Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on a Hack Screenwriter)

“[Screenwriter] Pat [Hobby] was forty-nine. He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the 'originals' he worked from, because it made his head bang to read much. But the good old silent days you got somebody's plot and a smart secretary and gulped benzedrine 'structure' at her six or eight hours every week. The director took care of the gags. After talkies came he always teamed up with some man who wrote dialogue. Some young man who liked to work.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “A Man in the Way,” in The Pat Hobby Stories (1962)

My favorite writer—the man whose most famous work even inspired the title of this blog—was born on this date in 1896. F. Scott Fitzgerald is not generally known for his humor, but even his most tragic fiction often brims with delicious irony, and in his stories about Pat Hobby he mined his time as a screenwriter for the most sustained amount of satire of his all-too-short two-decade career

At best, Fitzgerald’s view of Hollywood was ambivalent: While he saw motion pictures as an exciting new art form, he couldn’t help feeling that his employment as a screenwriter was a comedown from his heyday as a well-paid short-story writer, not to mention his bestselling debut as a novelist, This Side of Paradise.  

Nevertheless, though the circumstances that brought Fitzgerald west (notably, the need to pay for wife Zelda’s mental care) were desperate, he was able to use his fictional Hobby as a release from his pain. No matter how craven he might have felt, in other words, Hobby was arguably worse: alcoholic and in deep financial straits like his creator, but older and far more willing to cringe and compromise. 

Writing for Arnold Gingrich, who as the new editor of Esquire could not pay Fitzgerald anything close to the payments he could receive for his stories from the Saturday Evening Post, the Great Gatsby creator ended up writing about Hobby in 17 tales altogether published in 1940 and 1941. Along with his stories on Basil Duke Lee, much more of a alter ego, this would be his only collection revolving around a particular character.

The Pat Hobby Stories have none of the incandescent nostalgia of “The Last of the Belles” or the hard-won sobriety of “Babylon Revisited,” but they offer a lighter take on the Hollywood Dream Factory than what Fitzgerald was attempting to create in what promised to be a masterpiece at the time of his death, The Last Tycoon.