The first compromise was the one about the shark.

Leo Markham sat in a glass-walled conference room on the Paramount lot, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 1987, looking at a production schedule that had been printed on a dot-matrix printer whose ribbon was running out, so that the numbers appeared in a ghostly grey that seemed to be apologizing for their own existence. Across the table, Barry Kornblum — executive vice president of something, the title had been revised twice since Leo had started working with him — was explaining why the third-act shark attack needed to be cut.

"Here's the thing," Barry said, spreading his hands on the teak conference table. "We've got a seventy-five-million-dollar picture. We've secured the toy license. We've got Happy Meal tie-ins across eleven territories. This is no longer a movie, Leo. This is a global entertainment product. And the thing about a global entertainment product is that children under twelve cannot be terrified in a dark theater."

"The shark is the antagonist," Leo said. "The entire third act is the shark."

"The shark is still the antagonist. We're just reducing the antagonist's screen time by, what, four minutes? Five?" Barry leaned back in his chair, which was upholstered in leather the colour of a brandy Alexander. "You're a writer. You understand editing. What you cut makes what remains more powerful."

Leo had spent fourteen months on the script. He had researched great white behavior at the Scripps Institution. He had written the shark as a metaphor — American predation, the hunger of the Reagan era, the way capital devoured everything it touched and called the result growth. The shark was not a monster. The shark was the thesis.

But the production was seventy-five million dollars. The toy license had been signed. Eleven territories had their Happy Meal boxes printed and waiting in warehouses in Singapore and Rotterdam and São Paulo. And Leo had a mortgage on a house in Silver Lake that he had bought in 1985, when interest rates had dipped below ten percent for the first time in his adult life, and his wife Beth was six months into a pregnancy that had been achieved through two years of procedures whose invoices arrived in envelopes thick as quarterly reports.

"Four minutes," Leo said.

"Four minutes," Barry agreed. "And the shark still eats the villain. That stays. The villain gets eaten. The audience cheers. Everybody's happy."

Leo nodded. He signed the revised script approval form with the Montblanc pen that Beth had given him for his thirty-fifth birthday, the one engraved with the opening line of his first produced screenplay — a small independent film about migrant farmworkers that had played at Sundance in 1980 and disappeared without a trace. The line read: *The earth gives us everything and we give it nothing back.* He had been twenty-eight when he wrote that line. He had believed it with the conviction of someone who had never owned anything worth protecting.

The second compromise was the one about the wife.

The script was called "Pacific Crossing," and it was about a fisheries biologist who discovers that a Japanese corporation is dumping toxic waste off the coast of Oregon. Leo had written the biologist as a woman in her fifties, a widow, a scientist who had sacrificed personal happiness for the integrity of her work. The studio wanted to make her thirty-two and married, with a husband who was also a scientist, also attractive, also in the movie.

"Younger," said Nancy Yashimoto, the development executive assigned to the project. She was twenty-seven, wore Comme des Garçons suits in shades of grey that looked like fog over the Pacific, and had an MBA from Stanford that she wielded like a surgical instrument. "Younger, married, and we'd like to see a subplot where the husband is tempted by the corporation's bribe."

"That completely changes the character," Leo said.

"That completely creates a character people want to watch," Nancy said. "A fifty-year-old widow does not test well with males eighteen to thirty-four. A thirty-two-year-old married woman whose relationship is in crisis — that tests through the roof."

The data was the data. Leo had seen the focus group reports, the demographic breakdowns, the columns of numbers that reduced human desire to decimal points. He could argue with taste but he could not argue with Excel. He made the biologist thirty-two. He gave her a husband. He wrote the scene where the husband takes the bribe, a scene that took him three days because he kept deleting it and starting over, and when he finished he realized that the scene was actually quite good. The husband's moral failure gave the story a second layer of tension. The audience would feel for the biologist not just because her ocean was being poisoned but because her marriage was being poisoned by the same corporate logic.

When he showed the revised pages to Beth, she read them in silence and then looked at him with an expression he couldn't quite read.

"What happened to the widow?" she asked.

"The data," Leo said. "The widow doesn't test."

"You used to talk about this character like she was a real person."

