1. The Title

The script was called "The Distance Between Stars," and Leo Kaplan had spent three years writing it. It was a quiet film about a father and daughter driving across Nebraska in a Plymouth Duster to scatter the mother's ashes at the precise spot where the Big Dipper aligns with the chimney of an abandoned grain elevator on the summer solstice. The dialogue was sparse. The landscapes were wide. The ending was ambiguous and beautiful and Leo had wept when he typed the final FADE OUT on his IBM Selectric in the Santa Monica apartment that smelled of coffee and the sea.

The meeting was at Paramount, in a bungalow on the lot that had once belonged to Billy Wilder. The executive was a man called Gary Schumacher, who was thirty-two years old and who wore a yellow tie printed with tiny palm trees. Gary's office contained a Lucite desk, a framed poster of "Top Gun," and a telephone with fourteen lines, one of which rang every seven minutes. Gary never answered the telephone himself. His assistant — a young woman called Heather who managed to look both enormously competent and mildly terrified — handled every call with the same three words: "He is in a meeting."

Gary had read "The Distance Between Stars." He had liked it. He had liked it very much. He had, in fact, taken it home to his house in Brentwood and shown it to his wife, who had also liked it, and to his fourteen-year-old daughter, who had cried at the scene where the father explains why the mother chose that particular grain elevator. Tears. Actual tears. Gary's daughter had not cried at a piece of writing since "Where the Red Fern Grows" in seventh grade.

"But," Gary said.

The word hung in the air of the bungalow like a note of music held too long. Leo knew the word. Every screenwriter knew the word. It was the word that preceded the note, and the note was the thing that would change everything.

"The ending," Gary said. "It is beautiful. It is art. But the audience — the audience is going to want something more concrete. Something they can hold onto. The father and daughter, after they scatter the ashes, maybe they learn something from each other that they carry forward. Maybe there is a scene where the father gives the daughter the keys to the Plymouth and tells her to drive. Something that says the story continues, you know? Something that gives people permission to leave the theatre feeling good."

Leo sat in the visitor's chair — a low-slung Danish modern thing that made everyone who sat in it feel slightly subordinate — and considered his options. The script had taken three years. He was thirty-four years old and he had a contract for one picture with an option clause that meant Paramount could drop him with thirty days' notice if they did not like what he delivered. His rent was nine hundred dollars a month. His agent, a man called Bernie who worked out of a storefront on Wilshire and who represented exactly four writers, had told him that this was his shot.

"It is a small change," Gary said. "It is still your ending. It is just your ending with a little more light in it."

Leo made the change. It took him two days. The new scene — the father handing over the keys, the daughter driving off into the Nebraska sunset while a Bruce Hornsby song played on the car radio — was well-written. It was even good. Leo told himself that the script was better now, more accessible, more commercial. He told himself that art and commerce were not enemies but partners, and that a story that reached more people was a story that mattered more.

He believed this for approximately forty-eight hours.

2. The Casting

The script sold. Gary Schumacher's enthusiasm, combined with the attachment of a director named Peter Haldeman who had made a well-reviewed film about coal miners in Pennsylvania, got "The Distance Between Stars" greenlit with a budget of twelve million dollars. Leo received a cheque for two hundred and eighty thousand dollars, which was more money than he had earned in the previous eight years combined. He moved from the Santa Monica apartment to a house in the Hollywood Hills with a view of the reservoir and a kitchen that had been featured in Architectural Digest. He bought a red BMW 325i convertible, which he parked in the driveway and which his neighbour — a producer of television game shows — complimented twice in the first week.

Then the casting notes arrived.

Peter Haldeman wanted actors who looked like real people. He had spent three months in Nebraska scouting locations and he had come back with a vision: sun-bleached highways, roadside diners with cracked linoleum, the kind of faces that had never seen a dermatologist. He wanted the father to be played by a character actor called Donald Kresge, a man with a face like a topographical map of Oklahoma, who had spent thirty years playing bartenders and mechanics and the third lead in films that won awards at festivals no one had heard of.

Gary Schumacher did not want Donald Kresge. Gary Schumacher wanted Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise was not available. Tom Cruise was shooting a film about a fighter pilot and was booked for the next two years. But Gary wanted someone like Tom Cruise — someone with a smile that could be photographed from a helicopter, someone whose face would look good on a poster at a bus stop in Des Moines. He wanted someone the audience would recognise.

Leo was invited to a meeting. Present were Gary, Peter Haldeman, a casting director called Mona, and a development executive called Rich whose job seemed to consist entirely of nodding whenever Gary said something and frowning whenever Peter said something. The meeting lasted three hours. By the end of it, Donald Kresge was out and a man called Rick Specter was in. Rick Specter was thirty-eight years old but played thirty-two. He had been in three films that had each grossed over a hundred million dollars. His face was symmetrical in a way that suggested divine intervention. He could not act, exactly, but he could hit his marks and deliver dialogue without embarrassing himself, and he was willing to cut his fee in exchange for a producing credit.

