What Happens Next? by Marc Norman

What Happens Next? by Marc Norman

The script-writer's place in the Hollywood has traditionally been somewhere near the bottom of the food-chain, 'Below the heads of publicity but above the hairdressers' said screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. In this vastly entertaining book Marc Norman seeks to reverse that perception by tracing the whole history of the industry from the perspective of the oft-abused and much-derided individuals who actually provided the foundations upon which the directors, stars and studio bosses erected their titanic egos. He takes us through the early days of silent movies when teams of anonymous hacks churned out storylines and sub-titles on a weekly basis, through the 20's and 30s, when it sometimes seemed as if half of Manhattan had relocated to California as the studios sought to corral literary lions in their gilded cages, into the dark days of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists and on into the era of the auteur and the rise of the writer-director. Along the way we learn how movies were made - and how close many came to never being made; glean choice bits of hard-won wisdom: 'Emotionally involving the audience is easy,' advised George Lucas. 'Get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck'; watch William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald fail as screenwriters; witness Paddy Chayefsky's rage as the director turns his script into 'a Ken Russell film' without changing a single word; and watch as Francis Ford Coppola struggles to both write and direct Apocalypse Now - 'The walkie-talkies on the set would crackle, "He's on his way with another two pages," as his helicopter lifted off in the morning.' Marc Norman was co-writer, with Tom Stoppard, of the Oscar-winning script for Shakespeare in Love. This is his first non-fiction book.

'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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781845133245
ISBN 10	1845133242
Title	What Happens Next?
Author	Marc Norman
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Quarto Publishing PLC
Year published	2008-03-25
Number of pages	560
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable