Product Description

Screenwriters have always been viewed as Hollywood’s stepchildren. Silent-film comedy pioneer Mack Sennett forbade his screenwriters from writing anything down, for fear they’d get inflated ideas about themselves as creative artists. The great midcentury director John Ford was known to answer studio executives’ complaints that he was behind schedule by tearing a handful of random pages from his script and tossing them over his shoulder. And Ken Russell was so contemptuous of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Altered States that Chayefsky insisted on having his name removed from the credits.

Of course, popular impressions aside, screenwriters have been central to moviemaking since the first motion picture audiences got past the sheer novelty of seeing pictures that moved at all. Soon they wanted to know: What happens next? In this truly fresh perspective on the movies, veteran Oscar-winning screenwriter Marc Norman gives us the first comprehensive history of the men and women who have answered that question, from Anita Loos, the highest-paid screenwriter of her day, to Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman, and other paradigm-busting talents reimagining movies for the new century.

The whole rich story is here: Herman Mankiewicz and the telegram he sent from Hollywood to his friend Ben Hecht in New York: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” The unlikely sojourns of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner as Hollywood screenwriters. The imposition of the Production Code in the early 1930s and the ingenious attempts of screenwriters to outwit the censors. How the script for Casablanca, “a disaster from start to finish,” based on what James Agee judged to be “one of the world’s worst plays,” took shape in a chaotic frenzy of writing and rewriting—and how one of the most famous denouements in motion picture history wasn’t scripted until a week after the last scheduled day of shooting—because they had to end the movie somehow.

Norman explores the dark days of the Hollywood blacklist that devastated and divided Hollywood’s screenwriting community. He charts the rise of the writer-director in the early 1970s with names like Coppola, Lucas, and Allen and the disaster of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate that led the studios to retake control. He offers priceless portraits of the young William Hurt, Steven Spielberg, and Steven Soderbergh. And he describes the scare of 2005 when new technologies seemed to dry up the audience for movies, and the industry—along with its screenwriters—faced the necessity of reinventing itself as it had done before in the face of sound recording, color, widescreen, television, and other technological revolutions.

Impeccably researched, erudite, and filled with unforgettable stories of the too often overlooked, maligned, and abused men and women who devised the ideas that others brought to life in action and words on-screen, this is a unique and engrossing history of the quintessential art form of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #687241 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-23
• Released on: 2007-10-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307383396
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"'The movies: they tear you away from your home, draw you into a pigsty of people, make you do stuff that disgusts you, rip out all your ambition of inventiveness, reduce you to a hack - and what do you get for it? A fortune.' Screenwiter Samuel Hoffenberg 'Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures? All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around.' Telegram from Herman Mankiewicz (who wrote Citizen Kane) to Ben Hecht (who wrote The Front Page) 'They're destroying my script. They're wrecking my beautiful story' Paddy Chayefsky on the filming of Altered States 'Naa, you know, what he did was cross out a lot of stuff that I wrote, and he told me to do this and that, and we usually fought about it, and sometimes he really f**ked things up.' Robert Towne, on being asked if Warren Beatty, who got the first credit, had written any of the script for Shampoo"

Review
“Fascinating.”
—Los Angeles Times

“A remarkable synthesis . . . the best, by far.”
—Scott Eyman, New York Observer

“A history of American film in which the camera pans away from its presumptive stars and searches out the ink-stained wretches huddled over typewriters.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Irreplaceable . . . Without question, the best treatment of the subject since Richard Corliss’s Talking Pictures in 1974.”
—Buffalo News

“Excellent . . . A book that deserves to become a classic of the genre.”
—The Times (London)

“Marc Norman is not only a wonderful and talented screenwriter in his own right, but he has done a great job of laying out screenwriting’s evolution in this excellent, comprehensive history. A must read for anyone who wants to know this important piece of the puzzle of Hollywood.”
—Mike Medavoy

“A stunningly entertaining way to tell the history of Hollywood. But what’s amazing about this wonderful book is not just that it’s relentlessly insightful, constantly surprising and beautifully written–what’s amazing is that no one has done this before. This is one terrific book.”
—Phil Robinson, author (screenplay) of Field of Dreams