"She was a real person. Now she's a real person who happens to be thirty-two and married."

Beth handed the pages back to him. She was seven months pregnant, her belly a smooth curve beneath the USC sweatshirt she had been wearing since the second trimester, and she had stopped arguing about his work somewhere around the fourth month, when the reality of the mortgage and the medical bills and the cost of a college education eighteen years in the future had begun to feel more immediate than the aesthetic principles they had once shared over cheap wine in their graduate student apartment.

"I'm sure it's fine," she said. "I'm sure the data is right."

The third compromise was the one about the ending.

The script was a political thriller about a journalist who uncovers a conspiracy involving the CIA, the Salvadoran death squads, and a congressman from Texas. Leo had written the ending as an indictment — the journalist publishes the story, but the congressman is re-elected, the CIA denies everything, and the death squads continue their work. The world remains broken. Truth is revealed but truth is insufficient. That was the point. That was the whole point.

The studio wanted the congressman to resign.

"People don't go to the movies to be depressed," said Barry Kornblum, who had been promoted again and now occupied a corner office with a view of the Hollywood sign that seemed to have been designed specifically for moments like this. "They go to the movies to see the world the way it should be. That's what entertainment is, Leo. It's aspirational reality."

"It's a lie."

"It's a product. And the product sells better when the bad guy gets punished."

Leo thought about the Salvadoran refugees he had interviewed for research — men and women who had watched their villages burn, who had crossed three borders with nothing but the clothes on their backs, who had described atrocities with the flat affect of people who had used up their capacity for horror. He thought about the congressman from Texas, the real congressman, the one who had chaired the subcommittee that had authorized the funding, the one who was still in office, still chairing subcommittees, still authorizing funding. He thought about the truth and its insufficiency.

Then he thought about the house in Silver Lake. He thought about Beth in the delivery room, her hand gripping his, the epidural wearing off, the obstetrician's voice calm and steady as she said *one more push, one more push, you're almost there.* He thought about his daughter, Emily, who was now fourteen months old and could say *Dada* and *ball* and *no*, who slept in a room with a mobile of hand-painted fish that Beth had hung above the crib, who would need preschool and piano lessons and a college fund and a world that was not entirely indifferent to her existence.

He made the congressman resign.

And the scene, he had to admit, was powerful. The journalist confronting the congressman on the steps of the Capitol, the cameras rolling, the confession extracted through a piece of evidence Leo had invented out of whole cloth because real life did not provide the kind of evidence that produced satisfying third acts. When he read the scene aloud in his office, his voice echoing off the framed posters of films he had loved before he understood how films were made, he felt the emotional release that the scene was designed to produce. The bad guy got punished. The world was just. The lie was better than the truth.

The fourth compromise was the one about the credit.

The script was Leo's in every respect. He had conceived the idea over dinner with a documentary filmmaker who had spent eighteen months embedded with a fruit-pickers' union in the Central Valley. He had written six drafts over fourteen months, working nights and weekends while the development executives fed him notes that arrived via fax machine in long curling sheets. He had built the characters, structured the acts, written dialogue that made him laugh out loud in his office at two in the morning when the rest of the house was asleep.

The studio wanted to give a co-writing credit to a man named Rick Schroeder, who had been brought in to "punch up" the dialogue on the fourth draft and had contributed, by Leo's count, approximately eleven lines, all of which had been cut in the fifth draft.

"It's a political thing," Nancy Yashimoto said, in the apologetic tone that was not actually apologetic. "Rick is attached to the director's next project. The director wants Rick's name on this one to build his profile."

"That's not how credits work," Leo said. "There's a Writers Guild arbitration process."

"There is. And we would prefer to avoid that process, which can be time-consuming and adversarial and which tends to create tensions that affect future employment." Nancy paused. "Leo, you have two films in pre-production with us and a first-look deal that runs through 1990. This is a small thing. A name on a poster. No one reads the credits anyway."

Leo had fought for his credits before. He had spent three weeks in Writers Guild arbitration over a television movie in 1983, submitting drafts and memos and annotated notes that proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the script was his. He had won and had celebrated by buying a bottle of Dom Pérignon that cost more than his first car. The victory had tasted like vindication.

