“[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.
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