I wrote the best thing I have ever written in the spring of 1987, sitting at a card table in a rented bungalow in Silver Lake, drinking instant coffee out of a mug that said "World's Okayest Screenwriter." The bungalow had a lemon tree in the backyard and a water heater that groaned like a dying man whenever anyone took a shower. The rent was four hundred dollars a month, which was cheap even for Silver Lake, because the landlord was a retired stuntman who claimed to have doubled for Steve McQueen and needed someone to keep an eye on the place. I was thirty-six years old. I had written eleven screenplays, and none of them had been produced.

The twelfth was different. I knew it from the first page. It was called The Inheritance, and it was a dark comedy about a man named Peter Haas who discovers, at his father's funeral, that his father — a beloved Detroit autoworker, a union man, a man who marched with King in '63 — had been a Nazi collaborator during the war. Not a guard, not a soldier, but a clerk in a Dutch municipal office who signed the papers that sent Jewish families to the camps. A small man, a bureaucratic man, a man who did what he was told and never asked questions. Peter Haas spends the rest of the film trying to understand how the man he loved could have been the man who did this, and the answer is: he cannot. There is no understanding. There is only the weight of history, the slipperiness of identity, the fact that every human being contains multitudes, and some of those multitudes are monstrous.

I wrote it in six weeks, fueled by coffee and the desperate energy of a man who can feel the door closing. My girlfriend, Carla, read the first draft and said it was the most honest thing I had ever written. She said it with tears in her eyes, which I took as a good sign. Carla was a production assistant at Paramount, which meant she worked sixty hours a week for less than minimum wage and had seen enough bad scripts to know a good one when she read it. She believed in me. She had been believing in me for four years, and her belief was beginning to show strain, like a bridge that has held one car too many.

I sent The Inheritance to my agent, a man named Marty Schreibman who worked out of a glass office on Wilshire and had represented me for seven years without ever making a commission. Marty called me two days later. "This is it," he said. "This is the one that gets you off the Datsun." The Datsun was my car, a 1978 210 that had been beige once and was now the color of regret. It started one time out of three. The other two times, I walked.

Marty sent the script to a producer named Lenny Fogel at Universal. Lenny called a meeting.

COMPROMISE ONE. Lenny's office had a view of the Universal lot and a couch that cost more than my annual rent. Lenny himself was a large man in a small chair, a man who had produced three hit comedies in the eighties and believed this entitled him to certain opinions about what audiences wanted. He liked the script. He really liked it. The father thing, the Nazi thing, the identity thing — powerful stuff. His only note was: "Make the protagonist a woman."

"Women are hot right now," Lenny said. "Baby Boom, Moonstruck, Working Girl. Audiences want to see women on screen. Plus, if we make it a woman, we can get Meryl. Or Glenn. Glenn Close would kill this."

I thought about it. Cassie Haas instead of Peter Haas. A daughter discovering her father's secret instead of a son. The emotional dynamics would shift — a daughter's relationship with her father, a daughter's inheritance of guilt — but the core would remain. The central question would remain. "Sure," I said. "Cassie Haas. I can make that work."

I drove home in the Datsun, which started on the second try, and told Carla about the meeting. She said Cassie was a great idea. She said women's stories were underrepresented. She said this was a good compromise, the kind that made a script better, not worse. I agreed. I spent the next three weeks rewriting, and when I was done, the script was still good. Maybe even better. The female perspective added something — a tenderness, a ferocity. I was proud of it.

Lenny sent the revised script to a studio executive named Barbara Kinsolving at the production arm. Barbara called a meeting.

COMPROMISE TWO. Barbara's office was smaller than Lenny's but had a better view, and she kept a framed photograph of her Golden Retriever on her desk. She liked the script. She really liked it. Cassie Haas was a tremendous character, a woman grappling with the weight of history, a role any actress would kill for. Her only note was: "Make the love interest younger."

"She's thirty-eight in the script," Barbara said. "The guy we have in mind for the love interest is thirty-five. If we make him thirty-two, we can get Tom Cruise. Or Kevin Bacon. One of those guys. They're testing through the roof with the eighteen-to-thirty-four demo."

"He's a Holocaust historian," I said. "A professor. He's supposed to be older."

"Make him a grad student. It's the same thing. He's researching. She helps him. They fall in love. It's beautiful."

I drove home in the Datsun, which did not start, and walked the two miles to Silver Lake in the February rain. Carla said the age thing didn't matter. She said the relationship was secondary to the central conflict. She said I was being precious. I agreed. I spent a week rewriting, and when I was done, the script was still good. The love interest was younger, but the emotional truth was intact. The central question — how do you love someone who did unforgivable things — remained.

COMPROMISE THREE. The director, a man named Rick Daviau who had made an indie film about Vietnam that won a prize at Sundance, wanted to meet. Rick was thirty-one and intense and wore a leather jacket that he never took off, even indoors. He liked the script. He really liked it. The ambiguity of the ending, the way Cassie never fully resolves her feelings about her father — powerful stuff. His only note was: "She should forgive him at the end."

"The ambiguity is what makes it honest," I said.

"Honest doesn't sell tickets," Rick said. "Closure sells tickets. People want to walk out of the theater feeling good. They want to believe that understanding leads to forgiveness. If she forgives him, we get a standing ovation. If she doesn't, we get confused silence."

"Real life doesn't always resolve."

"This isn't real life. This is a movie. Two hours, twenty-four frames per second, twenty dollars a ticket. Give them the ending they want."

I gave them the ending they wanted. Cassie forgives her father. Not fully, not easily, but in the final scene she visits his grave and places a stone on the headstone, a Jewish custom she has learned from the historian, and she says, "I understand now." It was a lie, but it was a beautiful lie, and it would make people cry. Carla read the new ending and said it was "moving," which I noticed was not the same as "honest."

COMPROMISE FOUR. The marketing department got involved. A woman named Sheila from the distribution arm flew down from New York with a PowerPoint presentation and a smile that did not reach her eyes. The tracking was soft, she said. The word Nazi was testing poorly with focus groups. "People hear Nazi and they think Schindler's List. They think depressing. This is a comedy. A dark comedy, sure, but a comedy. We need to lose the Nazi angle."

"It's the central premise of the film."

"The central premise is the father's secret. The secret doesn't have to be Nazi. It could be anything. He could have had a second family. He could have had a gambling problem. He could have..."

"He was a Nazi collaborator. That's the point. That's the weight. A gambling problem doesn't carry the same weight."

Sheila looked at me the way you look at a child who doesn't understand why he can't have ice cream for breakfast. "David," she said, "the weight is what's killing us. Lighten the load."

The secret became an affair. The father had a mistress in another city, a woman he visited once a month for thirty years. Cassie Haas discovers this at the funeral, reexamines her entire childhood, questions whether her father's love was real or divided. It was still a dark comedy. It was still about identity and secrets and the unknowability of the people we love. It was just... lighter. Easier to market. Carla said it was "commercial," which I noticed was not the same as "good."

COMPROMISE FIVE. The star's agent called. The star was a woman named Denise Harper, a former sitcom actress who had made the transition to dramatic roles with a well-reviewed performance in a film about a woman with cancer. She was attached to play Cassie, and her attachment was the only reason the studio was still interested. Her agent wanted to discuss the setting. "Detroit is depressing," the agent said. "Nobody wants to spend two hours in Detroit. Move it to LA. The light is better. The locations are easier. And Denise lives here, so it works for her schedule."

"The father was a Detroit autoworker. The union. The auto plant. That's all Detroit."

"Make him a studio carpenter. Paramount lot. The union thing still works. It's basically the same."

It was not the same. But the Datsun had finally died, completely and irrevocably, on the 101 freeway three weeks earlier, and I needed the money from this project to buy a new car. I moved the setting to Los Angeles. The father became a studio carpenter. The union hall became the studio lot. The Detroit winter became the LA summer. The light was better. The locations were easier. The script was still good. It was still about something. I just could not remember exactly what.

COMPROMISE SIX. The rewrite specialist was a man named Gary Pinter, and he was brought in by the studio over my objections. "The dialogue needs punching up," Barbara said. "Gary's the best. He did the polish on Beverly Hills Cop II. The jokes land." Gary was a nice guy, a former stand-up comic with a nervous laugh and a collection of Hawaiian shirts. He read my script and said it was "great material, really great, just needs a little air in the tires." He added seventeen jokes. Seventeen. I counted them. Three of them were at the expense of the historian character, who was now a buffoonish love interest who kept accidentally saying the wrong thing. Four of them were about Cassie's mother, who had become a caricature of a nagging Jewish mother despite not being Jewish in any previous draft. The rest were scattered throughout, little landmines of comedy that detonated whenever the script came too close to an honest emotion.

Gary's draft was funnier than mine. I could admit that. It made me laugh out loud three times. But when I finished reading it, I did not feel anything. The weight was gone. The central question — how do you love someone who did unforgivable things — had been replaced by a different question: how do you get through a difficult conversation and still make it to the wedding on time?

"We need to talk about the credit situation," Marty said over the phone. "Gary's people want sole credit. WGA arbitration. They're saying his contribution was transformative."

"It's my script."

"It was your script. Now it's Gary's script. That's how it works. Look, David, you'll get a story credit and a consulting fee. It's more money than you'd get from the writing credit anyway. The WGA minimums are a joke."

I looked at the consulting contract. It was for forty thousand dollars, which was more than I had made in the previous three years combined. Carla and I had been talking about buying a house. A little Craftsman in Echo Park, maybe, with a yard and a water heater that didn't groan. The forty thousand would cover the down payment. All I had to do was accept that the script was no longer mine.