But he was thirty-eight now. He had a daughter who needed braces and a wife who had left her job at the university press to stay home with the baby and a house that needed a new roof and a sense that the world was not going to rearrange itself around his principles. He let Rick Schroeder have the credit. His name appeared second on the poster, smaller than Rick's, and the poster hung in the lobby of the Chinese Theatre for six weeks before it was replaced by a poster for a film about a time-traveling police dog.

The fifth compromise was the one about the message.

The script had begun as a story about a Honduran family fleeing political violence. Leo had written it in a white heat after reading a newspaper article about a massacre in a village whose name he could not pronounce, a place where American-made helicopters had deposited American-trained soldiers who had killed American-counted civilians. The script was angry and precise and structurally perfect, and it ended with the family crossing the Rio Grande and being met not by welcome but by floodlights, by barking dogs, by the indifferent machinery of a nation that had helped create the violence it was now fleeing.

A year into development, the studio received a memo from the distribution department. The film could not be released in seventeen markets in Central and South America if it implicated the United States in any foreign government's military operations. The legal department had flagged potential liability. The marketing department had determined that the subject matter was "not commercially viable in the current political climate." The current political climate being, Leo understood, the Reagan administration's ongoing support for anti-communist forces in the region, which was a policy and not a political position and therefore not something the studio could be seen to criticize.

"We're not saying don't make the film," Barry Kornblum said, in his new office on the top floor, the corner office having been deemed insufficient for his newest title, which was President of Production. "We're saying make the film about something else. Keep the family. Keep the journey. Lose the politics."

"What's the journey without the politics?"

"A human story. Universal themes. Perseverance. Family devotion. The things that actually matter to audiences."

Leo thought about the village with the unpronounceable name. He thought about the American-made helicopters. He thought about the Honduran refugees he had interviewed in a church basement in East Los Angeles, their voices soft and precise, their accounts of what had happened to their neighbors offered without embellishment because embellishment would have diminished the truth. He thought about the distribution territories and the legal liability and the commercial viability and the career he had built on a foundation of compromises that had seemed reasonable at the time.

He wrote a new draft. The family was still fleeing. But the reason for their flight was now an unnamed natural disaster — a flood, a famine, a generic catastrophe that required no political explanation. The American-made helicopters became weather patterns. The American-trained soldiers became bad luck. The film was released in all seventeen markets and made forty million dollars in its opening weekend, and when Leo watched it at the premiere in Westwood, sitting in the dark theater with Beth beside him and Emily asleep at home with the babysitter, he could not tell the difference between the film he had written and the film that was on the screen. They seemed like the same thing. They probably were the same thing. It was only words. Words could be changed. Words were always being changed.

The sixth compromise was the one about the friend.

His name was David Okonkwo, and he had been Leo's writing partner in the early years, before Leo had been promoted to the studio system and David had stayed in the independent world, making documentaries about police brutality and housing discrimination and the slow disenfranchisement of communities that had never had much franchise to begin with. David had called Leo every month for thirteen years, their conversations a lifeline to a version of himself that Leo was increasingly unable to locate. David had introduced Leo to Beth, at a party in a loft in downtown Los Angeles, in 1979, when Beth was a graduate student in comparative literature and Leo was a script reader who wrote screenplays on weekends and believed that his best work was ahead of him.

In the spring of 1988, David called with a proposition. He had secured the rights to a book about the Rwandan genocide, a scholarly work by a Belgian historian who had documented the failure of the international community to intervene. David wanted Leo to co-write the adaptation. No studio. Independent financing. A film that would actually say something.

"I can't," Leo said.

"Why not?"

"I'm under contract. My first-look deal runs through 1990. Anything I write, Paramount gets first refusal."

"So refuse. They're not going to make a movie about Rwanda."

"They could refuse and then refuse to let me take it elsewhere. It's in the contract. Standard clause."

"The clause that says they own everything you think about."

"It's not like that."

"It's exactly like that. You just stopped noticing."

