Find out how to write your own screenplay

“AUDIENCES DON'T KNOW somebody sits down and writes a picture,” says Joe Gillis, the Hollywood hack screenwriter immortalised by Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard. “They think the actors make it up as they go along.” Sometimes, of course, they do. But the result is rarely satisfactory, unless it's Orson Welles extemporising on Swiss democracy and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man.

Marc Norman wrote the first drafts of Shakespeare in Love (subsequently polished by Tom Stoppard) after a long apprenticeship writing and producing in American television and feature films. Since his triumph at the Academy Awards in 1999, he appears not to have written a script that has made the transition to the screen. It is the chequered nature of his career that makes him singularly well qualified to write this excellent history of American screenwriting.

What Happens Next tells the story of movie writers from the silent era, when D.W. Griffith could keep the narrative of his sprawling epic The Birth of a Nation entirely in his head, to today's miserable existence in which writers can earn multimillion dollar payments for scripts, but only after interminable drafts and a wretched subsistence in “development hell”.

The conclusion this week of the screenwriters' strike will certainly increase their royalties, but it is unlikely to eradicate their intrinsic sense of grievance.

The essential problem is that since The Jazz Singer, the quality of the script has been the vital element in getting a movie started. But because the writer's work is essentially over before the film goes into production, producers, directors and stars resent their dependence on someone who is now off having a jolly good time spending the loot. Sometimes writers are even known to take on jobs for other producers while the script is being filmed, thereby adding betrayal to their list of crimes.

This resentment is frequently translated into contempt: hence the well-worn joke about the stupid Polish actress who went to Hollywood and tried to sleep her way to the top by going to bed with the writer. “Schmucks with Underwoods”, Jack Warner called his writers, whom he insisted clock on every morning at 9 in order to extract a full working day from them.

When Julius Epstein, one of the authors of Casablanca, was berated by Warner for not being able to come up with a solution to a script problem, he replied mildly that it had come to him that morning in the bathroom around eight o'clock, but since it was in his own time Warner had no right to it.

The writers had their own building on the studio lot, which made them feel like prisoners or animals in a zoo. Harry Cohn, the founding president of Columbia Pictures, would open his window and yell at them: “Writers! I don't hear your typewriters!” When his stentorian call was followed by an immediate clacking of keys he would shout even more loudly: “Liars!”

Norman is as good on the great days of the studio system as he is on more recent events, of which he has personal experience. Because he understands the tortuous manner in which the finance for most movies is raised, he writes about it in a highly entertaining but entirely believable style. His description of the production methods of Samuel Bronston and Philip Yordan, who made epics such as King of Kings and El Cid, is fascinating.

These films were shot in Spain with Franco's help because Spain wanted hard currency. Spanish trucks, ships and trains were exported to Yugoslavia, which had no cash but paid in pork, which was traded to Russia for oil, which went to Spain to be refined into petrol, the profits from which would end up as a subsidy for Bronston's below-the-line costs. The Spanish Army played Romans in King of Kings and Saracens in El Cid, and a good time was had by all.

Norman's brief ranges far and wide, well beyond the narrow confines of the writing of film scripts. He is not a historian, but he turns a neat phrase of which any historian might be proud. Writing about the influence of communism in the 1930s he notes that “Americans might not fathom Marx but they understood Robin Hood”. Any writer who has tried to sell a story about English history in Hollywood will smile and nod with approval.

There are occasional blips. The Supreme Court declared Roosevelt's NRA unconstitutional in 1935, not 1934, and the communists seized full power in China in 1949, not 1947. He is also unaware that recent research by film historians has discredited Jack Warner's attribution of his strong anti-Nazi stance to the supposed murder of the Warner Brothers' salesman in Berlin. But these are tiny reservations about a book that deserves to become a classic of its genre.

It is unfortunate that much of the history of Hollywood is composed of self-serving unreliable memoirs and misguided, unreadable academic treatises. What Happens Next is a shining example of what can be achieved with diligent research.

The final word should belong to Wilder, who in 1939, with Charles Brackett, then his partner, wrote the script of Ernst Lubitsch's brilliant Ninotchka. One of the preview cards read: “Great picture. Funniest film I ever saw. I laughed so hard I peed in my girlfriend's hand.” Aside from an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, it is hard to imagine a more satisfying response for a writer.

What Happens Next : A History of American Screenwriting by Marc Norman
Aurum, £18.99, 553pp

Times Recommends

• When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
• The Spare Room by Helen Garner
• Is Bertie Wooster the only fish-faced hero?