There’s a moment in one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories that I think about quite a lot. Pat Hobby’s a character Fitzgerald came up with when he was knocking about Hollywood and trying to make money writing for the movies. As a result, Hobby is a somewhat desiccated scriptwriter himself. Over the course of a handful of lightly sketched narratives, Hobby loses jobs, squanders opportunities and gets in at least one fight with Orson Welles.
