The changes had been significant. Peter had rewritten the protagonist's motivation and the antagonist's backstory and the entire second act, and by any reasonable standard the finished film bore only a passing resemblance to Alan Fischer's original script. The problem, which Peter understood perfectly and chose not to address, was that the principle he was testifying in support of was the same principle that had allowed him to attach his name to Maria Estevez's script in May, the same principle that had allowed him to bury Jack Delaney's script in September, the same principle that said whoever made the last pass owned the work, regardless of where the work had come from or who had done the real labour of creation. Peter testified clearly and calmly and effectively, and the arbitration panel ruled in favour of the producer, and Alan Fischer was not credited and not compensated and not vindicated. Peter received a Christmas bonus from the producer's company and a bottle of single-malt Scotch delivered to his apartment on the twenty-third of December, and he opened the Scotch and poured a glass and sat in his living room looking at the partially obstructed view of the Hollywood sign and tried to locate the moment when he had crossed the line between integrity and corruption. He could not find it. There was no single moment. There was only a series of reasonable decisions, each one a small step across a threshold that had been invisible at the time, each one justifiable in the language of the industry and the logic of the numbers and the pragmatism of survival, each one a tiny compromise that had accumulated into something that was not tiny at all, something that had replaced the person he had been with a person he did not recognise but could not honestly say he had not chosen to become. He finished the Scotch and poured another glass and thought about calling Maria Estevez to apologise, or Jack Delaney to explain, or Alan Fischer to confess. He did not call anyone. He sat in the chair and watched the lights of Los Angeles spread out below him like a circuit board, millions of points of light connected by invisible lines, and he thought about all the compromises that had been made and all the justifications that had been offered and all the numbers that had been consulted, and he understood that the most dangerous thing about a threshold is that you do not know you have crossed it until you look back and cannot see the other side.