The best deal of all for a writer, it has been said, is to sell his book to the movies for $1 million, and then they never make the movie. Sounds right to me. Somehow I never felt the screenplay I’d written was quite mine, even though I had written every word of it and it drew loosely on my stories. I wrote it, but did not sense that I really owned it, and I had put up no fight at all when asked to make extensive changes.