"It is still your script," Gary told Leo afterward, in the bungalow, with the palm-tree tie and the Lucite desk and the telephone with fourteen lines. "You are not changing a word. You are just helping us find the right people to say the words. That is what collaboration is. That is what filmmaking is. You are part of something bigger now."

Leo went home to the house in the Hollywood Hills and sat on the terrace and looked at the reservoir and told himself that casting was not writing. The script was the script. The words on the page had not changed. The ending still had light in it, but the light was Leo's light, the light he had added himself, the light that made the story better.

He did not believe this for forty-eight hours either. But he did not change anything. He did not call Gary and object. He did not write a memo. He went to the next meeting and the next, and gradually the casting of Rick Specter became a fact, and the facts accumulated, and the script — the script was still the script.

3. The Location

The film was supposed to be shot in Nebraska. Peter Haldeman had scouted seventeen towns and chosen one called Broken Bow, which had a grain elevator that aligned perfectly with the Big Dipper on the summer solstice and a diner that served pie that had won a county fair competition in 1972. The crew was scheduled to arrive in June, when the wheat was gold and the sky was the colour of a robin's egg and the light — Peter had gone on at some length about the light — was unlike any light on earth.

Then Paramount's head of physical production ran the numbers. Shooting in Nebraska would require transporting a crew of one hundred and twenty people, housing them in motels spread across three counties, building a base camp in a field that had no electricity or running water, and flying Rick Specter in and out on weekends so he could attend his daughter's soccer games in Malibu. The Nebraska shoot would add two point seven million dollars to the budget. The California shoot — using locations in Lancaster and Palmdale and a grain elevator that had been built for a John Ford western in 1947 and was still standing on a backlot in Burbank — would add nothing at all.

Gary Schumacher flew to New York for a meeting with the studio chairman and came back with the news: Nebraska was out. California was in. Peter Haldeman quit the project three days later, issuing a statement through his agent that cited "creative differences" and said nothing else. The trade papers ran the story on page six of the Monday edition. Leo read it at a Starbucks on Sunset Boulevard, the newspaper spread across the table next to a cup of coffee that cost three dollars and fifty cents.

The new director was a man called Jerry Mandelbaum, who had made three episodes of "Miami Vice" and a feature film about a talking dog. Jerry arrived at his first meeting with a leather jacket and a pager clipped to his belt and an enthusiasm that seemed to have no off switch. He loved the script. He loved the father-daughter dynamic. He loved the grain elevator. He loved everything, and his love was so genuine and so overwhelming that Leo found himself liking Jerry Mandelbaum despite every instinct that told him not to.

The grain elevator from the John Ford western looked nothing like the one in Broken Bow. It was too tall and too clean and it had been painted red for a film about cattle rustlers that no one remembered. The art department could fix it, Jerry said. A little weathering, a little paint, and no one would know the difference. The audience did not care about geography. The audience cared about story.

Leo told himself that this was true. He had spent three years writing a script that was rooted in a specific place, a place he had visited five times, a place whose dust was still in the treads of his hiking boots. But the audience would not know the difference. The audience would see a grain elevator and a father and a daughter and the Big Dipper, and they would feel the feeling that the script was designed to make them feel, and the location was just a location, just a backdrop, just a detail that mattered to no one except the writer who had imagined it.

He believed this for almost a week.

4. The Genre

The problem, Rick Specter's agent explained, was that the film was hard to categorise. It was not quite a drama and not quite a comedy. It had moments of humour but no jokes. It had moments of sadness but no catharsis. The audience, the agent said, needed to know what they were buying. Was this a film for a date night or a film for a funeral? Was it the kind of film that made you laugh or the kind of film that made you think or the kind of film that made you both, which was actually the hardest kind to sell because multiplexes did not have a section for "both"?

The solution, arrived at during a meeting that Leo did not attend because no one invited him, was to lean into the comedy. Rick Specter was funny. He had been funny in the film about the fraternity and the film about the wedding and the film about the zoo. His fans expected funny. The trailer, the agent argued, would be easier to cut if the film had more jokes. The poster would look better if Rick Specter was smiling.

Leo was called into a meeting with Jerry Mandelbaum and Rich, the development executive who was still nodding and frowning in his established pattern. Jerry was apologetic. He was always apologetic. He apologised for the casting, for the location, for the Bruce Hornsby song, for the weather, for the price of coffee, for the existence of gravity. But the apology was always followed by a suggestion, and the suggestion was always phrased as a question: What if the father and daughter stopped at a roadside attraction where everything went wrong? What if there was a scene with a misunderstanding and a small-town sheriff? What if the daughter had a love interest, a local boy with a motorcycle and a heart of gold?

