What Happens Next (2007)

Marc Norman must be tired of being ''the other guy'' who won an Oscar for writing Shakespeare in Love with Tom Stoppard. In this ambitious history of screenwriting — he kicks off with 1915's The Birth of a Nation — Norman drily chronicles Hollywood's least glamorous craft. The usual suspects are all here: golden-age greats Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder; New Hollywood auteurs Francis Coppola and Paul Schrader; and whiz kids Charlie Kaufman and Quentin Tarantino. But What Happens Next feels sluggish, like the script for a bloated three-hour epic that should have taken 90 minutes. C