The first thing Dana Whitfield did that she could not undo was change a line of dialogue. It was February 1987, and she was thirty-four years old, and she had been a screenwriter for six years without selling a script. She paid the rent by doing rewrites for a production company called ArcLight Pictures, which was based in a glass-fronted building on Wilshire Boulevard and run by a man named Bobby Kesselman who wore linen suits and said synergistic more often than any human being should. The script was a romantic comedy about a stockbroker and a waitress, and the producer — not Bobby, a lower-level man named Chuck Dietz — wanted the waitress to be younger. The script said she was twenty-eight. Chuck wanted her to be twenty-two.

That is a problem, Dana said. She is supposed to be a law student who is working as a waitress to pay her way through night school. You cannot be a law student at twenty-two.

Chuck Dietz looked at her across his desk. He had a framed poster of Top Gun on the wall behind him and a glass paperweight shaped like a dollar sign. He said: Change the backstory. Make her a college dropout. Make her a single mother. Make her whatever. The actress we want is twenty-three and she reads young. Just do the pages.

Dana did the pages. It took her two hours. She changed the waitress's age, deleted the law school references, and added a throwaway line about a sick grandmother that explained why she needed the money. The rewrite was shallow and functional and completely inoffensive. Nobody would notice. Nobody would care. It was just a few pages in a script that would be rewritten a dozen more times before it ever got in front of a camera. She told herself it was nothing. She told herself that everyone in this town did worse things before breakfast.

The film was released in the summer of 1988 under the title Second Chances. It starred an actress named Mindy Lambert, who was twenty-three and read young. It made forty-seven million dollars domestically and launched Mindy Lambert's career. Two years later, Mindy Lambert was nominated for an Academy Award. In an interview with Rolling Stone, she credited her breakthrough role in Second Chances, the one where she played the waitress with the sick grandmother, the one that showed her dramatic range. A million teenage girls saw that interview and decided to become actresses.

Dana read the interview in her apartment in Silver Lake, a one-bedroom with a view of the reservoir and a kitchen that she had painted yellow because she had read somewhere that yellow kitchens boosted creativity. She had written three original screenplays by then, all of them rejected. She was still doing rewrites for ArcLight. Bobby Kesselman had promoted her to something called creative fixer, which meant she handled the scripts that were in trouble, the ones with plot holes and continuity errors and characters who did not make sense. She was good at it. She was very good at it. She had a talent for finding the smallest possible change that would solve the largest possible problem, the surgical adjustment that nobody would notice in the final product. She was, in the language of the industry, a problem solver.

The second thing she did was cover for Chuck Dietz. It was the fall of 1988, and a young production assistant named Erin something had filed a complaint with human resources. The complaint alleged that Chuck had made inappropriate comments and had, on one occasion, cornered her in the supply closet. Erin had a witness. She had dates and times. She had a case.

Chuck called Dana into his office and closed the door. His Top Gun poster had been replaced by a poster for Wall Street, the new Oliver Stone film that everyone was talking about. He looked tired. He looked scared. He said: I need you to talk to HR.

About what, Dana said.

About Erin, he said. About how she was unstable. About how she was always making things up. About how you heard her bragging about sleeping with executives to get ahead.

Dana said: I never heard her say anything like that.

Chuck said: I know. But I need you to say you did.

Dana looked at him. Outside the glass walls of the cubicle, the production floor hummed with the normal noise of the entertainment industry, phones ringing, assistants running, the Xerox machine whining in the corner. She thought about Erin, who was twenty-four and had been working at ArcLight for eight months and had once lent Dana a pair of pantyhose when Dana's had run during a client meeting. She thought about Chuck, who had given her the rewrite job that paid her rent and enabled her to keep writing her original screenplays in the yellow kitchen. She thought about the fact that Erin would probably quit anyway, would probably move to New York or go to law school or do something else completely, and that in a year nobody would even remember her name.

She said: Okay.

She went to HR. She told them Erin was unstable. She told them Erin had made comments about sleeping with executives. She kept her voice steady and her eyes dry and her story consistent. Two weeks later, Erin was gone. Six months later, Dana heard through the grapevine that Erin was working as a waitress in Studio City and had given up on the film industry entirely.

The third thing was the pitch. It was 1989, and ArcLight was bidding on a hot property, a novel about a journalist who uncovers a government conspiracy. The book was a bestseller, and the studio was in a bidding war with three other production companies. Bobby Kesselman called Dana into his office — the big office with the view of the Hollywood Hills and the signed poster of The Godfather — and told her that they needed a synopsis, a treatment, something to show the author's agent that they understood the material.

The problem was that Dana had not read the book. She did not have time. Bobby gave her the Cliff's Notes version, a one-page summary that the assistant had typed up, and told her to make it sound brilliant. She wrote a five-page treatment that made the book sound like All the President's Men crossed with The French Connection, a gritty, urgent, morally complex thriller. She used phrases like chiaroscuro morality and existential noir and the fragility of democratic institutions. She was proud of it. It was good writing.

The author loved the treatment. ArcLight won the bidding war. The film went into production the following spring with a budget of thirty million dollars and a cast that included a major star who had just come off a hit action franchise. The director was a young hotshot who had made his name directing music videos on MTV. On the first day of principal photography, the director called Dana and asked her to explain a particular plot point from the novel, something about the journalist's conflicted relationship with her source. Dana did not know the answer. She had never read the novel. She made something up. The director nodded and hung up and shot the scene the way she had described it.

