The first perfectly reasonable decision was made on a Tuesday in March of 1987, when David Rosen was thirty-six years old and still believed he was a good person. It happened in a conference room at Paramount Pictures, the one with the view of the Hollywood sign that was visible through the smog on clear days, which was almost never. The studio executive, a man named Brenner who wore his sunglasses indoors and used the word "package" as a verb, had called David in to discuss a script that was not David's and would never be David's — a dark little drama about a jazz musician dying of AIDS in San Francisco, written by a young playwright from New York named Christopher.

"Here's the thing," Brenner said, leaning back in his leather chair with the practiced ease of a man who had never written anything longer than a memo. "The script is beautiful. It's important. It's the kind of thing that wins awards. But it's also the kind of thing that opens in two theaters and closes in three weeks. We need someone to come in and just — " he made a smoothing gesture with both hands, like a potter working clay, " — smooth it out. You know. Make it play."

David knew what "smooth it out" meant. It meant softening the scene where the protagonist screams at his mother. It meant cutting the monologue about the Tenderloin district that ran for four pages and was the best writing David had read in years. It meant making the dying less messy, the grief less sharp, the whole experience more palatable to the suburban multiplex audience that had made Eddie Murphy a star and would never pay seven dollars to watch a gay jazz musician waste away in a hospital bed.

"You want a rewrite," David said.

"I want a polish," Brenner said. "A light one. Christopher is brilliant but he's theater. He doesn't understand film. You understand film. And honestly — " Brenner leaned forward now, dropping his voice to the register of sincerity that studio executives used when they were about to ask you to do something unethical, " — it'll help Christopher. If the script is more commercial, it gets made. If it gets made, it launches his career. If you say no, the script sits in a drawer and Christopher goes back to off-off-Broadway and nobody wins."

David thought about Marcus. Marcus, his writing partner for eleven years, who had died of a heart attack at forty-two in the middle of a script about migrant farm workers that no studio would touch because it was too political and too sad and too true. Marcus, who had said on his deathbed — an actual deathbed, a hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai with the tubes and the beeping and the terrible fluorescent light — "Don't let them ruin the work. Promise me. Don't let them turn everything into a happy ending."

David had promised. He had held Marcus's hand and promised, and then Marcus had died, and the script about migrant farm workers had died with him, and David had spent the next two years writing nothing because every time he tried, he heard Marcus's voice asking him if it was true.

But Brenner was right about one thing. If the AIDS play didn't get made, Christopher would go back to New York and wait tables. If David polished it, just a little, just enough to get it past the development committee, it would get made. Christopher would get paid. Christopher would get a credit. Christopher would get a career.

"It's a light polish," David said. "I'm not changing the ending."

"Light polish," Brenner agreed. "And no one's asking you to change the ending."

David took the job. He spent three weeks smoothing the edges of Christopher's script. He cut the four-page monologue to one page. He softened the scream at the mother into a tense conversation. He added a scene where the protagonist's ex-lover comes back, just briefly, just to hold his hand. He told himself that these were small changes, cosmetic changes, the kind of changes that any script needed to survive the development process. He told himself that the story was still there underneath, that the heart of it was untouched. He told himself that Marcus would have understood.

The film was made. It opened in eight hundred theaters instead of two. It did not win awards, but it made money. Christopher did not go back to New York. He took a staff writing job on a network drama about lawyers, and he never wrote another play.

The second perfectly reasonable decision came in June.

Brenner called again. "We've got a problem with the Western. The director wants a rewrite but the writer is being difficult. We need someone who can come in and just — " the smoothing gesture again, " — make it work."

The Western was called "The Last Crossing" and it had been written by a woman named Elaine who had spent three years researching the Oregon Trail and had produced a script that was brutal and feminist and unsparing in its depiction of what the frontier actually cost. The director, a hot young film school graduate named Rawlings, wanted to add a love triangle and cut the scene where the protagonist's daughter dies of dysentery.

"The love triangle is a studio note," Brenner said. "The dysentery thing is Rawlings. He says it's too dark."

"It's the Oregon Trail," David said. "People died of dysentery."

"People don't pay nine dollars to watch people die of dysentery."

David thought about refusing. But refusing would mean Rawlings would hire someone else, someone who didn't care about Elaine's research, someone who would add the love triangle and cut the daughter and also turn the protagonist into a man. If David did it, he could protect the core of the script. He could negotiate. He could find compromises.