Leo pushed back on the love interest. The film was about a father and a daughter. Adding a boy would dilute the central relationship. Jerry nodded. Rich frowned. A compromise was reached: the local boy would appear in exactly one scene, at the diner, and he would say exactly three lines, and the daughter would roll her eyes at him in a way that suggested she was too smart for this town and this boy and this life.

But the roadside attraction stayed. And the misunderstanding with the sheriff. And a scene where the father accidentally locked the keys in the Plymouth and had to break in using a coat hanger, which Rick Specter suggested himself because he had done something similar in the fraternity film and knew it would get a laugh.

Leo made the changes. The script was now 118 pages. The original had been 104. The extra fourteen pages were jokes and set pieces and the sheriff and the boy and the coat hanger. Leo looked at the pages on his desk and could not remember writing some of them. They seemed to have arrived on their own, like guests at a party he had not planned to throw.

5. The Test Screening

The film, now called "Star Road," screened for a test audience in Sherman Oaks in November 1986. The theatre was a multiplex on Ventura Boulevard. The audience was recruited from the surrounding neighbourhood, a mix of young couples and older singles and a group of teenage girls who had come because someone had told them that Rick Specter was in the building. Rick Specter was not in the building. He was in Hawaii, shooting a commercial for a Japanese car company that paid him more than the entire budget of "The Distance Between Stars."

Leo sat in the back row with Jerry Mandelbaum and Gary Schumacher and a woman from the marketing department who held a clipboard and a small flashlight. The film played. The audience laughed at the coat hanger scene. They laughed at the roadside attraction. They did not laugh at the scene where the father explained why the mother had chosen the grain elevator, which had been Leo's favourite scene in the original script and which was still, more or less, intact.

The test cards told the story. In the "What did you like most about the film?" section, the top three answers were: 1) Rick Specter, 2) the funny parts, 3) the car. In the "What did you like least?" section, the top answer was: the sad parts. The second answer was: too much talking. The third was: the ending was confusing.

The ending was the same ending Leo had written, with the light in it. It was the ending Gary had asked for. It was the ending that was supposed to solve the problem.

"The audience does not understand it," said the woman from marketing. Her name was Elaine and she had an MBA from Stanford and she used the word "audience" the way other people used the word "weather," as if it were a force of nature that could be predicted but never controlled. "They do not understand why the father gives her the keys. They do not understand where she is going. They want to know what happens next. They want closure."

Leo sat in the back row of the empty theatre after everyone else had left. The credits had finished. The screen was white. The air conditioning hummed. He thought about the early mornings in Nebraska, the wheat fields and the diners and the grain elevator that looked different in every kind of light. He thought about the mother's ashes and the summer solstice and the Big Dipper, which were all still in the film somewhere, buried under the jokes and the set pieces and Rick Specter's symmetrical face.

He thought about saying no. He had a contract. He had a lawyer. He could insist on his original vision. He could issue a statement. He could fight.

He did not fight. He went home and wrote a new ending in which the daughter arrived at college, called her father from a payphone, and told him she loved him. The father smiled. Cut to black. Fade in a Bruce Hornsby song over the credits. Test audience approved. Elaine from marketing approved. Gary Schumacher approved. The film was going to open on twelve hundred screens.

6. The Credit

The Writers Guild arbitration took place in a conference room at the Guild's headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. Three anonymous arbitrators read two versions of the script — Leo's draft and the final shooting script — and determined that the differences were substantial enough that another writer deserved a credit.

The other writer was a man called Todd Lafferty, who had been brought in by Jerry Mandelbaum during the two weeks when Leo was rewriting the roadside attraction scene. Todd had written three episodes of a sitcom about a talking baby and he was very good at jokes. He had contributed the misunderstanding with the sheriff, the coat hanger bit, and a scene near the end where the father and daughter sang along to a song on the radio that they both knew, which had tested through the roof in Sherman Oaks.

Leo received a shared credit: "Written by Leo Kaplan and Todd Lafferty." His name came first because his draft had come first, but the "and" meant that Todd's contribution was equal. In the film's final cut, Todd's scenes accounted for approximately eighteen minutes of screen time. Leo's accounted for the rest, minus the ending that Elaine from marketing had asked for and the love interest who had somehow expanded from one scene to three.

Leo attended the premiere at the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. He wore a tuxedo that he had rented from a shop on La Cienega. He walked the red carpet behind Rick Specter and in front of a producer who had come to the project after the arbitration and whose name Leo had never learned. The flashbulbs were bright and the crowd was loud and someone — he never found out who — had arranged for Bruce Hornsby to play a short set before the screening.

The film played. The audience laughed at Todd's jokes. They cried at the ending that Elaine had approved. They applauded when the credits rolled and Leo's name appeared on screen, paired with Todd's, the two names sharing a line like strangers forced to share a table at a crowded restaurant.

