"I had turned 40 and I was unhappy and I wanted to write about that. Dating just became the framework…" It was the early 90’s, and actor Tom Noonan was at a dinner party when he heard a story about a man invited to a woman's home for dinner.  In the middle of dinner, he asked, "Is this a date?”  Noonan quickly excused himself from the party and got to work on his first feature film, What Happened Was…, apparently writing 75 percent of the script in 3 days.  After playing a number of mainstream parts, including the lead villains in Robocop 2 and Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero, Noonan was able to finance the film.  Before going to camera, he directed and starred in the two-hander on stage for 6 weeks with his theatre company in NYC.  The film was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Gene Siskel raved, "One of my favourite films of the year! I've always felt there was a great film to be made out of a first date... Now I've seen it! It's superb!”  To this day What Happened Was… remains a cult classic. 

Tom Noonan is a well-known actor, writer, and director.  His work in theatre began with the role of Tilden in the original Off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child.  He founded the Paradise Factory theatre in NYC in 1983, which became an incubator for developing plays and films.  His big break into film came when he famously played the serial killer in Michael Mann’s Manhunter.  The lanky (6’5”) soft-spoken actor went on to build an impressive career playing oddball characters in film and television (Mystery Train, The Pledge, House of the Devil, Synecdoche, New York, Louie, and an acclaimed episode of The X-Files written especially for him by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan).  His directorial debut, What Happened Was…, made him a  fixture in the arthouse scene.  He has written and directed two other feature films (The Wife, The Shape of Something Squashed), and his more recent work can be seen on 12 Monkeys, Horace and Pete, and Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, in which he voices the roles of “Everyone else.”