He told himself this was ethical. He told himself he was being the lesser of two evils.

He added the love triangle but made the female protagonist the center of it. He cut the dysentery scene but added a montage of graves along the trail — quick cuts, no dialogue, just the visual fact of death. He delivered a script that was softer than Elaine's original but harder than what Rawlings had asked for. He told himself it was a victory.

Elaine did not see it that way. She called him from a payphone in Wyoming, where she was researching her next script, and she used words that David had never heard a woman use before. "I spent three years on that script," she said. "You spent three weeks. What gives you the right?"

"Elaine, I tried to protect your vision — "

"You protected nothing," she said. "You put a bow on a coffin."

The film was made. It was nominated for two Oscars. Rawlings was hailed as a visionary. Elaine's name was buried in the credits under "Additional Material By." David told himself that this was how the industry worked, that he had done the best he could, that you couldn't save everything.

The third perfectly reasonable decision came in September.

This time it was not a polish. It was a full rewrite. A young writer named Terrence had delivered a script about police corruption in South Central Los Angeles, based on his own experiences growing up in Watts. The script was angry and specific and politically explosive. The studio was terrified of it.

"I need you to make it less — " Brenner searched for the word, " — polemical."

"Polemical," David repeated.

"Relatable. Universal. Make the cop a good man in a bad system. Make it less about race and more about the individual. You know. Human."

David knew. He had heard this language before. He had used this language before. "Relatable" meant white. "Universal" meant don't talk about racism. "Human" meant don't make anyone uncomfortable.

He took the job. He told himself it was the only way the script would get made. Terrence was twenty-five years old with no credits and a mortgage. If David didn't do it, someone worse would. He spent two months diluting Terrence's fury into something palatable, something that would test well in Sherman Oaks, something that would not frighten the foreign distributors.

Terrence did not call to yell at him. Terrence simply stopped writing. David heard later that he had gone back to Watts and was working at his uncle's auto body shop. The film was made. It was called "gritty" and "powerful" in the trades. It did not mention race in any of its two hours and fourteen minutes.

The fourth perfectly reasonable decision was made in 1988, and the fifth in 1989, and by the sixth, in the spring of 1990, David had stopped counting.

He had become the person that the studio called when a writer was being "difficult." He had become the person who knew how to "smooth things out" and "make it play" and "find the universal." He had become the person who could look a young playwright in the eye and say, "I'm here to protect your vision," and believe it.

The seventh perfectly reasonable decision was the one that made him stop.

It was a Tuesday in November of 1991. The script was a small thing, a personal thing, a story about a father and son in the San Fernando Valley written by a young woman named Rosa who had based it on her own father's death from lung cancer. Rosa was twenty-three years old. She had delivered the script on spec, without an agent, without a deal, just a manuscript in a manila envelope that had somehow made its way to Brenner's desk.

Brenner called David into the conference room. The Hollywood sign was visible today, sharp against a blue sky. "This one is special," Brenner said. "It's raw. It's honest. It's the kind of thing that could be a sleeper hit if we handle it right."

"What do you need?"

"A polish. Just a light one. The ending is too — " Brenner paused. "She kills the father. From the cancer. It's devastating. I need you to find a way to make it hopeful."

"There's no hopeful ending to lung cancer," David said.

"Find one. A dream sequence. A flashback. A voiceover. Something. The test audiences will crucify us if the father dies at the end."

David opened his mouth to say no. He had said no before, in the beginning, when he still had the muscle memory of integrity. But the muscle had atrophied. Three years of perfectly reasonable decisions had worn it away, one tiny compromise at a time, until there was nothing left but the professional habit of saying yes.

He took the script home. He read it in one sitting, in the apartment in West Hollywood that he had bought with the money from the Western rewrite. It was beautiful. It was the best thing he had read since Christopher's AIDS play, since Terrence's police corruption script, since Elaine's Oregon Trail epic. It was true in the way that Marcus had meant when he said "don't let them ruin the work." It was the kind of script that made David remember why he had become a writer in the first place, before the conference rooms and the smoothing gestures and the vocabulary of betrayal.

And David sat at his desk with Rosa's script in front of him and understood, with a clarity that made his hands shake, that he was going to destroy it.

