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.


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“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


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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.


From the Hardcover edition.

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