Jack Morrow woke up at four in the morning to the sound of his own screenplay, still unfinished, glowing at him from the screen of his Macintosh Plus. The cursor blinked. It had been blinking since midnight. It seemed to be blinking in judgment. He closed the file and opened another one — someone else's screenplay, a spec script by a kid named Danny Kovacs who had come out from Ohio with a duffel bag and a dream and a script about two brothers who rob a bank in the San Fernando Valley, and who had made the mistake of showing it to Jack at a party in the Hills six months ago. Jack had said he would take a look. Jack had said he would give notes. Jack had not given notes. Jack had, instead, opened the file at four in the morning on a Tuesday in September of 1987, and had begun to type.

He told himself it was nothing. He told himself he was just playing with the dialogue, tightening the second act, making the girl more interesting. He told himself Danny would thank him. He told himself a lot of things, and the cursor blinked its steady rhythm, and the smog pressed against the window like a dirty yellow blanket, and somewhere on the Sunset Strip the hair metal bands were finishing their sets and the valet parkers were bringing the cars around and the cocaine was disappearing into bathroom stalls, and Jack Morrow was crossing a line so thin he could not see it, so fine he did not feel it, so reasonable that it did not feel like a line at all.

That was the first compromise. The first of seven.

The first compromise was the easiest because it was not a compromise at all. Jack took Danny's script and he rewrote it — really rewrote it, not just polishing, restructuring the whole thing from the ground up — and he showed it to his agent, a man named Barry Schorr who wore linen suits in September and sweated through them by noon, and Barry said "this is good, this is really good, whose is it," and Jack said "mine" before he had time to think about what he was saying. It was an accident. It was a reflex. It was the kind of thing anyone would do.

Danny Kovacs called three times that month. Jack did not call back. He was busy. He was always busy. There was a Writers Guild strike looming — the contract was up in March of eighty-eight and everyone was positioning, everyone was scrambling, everyone was trying to get their projects locked in before the whole town shut down — and Jack was in demand. Paramount wanted him to rewrite a comedy. Columbia wanted him to polish a thriller. Jack Morrow, thirty-five years old, was having a moment, and moments in Hollywood were like the Santa Ana winds — they came without warning and they left devastation and you did not ask questions while they were blowing.

The second compromise happened in October. Jack was having lunch at the Ivy — lunch, not a meeting, just lunch, the kind of lunch that cost more than his mother's monthly mortgage in Van Nuys — with a producer named Larry Feldstein who had made three pictures that had each grossed more than the last and who had a reputation for being difficult with women. Specifically with women. Specifically with the assistants, the readers, the girls who brought him his Perrier and his cocaine and his phone messages and who lasted, on average, seven months before they quit or were fired or simply disappeared into the vast, humming machinery of Los Angeles, never to be seen again.

Jack's own assistant, a twenty-four-year-old from San Diego named Lisa Chen who was smarter than anyone in the room and knew it and was learning to hide it, brought Larry his Diet Coke and smiled the smile that women in Hollywood learned to smile — pleasant, professional, a pane of glass between her and the world — and Larry watched her walk away with an expression that made Jack's stomach tighten. It was nothing. It was a look. Men looked. It was what men did.

"Great girl," Larry said. "Great legs. You're a lucky man, Jack."

Jack said nothing. He could have said something. He could have said "she's my assistant, Larry, not a cocktail waitress." He could have said "let's keep it professional." He could have said a dozen things, all of them true, all of them right. But Larry was producing the Christmas release — the one with the forty-million-dollar budget and the star who had just won the Golden Globe — and Jack was attached to write the rewrite and Barry had told him, specifically, in the car on the way to the restaurant, "do not piss off Larry Feldstein, he is the only person in this town who can get you a green light before the strike, do you understand me, Jack, do not piss him off."

So Jack said nothing. And Lisa Chen went back to her desk and Larry Feldstein talked about the third act and Jack nodded and took notes and told himself it was nothing. It was a look. It was a comment. It was the kind of thing that happened every day. It was reasonable.

The third compromise came in November. A writer named Bill Hartigan — Bill, who had been at UCLA with Jack, who had shared a bungalow in Westwood and a typewriter and a dream, who had been the best man at Jack's wedding before Jack's marriage had fallen apart in the way that Hollywood marriages fell apart, which is to say gradually and then all at once — had written a script that was brilliant. Truly brilliant. The kind of script that made you remember why you had wanted to be a writer in the first place, the kind of script that had sentences in it that you wanted to frame and hang on your wall. But Bill was not bankable. Bill had directed one picture that had gone over budget and under grossed and now Bill was cold, and cold in Hollywood was worse than dead. Dead had mystery. Dead had tragedy. Cold was just cold.

Larry Feldstein said: "I like the script, but I need it to come from you. Bill's name on the cover page is a red flag. Studio won't touch it."

"It's Bill's script," Jack said.

"It's a rewrite," Larry said. "It's a page-one rewrite. You're doing a page-one rewrite. Bill understands. Bill's a professional."

Jack called Bill. He did not tell Bill the truth. He told Bill that the studio had passed, that the script was too literary, too personal, that maybe in a few years when the market shifted. Bill said he understood. Bill's voice was tired, resigned, the voice of a man who had been having this conversation for ten years and had learned not to argue. Bill had a kid now. Bill had a mortgage. Bill could not afford to fight.

And Jack took Bill's script and he changed the title and he changed the characters' names and he added a car chase and he gave it to Larry and the studio bought it for three hundred thousand dollars and Jack kept the money and Bill kept the silence and Jack told himself that this was how the business worked, that Bill knew the rules, that if he hadn't done it someone else would have, that it was nothing.

The cursor blinked on the Macintosh at four in the morning and Jack thought: I am doing what anyone would do. I am surviving. I am playing the game. And the light from the screen was blue and cold and it did not argue with him.

The fourth compromise happened in January of 1988. The Writers Guild strike was three months away and the town was in a frenzy, everyone trying to finish everything, everyone trying to get paid before the shutters came down. Jack was working on three scripts simultaneously, sleeping four hours a night, living on coffee and Dexedrine and the particular adrenaline of almost-success. He had not spoken to Danny Kovacs in months. Danny's script — the script about the brothers in the Valley — was in development at Paramount, with Jack's name on it, and Jack had stopped pretending it was anything other than his.

A writer named Richard Asher died in January. Heart attack, at his home in the Palisades. Sixty-three years old. Three Oscars. A legend. And sitting in his study, unfinished, was a screenplay — the last screenplay he would ever write — about a jazz musician in 1950s New Orleans. It was beautiful. It was the best thing Richard Asher had written in twenty years. And Richard Asher was dead, and Richard Asher's agent called Jack Morrow and said: "Richard wanted you to finish it. He told me. He said you were the only one who could do it justice."

Jack did not know if this was true. He did not ask. He took the script and he finished it — three weeks of eighteen-hour days, of takeout Chinese and cold coffee and the blue light of the Macintosh burning into his retinas — and when it was done the studio put his name on it. Not Richard Asher's. Not "based on a screenplay by." Just Jack Morrow. Because Richard was dead and dead writers did not sell tickets and Jack was hot and hot writers sold everything.

He drove up to the Palisades for the memorial service and he stood at the back of the room and he looked at Richard's widow and he did not tell her what he had done, and she thanked him for finishing Richard's work, and Jack said "it was an honor," and it was an honor, and it was a theft, and these two things were the same thing. The Santa Anas were blowing and the eucalyptus trees were bending in the wind and Jack Morrow drove back to his apartment in West Hollywood and wrote until the sun came up.

The fifth compromise was Lisa.

Lisa Chen, who had worked for Jack for eighteen months, who had organized his calendar and picked up his dry cleaning and read every terrible script that came across his desk and written coverage so sharp it made him jealous, who had never complained, who had never asked for anything except a chance to write something of her own. Lisa, who Larry Feldstein had been looking at since October. Lisa, who came to Jack's office on a Tuesday in February, her face pale, her hands shaking, and told him that Larry had cornered her at a party in Malibu, had put his hands on her, had said things she could not repeat.

Jack listened. He nodded. He said he would take care of it. And then he called Barry Schorr and Barry said "we are six weeks from the strike, Jack, six weeks, if you go after Larry Feldstein now the whole deal collapses, the Christmas picture, the Paramount rewrite, all of it, and Lisa Chen is an assistant, Jack, there are a thousand assistants, Lisa Chen will be fine, Lisa Chen can get another job, but you cannot get another career, do you understand me?"

Jack understood. He sat in his office with the door closed and he understood that what he was about to do was wrong and that he was going to do it anyway and that the reasons were perfectly reasonable — the deal, the strike, the career, the life he had built, the life he deserved, the life he had earned. He called Lisa into his office and he told her that Larry denied everything and that without witnesses there was nothing he could do and that he was sorry and that he would give her a recommendation, a glowing recommendation, the best recommendation anyone had ever written.

Lisa did not cry. She looked at him for a long moment — a look that contained a kind of understanding that was worse than hatred — and she nodded and she walked out of his office and she did not come back. The cursor blinked. The smog pressed against the window. The town kept humming. Jack Morrow kept working. And somewhere in the back of his mind, a door closed. He heard it click. He did not look back.