Not because he wanted to. Not because he was evil. But because he had been making perfectly reasonable decisions for four years, and each decision had shifted him a fraction of a degree away from the person he had promised Marcus he would be, and now he was so far from that person that he could not find his way back. He was the fixer. He was the one who made the work safe. He was the one who put bows on coffins.

He called Rosa. He said: "I'd like to talk about your script. There are some things we can do to make it more — "

He stopped. He had been about to say "commercial." He had been about to say "accessible." He had been about to say all the things that Brenner said, that he had learned to say, that came out of his mouth now as naturally as breathing.

"Mr. Rosen?" Rosa's voice was young and hopeful. "I'm so honored you're working on my script. I loved 'The Last Crossing.' The scene with the graves was beautiful."

David closed his eyes. The graves. His compromise. His small victory. The thing he had salvaged from the wreckage of Elaine's vision and held up as proof that he was still a good person. Rosa had seen it. Rosa had been moved by it. Rosa did not know that the graves were the only thing left after he had cut everything that mattered.

"Ms. Herrera," David said carefully, "I need to be honest with you. The studio is going to ask me to change the ending. They're going to want the father to live, or at least to have a hopeful moment before he dies. They're going to say it's for the audience. They're going to say it's the only way the film gets made."

Silence on the line.

"I can tell them no," David said. "But if I tell them no, the script goes back in the drawer. You don't get paid. You don't get made. Someone else will write a film about a father dying of lung cancer, and it will be softer than yours, and it will make money, and you will still be waiting tables and wondering what happened."

More silence. Then Rosa's voice, very small: "What would you do? If it was your script?"

David thought about Marcus. About the hospital bed. About the promise. About the migrant farm workers script that had died with him, unproduced, unread, forgotten in a drawer in David's apartment somewhere under the tax returns and the takeout menus.

"I would let it die," David said. "A script that stays true is worth more than a film that sells out."

"Then why do you do it?" Rosa asked. "Why do you keep — " she hesitated, " — smoothing things out?"

David looked at the script on his desk. He looked at the photograph of Marcus on the bookshelf, the one from the Sundance festival in 1983, both of them young and drunk and certain that they were going to change the world. He looked at the view of the Hollywood Hills through his window, the houses climbing the canyon walls, the lights coming on in the November dusk.

"Because it's reasonable," he said. "Every single time, it's reasonable. That's the trap. If anyone asked me to do something terrible, I would say no. But no one ever asks. They ask for a polish. They ask for a small change. They ask for something so tiny that saying no seems arrogant, seems precious, seems like the kind of thing only a difficult person would do. And I am not a difficult person. I am a very reasonable person. I have been reasonable for four years, and I have destroyed four careers, and at no point did I ever do anything that wasn't perfectly reasonable."

He paused. Rosa was crying, he could hear it, the small hitches in her breathing that she was trying to hide.

"Don't sell it," David said. "Don't let me touch it. Don't let anyone touch it. Put it in a drawer and write the next one. And the next one. And the one after that. And if you write enough of them, eventually one will get made on your terms. Maybe not this year. Maybe not this decade. But eventually. That's what Marcus believed. That's what I used to believe."

"Who's Marcus?"

"Someone I made a promise to," David said. "Someone I've been failing for four years."

He hung up the phone. He sat in the darkening apartment with Rosa's script in front of him. He did not open it. He did not touch it. He called Brenner and said: "I'm not doing the polish. I'm not doing any more polishes. I'm done."

Brenner laughed. "You'll be back. You're too good at this."

David hung up. He went to the bookshelf and took down the photograph of Marcus. He looked at the two young men in the frame, the Sundance lanyards around their necks, the reckless certainty in their eyes. He thought about the seven perfectly reasonable decisions that had brought him here, to this apartment, to this moment, to the other side of the promise.

"I'm sorry," he said to the photograph. "It took me seven tries to remember what you meant."

He put the photograph back. He went to his desk. He opened the drawer where Marcus's unfinished script had been sitting for six years, unread, untouched, the paper yellowing at the edges. He took it out. He began to read.

The script was about migrant farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley. It was about a father and son. It was about the cost of survival. The ending was devastating. There was no hopeful moment. There was no dream sequence. There was no voiceover.

David read it all the way through, and when he finished, he understood something that he had forgotten in the four years of perfectly reasonable decisions.

The ending was supposed to be devastating. That was the point.