Leo went to the after-party at Spago. He stood near the bar with a glass of champagne that he did not drink. Gary Schumacher found him and clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Congratulations. You made a hit." Gary was wearing a different tie, this one with tiny surfboards. His breath smelled of scotch and success. He had already been promoted to senior vice president, largely on the strength of "Star Road" and its projected first-weekend gross.

"It is not the film I wrote," Leo said.

Gary looked at him with something that might have been pity or might have been impatience or might have been the blank, unfocused goodwill of a man who had been drinking since four o'clock in the afternoon. "Of course it is," he said. "It is exactly the film you wrote. You just wrote it with other people, in a different order, over a longer period of time. That is what collaboration is. That is what this business is. You will get used to it."

He patted Leo's shoulder again and drifted away into the crowd, toward a group of agents who were laughing about something that Leo could not hear.

7. The Next One

Six months later, Leo was in a meeting at Columbia Pictures. The executive was a woman called Denise Okonkwo, who was thirty years old and who wore a grey suit that made her look like she was about to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Denise had read a script that Leo had written in three weeks — a thriller about a man who discovers that his neighbour is not who he appears to be, with a twist ending that Leo had come up with while driving to Palm Springs for a weekend with a woman he had met at the Spago party.

Denise liked the script. She liked it very much. But there was a note. There was always a note.

"The twist," Denise said. "It is clever. But it is maybe a little too clever. The audience might not follow it. What if, instead of the neighbour being the one who is not who he appears to be, the protagonist is the one? What if it is a story about a man who does not know himself? That is more relatable. That is more universal."

Leo sat in the visitor's chair — a high-backed leather thing that was more comfortable than the Danish modern chair in Gary's office but only slightly — and considered his options. He was thirty-five years old. He had a credit on a hit film. His agent, Bernie, had retired and been replaced by a man called Andrew who worked out of a high-rise in Century City and who represented forty-seven writers, twelve of whom had been nominated for Academy Awards. His house in the Hollywood Hills had doubled in value. His BMW was paid off. He was successful. He was respected. He was, by any reasonable measure, among the luckiest people in the history of human civilisation.

The note was not unreasonable. The twist was clever, perhaps too clever. A story about a man who does not know himself was more universal. Denise was right. The audience would relate to it more. The film would be better.

"I will think about it," Leo said.

He drove back to his house in the Hollywood Hills. The reservoir was blue in the afternoon sun. The game show producer's car was in the driveway next door — a black Porsche with vanity plates that read "WHEEL4U." Leo sat on his terrace and looked at the water and thought about the grain elevator in Broken Bow, which he had never seen on film, which Rick Specter had never stood in front of, which the art department had never painted to look real. He thought about the daughter driving off into the Nebraska sunset, a scene that existed only in a draft that no one except the Writers Guild arbitrators had read. He thought about the mother's ashes and the summer solstice and the Big Dipper, which had aligned with the chimney of the abandoned grain elevator on exactly one night of the year and which, in the released version of "Star Road," aligned with nothing at all.

He thought about the word "adjustment." It was a gentle word. It implied smallness, precision, the careful tuning of an instrument that was already in working order. None of the adjustments he had made, taken alone, had been wrong. The ending with the light was better than the ambiguous one. Rick Specter was a movie star and Donald Kresge was not. California was cheaper than Nebraska. Jokes were funnier than silence. Closure tested better than ambiguity. Todd Lafferty had written good jokes. The twist was clever, perhaps too clever. Each adjustment was reasonable. Each compromise was defensible. Each surrender had been signed with the same hand that had written "The Distance Between Stars," and the hand was still attached to the same arm, and the arm was still attached to the same man.

He went inside. He sat down at his IBM Selectric. He opened the script for the thriller — the one with the neighbour who was not who he appeared to be, the one with the twist that was too clever. He looked at the title page, where his name was printed alone, unshared, unmodified. He looked at the first page, where the protagonist was described as "a man who knows exactly who he is." He looked at the window, where the reservoir was blue and the sky was blue and the BMW was red in the driveway.

He thought about changing the twist. He thought about making the protagonist the one who was not who he appeared to be. He thought about Denise Okonkwo and her grey suit and her reasonable note. He thought about the house and the car and the agent in Century City and the forty-seven writers, twelve of whom had been nominated for Academy Awards.

He typed the words FADE IN. The sound of the Selectric was the sound of a small machine making small marks on a blank page. He did not know what he was going to write. He did not know who the protagonist was. He did not know if the twist would be clever or universal or somewhere in between. He knew only that the page was blank and the day was long and the reservoir was blue and somewhere in Nebraska, a grain elevator stood in a field of wheat, aligned with nothing, waiting for a solstice that had already passed.