The sixth compromise was the easiest of all. By February, Jack Morrow had stopped pretending. He had stopped telling himself that the compromises were compromises. They were just decisions. They were just business. They were just the way things worked. He had made three hundred thousand on Bill's script and five hundred thousand on Richard's and he was up for an Academy Award — not for writing, for producing, but still, an Academy Award — and Danny Kovacs had stopped calling and Lisa Chen had disappeared into the machinery and Bill Hartigan had taken a job teaching screenwriting at a community college in Bakersfield, and Jack Morrow, thirty-five years old, was one of the ten most powerful writers in Hollywood.

Barry Schorr called him in late February. "I have a project," Barry said. "Big project. Franchise potential. But there is a problem."

The problem was a writer named Miriam Berenson. Miriam had developed the project — a science fiction trilogy based on a series of obscure novels from the seventies — over five years. She had written three drafts. She had shepherded it through development hell. She had poured her life into it. And the studio was ready to green-light, but they wanted a bigger name attached. They wanted Jack Morrow.

"Miriam gets story credit," Barry said. "You get screenplay credit. It is a good deal. It is a fair deal. She has been fighting it for months but she is going to take it because the alternative is that the project dies and she gets nothing. You are doing her a favor, Jack. You are saving her project."

Jack did not argue. He had stopped arguing. He had stopped noticing the doors closing, the lines crossing, the man in the mirror becoming someone else. He signed the papers. He took the money. He wrote the script. The strike came in March and the town shut down and Jack went to Maui with his girlfriend — a twenty-two-year-old actress who had been in two episodes of a sitcom and who looked at him the way people looked at winners — and he sat on the beach and he drank Mai Tais and he did not think about Danny Kovacs or Lisa Chen or Bill Hartigan or Richard Asher or Miriam Berenson or any of the bodies he had stepped over to get here.

The seventh compromise was the one that almost did not happen.

Jack came back from Maui in May. The strike was still on but Jack had a waiver — he was a producer now, not just a writer, and producers had waivers — and he went to his office on the Paramount lot and he sat down at his desk and he looked at his reflection in the dark screen of the Macintosh and he did not recognize the man looking back at him.

The man in the screen was a little heavier. A little softer around the jaw. The man in the screen had eyes that were harder than Jack remembered, flatter, the eyes of someone who had stopped being surprised by anything. The man in the screen had made seven compromises. Seven perfectly reasonable decisions. Seven small steps, each one justified, each one the right thing to do, and taken together they had led him here, to this office, to this reflection, to this moment of clarity that came like a knife between the ribs.

He thought about Danny. He thought about the brothers in the Valley, the script he had stolen from a kid who had trusted him. He thought about Bill, his best friend, who was teaching freshmen how to write loglines in Bakersfield while Jack's name was on his script. He thought about Lisa, whose career he had traded for Larry Feldstein's goodwill. He thought about Richard, dead and robbed. He thought about Miriam, standing in a development meeting, watching five years of work handed to a stranger.

And for a moment — a single, luminous moment — he thought about making the eighth compromise different. He thought about calling Danny and apologizing. He thought about calling Lisa and telling her he would testify. He thought about giving the credit back, the money back, the life back.

But the cursor was blinking. And the phone was ringing. And Barry Schorr was on the line with another deal, another project, another chance. And Jack Morrow picked up the phone and said "tell me about it" and the moment passed and the man in the screen became the man in the chair and the seventh compromise was not a compromise at all. It was just Tuesday.

The klieg lights came on at Paramount that evening for a premiere — some action picture, something with explosions — and the light flooded through the windows of Jack's office and fell on his face and he stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the lot, at the soundstages, at the backlot tour trams making their final circuit, at the Hollywood sign in the distance, hazy through the smog, and he thought about light. About how light traveled. About how the light from the klieg lights was the same light that fell on the beach in Maui, the same light that fell on the desk where Richard Asher had written his last screenplay, the same light that fell on Lisa Chen's face as she walked out of his office, the same light that fell on everyone equally, the just and the unjust, the thief and the thief's victim, the man who had made compromises and the man who had stopped being able to tell the difference.

The light judged. And it found him wanting. And it did not matter, because judgment was just light, and light did not stop you, and light did not save you, and Jack Morrow walked out of his office and got into his Porsche and drove down Sunset toward the Ivy, toward Larry Feldstein, toward the next deal and the next compromise and the next perfectly reasonable step on the road to whatever he was becoming, and he did not look back.