"What Happens Next," Marc Norman, screenwriting

Salon Books: "'A screenwriter is not really a writer; his words do not appear on the screen. What he does is to draft out blueprints that are executed by a team.' So wrote Paul Schrader, writer of 'Taxi Driver' and co-writer of 'Raging Bull,' two of the greatest films of the late 1970s -- though chances are you were only dimly aware of that, and think of them both as Martin Scorsese pictures. That the writer on any film project is regarded as a second-class talent, negligible at best and a nuisance at worst, is one of the hoariest chestnuts of the movie industry, and even the writers themselves can't seem to help polishing it every now and then. So Marc Norman -- a screenwriter himself, winner of an Academy Award for 'Shakespeare in Love' -- abundantly documents in his new book, 'What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting.'"