Leo sat in his office, the office that Paramount had provided after his third produced screenplay, with its view of the water tower and its framed posters and its leather couch that had cost more than the total budget of his first independent film. He looked at the script on his desk — a romantic comedy about a stockbroker who falls in love with a mermaid, the seventh rewrite, the notes from the studio scattered across the pages in yellow highlighter — and he told David that he couldn't do it, that his hands were tied, that the contract was the contract, that maybe in 1991, when the deal expired, they could revisit the conversation.

David did not call again. The monthly conversations stopped. Leo noticed their absence the way a person notices a tooth that has been pulled — the space felt wrong, but the body adjusted, and within a few weeks he had stopped running his tongue over the gap.

The seventh compromise was the one about Beth.

She had been working on a novel for three years. The novel was about a woman in her thirties, a mother, an academic who discovers that her husband — a successful screenwriter — has been gradually replacing his principles with rationalizations, each one small enough to justify, until the man she married is no longer present in the man she lives with. The husband in the novel was not Leo. Beth had insisted on this, had shown him the character notes, the backstory, the physical description that matched no one they knew. But Leo read the chapters as they arrived, printed on the dot-matrix printer in the study, and he recognized himself in the margins, in the asides, in the accumulation of small betrayals that the wife in the novel catalogued with the precision of an accountant auditing a business that was being slowly bankrupted from within.

In September of 1988, Beth told him she was leaving.

"I don't know who you are anymore," she said. They were sitting in the living room of the house in Silver Lake, the house with the new roof and the Montessori preschool bills and the mortgage that Leo's compromised scripts had made possible. Emily was at a birthday party, supervised by a nanny Leo had never met, and the afternoon light came through the west windows in long golden panels that reminded Leo of the light in their graduate student apartment, the one with the leaking ceiling and the cockroaches and the conviction that they were building something together.

"I'm the same person," Leo said.

"You're not. You've made yourself into something else. Someone else. I watched it happen and I told myself each step was reasonable and each step was reasonable. That's the worst part. Each step made sense. But you're not there anymore. The man I married — he's gone."

"He's right here."

She shook her head. "He's in the margins of my novel. He's the thing that gets edited out, draft by draft, until he's not in the story at all."

Leo wanted to argue. He wanted to list the reasons — the mortgage, the medical bills, the college fund, the careers of the hundreds of people who depended on the films he made, the distribution territories and the foreign markets and the Happy Meal tie-ins. But the reasons were the same reasons he had been giving himself for three years, and they had begun to sound like the dialogue he wrote for characters whose motivations had to be simplified for test audiences. The reasons were reasonable. The sum of the reasons was not.

Beth took Emily and moved to Berkeley, where her sister taught in the English department and where the light was different, more northern, less golden, a light that asked different questions of the things it illuminated. Leo stayed in the house in Silver Lake, which was larger than he needed and quieter than he could bear, and he continued to write scripts for the studio, scripts about time-traveling police dogs and stockbrokers in love with mermaids and honorable congressmen who resigned when confronted with the truth. The scripts were good. The scripts made money. The scripts were exactly what the studio wanted, and the studio was exactly what Leo had become.

On the night Beth left, Leo poured himself a glass of single-malt Scotch — he had switched from beer in 1986, the year his first studio film had opened at number one, the year he had stopped attending the independent film festival where he had once believed he belonged — and stood at the window of his empty living room, looking down at the lights of Silver Lake shimmering below the Hollywood Hills. The city spread beneath him like a circuit board, each house a component, each car a signal traveling along a predetermined path. He thought about the shark, about the widow, about the congressman, about the credit that belonged to a man he had never met. Each decision had been reasonable. The product of reasonable decisions was a life he no longer recognized.

He raised his glass to the window, to the city, to the reflection of a man who had become a company without noticing.

"To efficiency," he said, and drank, and the Scotch tasted like everything he had been trying not to name.

The next morning he drove to the Paramount lot and parked in his reserved space and walked to his office past the soundstages where crews were building the sets for his next picture — a comedy about a dog who inherits a fortune — and he sat down at his desk and opened the script notes that had been faxed overnight from the development department. The notes asked for a new ending. A happier ending. An ending where the dog learned the value of family and shared its fortune with the people who had been kind to it. The notes were reasonable. The notes were always reasonable.

Leo Markham opened a new document on his word processor and began to type.