The film was a disaster. The critics hated it. The audience was confused. The novel's fans were furious. It made back about half its budget. Nobody blamed Dana. She was just the fixer. She had done what she was asked. The failure belonged to the director and the studio and the star, and Dana collected her cheque and moved on to the next project. But something had shifted. She had helped make something that did not exist, and the nonexistent thing had become real, had become a movie that people saw and talked about and reviewed in newspapers, and the movie was wrong because she had been wrong, and nobody knew it but her.

The fourth thing was the script. It was her script this time, an original spec called Nine Days in October that she had been working on for three years. It was a drama about a woman who discovers that her father was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, a story about memory and betrayal and the moral compromises of the Reagan era. Her agent sent it out in January 1990, and within a week there were three studios interested. ArcLight made an offer, and another company made a higher offer, and a third company offered Dana a blind script deal plus a production credit.

Dana chose the highest offer. She did not choose the best director or the most artistic vision or the studio that would protect her work. She chose the money. She told herself it was practical. She told herself that a writer with a financial cushion could afford to be selective later. She told herself that everyone in Hollywood made this calculation, that it was just business, that the art would survive the compromise.

It did not survive. The studio that bought Nine Days in October rewrote it into a generic thriller with a car chase and a love interest and an ending where the bad guys were arrested and the good guys celebrated with champagne. Dana's name was still on the script, but it was not her script. She watched the premiere in a theatre on Sunset Boulevard and felt something inside her go very still and very cold. She had sold her best work. She had watched it be destroyed. She had been paid very well for the privilege.

The fifth thing was the deposition. It was 1991, and Bobby Kesselman was being sued by a former partner who claimed that Bobby had defrauded him in a deal involving foreign distribution rights. The case was going to trial, and Dana was subpoenaed. The lawyers asked her about a particular meeting that she had attended in 1988, a conference call with some investors in Germany. They asked if Bobby had made certain representations about the expected returns on the investment. They asked if she had any reason to believe that those representations were false.

Dana knew the representations were false. She had been in the room when Bobby had laughed about it afterwards, had watched him pour himself a Macallan 25 from the bottle he kept in his desk drawer and say: Those Krauts will believe anything. She knew. But Bobby had given her a career. Bobby had promoted her and trusted her and paid for her loyalty with raises and bonuses and a parking space in the underground garage with her name on it. She owed him. She told herself she owed him.

She sat in the deposition room with her hands folded on the table and said: I do not recall anything like that. To the best of my recollection, all representations made to the investors were accurate and made in good faith.

The former partner lost the case. Bobby kept his company. Dana kept her job. She went home that night and sat in her yellow kitchen and looked at the pile of original screenplays she had not finished and thought about the woman she had been in 1987, the one who had agreed to change a waitress's age and told herself it was nothing. She was still that woman, she realised. She was still making the same calculation, still telling herself the same story. The compromises were bigger now, the stakes were higher, but the logic was identical. It is just this one thing. It is not that bad. Everyone does it. I do not have a choice.

She was still telling herself this when the sixth thing happened. An assistant in the legal department, a young woman named Holly Chen who had been at ArcLight for less than a year, discovered a discrepancy in the accounting for Nine Days in October. The discrepancy suggested that someone had been skimming from the production budget, small amounts over a long period, amounts that added up to something in the neighbourhood of three hundred thousand dollars. Holly brought the discrepancy to Dana because Dana was the senior creative person on the project, the one whose name was on the script, the one who theoretically cared about the integrity of the work.

Dana looked at the spreadsheets. She knew immediately who was skimming. It was Bobby. It had to be Bobby. Nobody else had the access or the knowledge or the sheer gall. She looked at Holly Chen's young, earnest face and thought about what would happen if she took this to the authorities. Bobby would go to prison. ArcLight would collapse. Fifty people would lose their jobs. Her career would be over because nobody in this town hired a snitch. And for what? Three hundred thousand dollars was a rounding error in a film budget. It was less than the studio spent on craft services for a single picture. It was not worth the destruction.

She told Holly she would look into it. She spent a week doing nothing. Then she called Holly into her office and said that she had reviewed the records and found no evidence of wrongdoing. The discrepancy, she said, was an accounting error, a mistake in the allocation of foreign tax credits. It had been corrected. There was nothing to worry about.

Holly looked at her for a long moment. She was very young, twenty-three at most, and she had the same expression Dana remembered seeing on her own face in older photographs, a kind of tentative hopefulness, a belief that the system worked and that people were basically good and that doing the right thing was the same as doing the smart thing.

Are you sure, Holly asked.

I am sure, Dana said.

Holly nodded and left. She quit ArcLight three months later and moved to Seattle to work for her father's software company. Dana stayed where she was. She kept her job and her parking space and her view of the reservoir from the yellow kitchen. She kept writing and she kept fixing and she kept telling herself that the next compromise would be the last one, that there was a line she would not cross, that she was still fundamentally a good person who had just been placed in difficult circumstances.

The line did not exist. That was the thing she understood, finally, sitting in her kitchen in the summer of 1992, five years after she had changed a waitress's age and told herself it did not matter. The line was an illusion. Every compromise was reasonable in isolation. Every decision was justifiable in context. There was no single moment of moral failure, no dramatic turning point, no clear threshold where good became bad. There was only a slow accumulation of small choices, each one perfectly defensible, each one imperceptibly shifting the ground beneath her feet, until one day she looked down and realised she was standing somewhere she had never intended to be and could not remember how she had got there.

She called her agent the next morning and asked him to find her a project she believed in. Her agent sent her a script about a young woman who discovers her father was involved in a government conspiracy. It was not a great script. It had plot holes and continuity errors and a protagonist who did not make sense. But there was something in it, a kernel of truth, a small flickering light that had not yet been extinguished. Dana read it twice. Then she opened her laptop and began to rewrite.