and oddly enough, mike nichols stayed mike nichols, and...but i sort of trusted mike. i didn't think he was going to allow them to really screw it up. and what happened, finally, by some great fortune: there was no screenplay. i mean, there's this guy, ernest lehman, who is credited with the screenplay. but then again, he produced the movie too. but i think he changed two sentences of my entire script and maybe cut about five minutes, so the text was intact. and i am told all sorts of apocryphal stories about hollywood and film. i am told, for example, that a screenplay was written in which the nonexistent child was changed into a real deeply retarded child that they kept upstairs somewhere. i don't know whether i believe stuff like this or not. but anyway, i was quite amazed when i went to see a rough cut of the movie that it was what i wrote, very much what i wrote, except those two dumb sentences: "hey, let's go to the roadhouse" and "hey, let's come back from the roadhouse..." [laughter] which destroyed the claustrophobia that was very important to me in the film.