“Marc Norman's What Happens Next is not only a fine book, it's a necessary book, brilliantly narrating the turbulent saga of 100 years of American screenwriting with energy, style, and an insider's sympathetic understanding of the always uneasy marriage between a primarily visual medium and the people who use words as its architecture.”
—Scott Eyman, author, Lion of Hollywood

"Marc Norman has created a comprehensive narrative of what is essentially a secret history. Entertaining, surprising and endlessly fascinating, he throws a bright light into a corner of our film heritage that has been habitually, even criminally, ignored."
—Lawrence Kasdan, co-screenwriter and director of The Big Chill

"At last! Hollywood History from a screenwriting perspective— a compelling, enlightening, and important work."
—Dave Trottier, author The Screenwriter's Bible

About the Author
MARC NORMAN won two Oscars for Shakespeare in Love in 1999, one for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (with Tom Stoppard) and another for Best Picture (shared with Donna Gigliotti, David Parfitt, Harvey Weinstein, and Edward Zwick), along with a Golden Globe, a Writers Guild Best Screenplay Award, a New York Film Critics Circle Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Silver Bear Award from the Berlin Film Festival. He lives in Santa Monica, California. This is his first work of nonfiction.

Customer Reviews

Read This Now
This book is phenomenal. Not only is it well-written and comprehensive, but it fills a horrendous gap in the legacy of screenwriting and its impact on movies.

Other than Ian Hamilton's terrific work on the early years of screenwriting, this book immediately becomes the cornerstone, the bedrock of the genre -- and for very good reason. It's not just a book about the writers themselves, but how the art and craft of screenwriting have evolved in the context of film. What we get is an alternate point of view that has for too long been neglected in entry-level cinema history.

Starting from Edison, Edwin Porter and D.W. Griffith, we travel the well-trodden (but freshly invigorated) path through the studio system and on into modern movie-making -- with the twist that the writer has not been brushed aside. In fact, we immediately see how crucial key scribes have contributed to the development of the art.

It's a cliche in Hollywood that the writer is abused and overlooked (ask a striking member of the WGA if you don't believe me). But other than a work stoppage, nothing can rectify the place of the writer in the public's awareness more than a historical overview with the screenwriter placed in his or her rightful place -- at the center of the creative process itself.

This is not a scree or a polemic, but a finely written, highly entertaining look at Hollywood. I find myself referring to it all the time. In fact, I've recreated my entire Netflix queue around areas of my movie history that could use some screenings. And I've become a big fan of Anita Loos! (You too will discover that at least 50% of the early screenwriters were women, with Anita being its first breakout star.)

Like a great film, this book immerses you in a world and rivets you to your chair. If you are a writer or a curious film buff, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. It will reward you with many great nights of delight and discovery -- a claim not enough movies themselves can make these days.

Lights, Camera, History, Gossip!
Academy award winner Marc Norman's "What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting" is as entertaining as a good movie. It can be studied as serious movie history--his description of the forces that moved the early movie industry from the East coast to the West is as good as any I've ever read--or perused as titillating, yet intelligent gossip. The men and women who wrote the words and stories so frequently disparaged and often disregarded by directors, producers, and heads of studios come alive in "What Happens Next" through anecdote, letters, and reminiscences.

From William Faulkner to Anita Loos (the highest paid screenwriter of her day), from Quentin Tarantino to Charlie Kaufman, this book is a delight for any movie fan or writer, or anyone who's ever enjoyed a juicy bit of scandalous gossip.

Thorough and Interesting
This exhaustively researched book starts at the very beginning then steps through each of the decades since D. W. Griffith's famous movie, all in a very entertaining manner.
Not satisfied simply with recounting the history of screenwriting and screenwriters in all their various guises, the author serves up cogent analysis about the business of movie making then comes to the conclusion that whatever else comes down the pike, in whatever form and whatever else screenwriters are called, there will always be a place for the content generator, or composer as he would prefer.
Excellent reading and enjoyable.