I signed the contract. Carla found a house. The Datsun's replacement was a 1984 Honda Civic, beige like the Datsun's ghost, and it started every single time.

COMPROMISE SEVEN. The premiere was at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset, a Tuesday night in December. The film was called Love and Secrets, which was not the title I had chosen but was, according to the marketing department, "warmer and more accessible." I wore a suit I had not worn since my cousin's wedding in 1984. Carla wore a red dress and held my hand in the lobby while photographers took pictures of Denise Harper, who was wearing something that probably cost more than the Honda.

The theater was full. The lights went down. The Universal logo appeared, spinning against the darkness, and I felt something tighten in my chest. The film began. Cassie Haas — no longer a professor, now a wedding planner, because "audiences like weddings" — discovers at her father's funeral that he had a secret daughter from an affair. The secret daughter is played by a twenty-four-year-old actress who looks nothing like Denise Harper but tests well with the eighteen-to-thirty-four demo. The two women bond. They fight. They bond again. The historian — no longer a historian, now a caterer with a heart of gold — helps them reconcile. The father is forgiven. The wedding is beautiful. The end.

My name was not in the credits. I had known it would not be, but I watched for it anyway, scanning the white text against the black background as if my name might have appeared by some miracle of clerical error. It had not. The credits ended. The lights came up. The audience applauded, and I applauded with them, because it was easier than not applauding, because everyone around me was happy, because the film was a success by every measure that mattered.

During the applause, I heard someone in the row behind me laugh at a line I had not written. It was a joke about the father's secret daughter accidentally insulting the mother at the funeral reception. The audience had laughed at it during the screening, and they were laughing at it again now, recounting it to each other in the warm aftermath of entertainment. And I realized, with a clarity that felt like ice water, that this joke — this funny, harmless, audience-pleasing joke — occupied the exact same place in the script as the scene I had written eighteen months ago at a card table in Silver Lake, drinking instant coffee from a mug that had since broken, a scene in which Peter Haas sits in his father's empty house and holds a photograph of a family he does not recognize and tries to understand how the man who raised him could also be the man who signed those papers.

The scene was gone. The joke was here. No one noticed. No one cared. The film worked. The audience was happy. The studio was happy. Denise Harper would get an Oscar nomination, and Gary Pinter would get another job, and Lenny Fogel would produce another hit comedy, and Barbara Kinsolving would get a promotion, and Rick Daviau would direct a sequel, and the caterer with a heart of gold would become a franchise. The world would continue exactly as it had before, only slightly funnier, slightly lighter, slightly easier to digest.

And I would take my forty thousand dollars and buy a house in Echo Park with Carla, and we would be happy, or at least we would try, and I would continue to write screenplays that would not be produced, and one day I would be fifty, and then sixty, and then dead, and no one would remember The Inheritance, not the original version, not the version with the female protagonist, not the version with the younger love interest, not the version with the happy ending, not the version without the Nazis, not the version set in Los Angeles, not the version with the seventeen jokes, not any of them. They would remember Love and Secrets, if they remembered anything at all — a pleasant comedy about sisters and weddings and forgiveness, a film that made them feel good for two hours and then evaporated from their minds like morning fog.

I thought about the sorites paradox, which I had learned about in college and had not thought about in fifteen years. If you have a heap of sand, and you remove one grain, it is still a heap. Remove another grain. Still a heap. Another grain. Still a heap. At some point, after enough grains have been removed, it is no longer a heap. But there is no single grain whose removal turns the heap into a non-heap. The change happens grain by grain, invisibly, until suddenly the heap is gone and you cannot say when it disappeared.

My script was the heap. Each compromise was a grain of sand. The female protagonist: one grain. The younger love interest: one grain. The happy ending: one grain. The lost Nazi secret: one grain. The move to Los Angeles: one grain. Gary's seventeen jokes: seventeen grains. The credit removal: one grain. Twenty-two grains of sand, each one individually reasonable, each one individually defensible, each one removed with my full knowledge and consent. And now the heap was gone, and I could not tell you which grain had been the one that made it no longer a heap. None of them, alone, had been wrong. All of them, together, had been everything.

The applause ended. Carla squeezed my hand. "It's a good movie," she said, and she was right. It was a good movie. It was exactly the movie that everyone had wanted it to be. It was just not my movie. It had never been my movie, not really, not from the moment I had handed it to Lenny Fogel and said yes to the first compromise and told myself that one grain of sand would not matter.

The lobby was crowded with people in expensive clothes, laughing and drinking champagne and congratulating each other on a job well done. I stood at the edge of the crowd, holding a glass I did not remember accepting, watching the people who had built this thing celebrate what they had built. Someone told a joke I had not written, and I laughed. I laughed with them. What else was I supposed to do?