The Pat Hobby Stories

Fitzgerald is an author that does not need much introduction. Though most are familiar with his novels and his short stories from the Jazz Age, many do not know about his final years living in relative obscurity in Hollywood, where he took screen writing gigs due to his financial failure. Though only in his early forties, he had aged well past his years from the stress of making ends meet and trying to support Zelda, who at this point resided in an hospital in North Carolina due to emotional distress. So Fitzgerald did what he always did when he was short on cash– write stories. Pat Hobby is the quintessential portrait of a Hollywood hack: past his prime, incompetent, and with a veracious desire to please that verges on revolting. In these stories, some funny, some sad, you see a once promising youth spiral into oblivion, one that Fitzgerald similarly never returned from.

I love THE GREAT GATSBY and have read that and THIS SIDE OF PARADISE over two dozen times each. Both are masterpieces, but so are THE PAT HOBBY STORIES. The wit and satire, over 70 years later, are still fresh and perhaps more relevant than ever. Pat Hobby is a washed-out alcoholic screenwriter whose best days were before the "talkies." These stories will thrill and surprise you and make you laugh out loud. SOMEBODY needs to adapt this for a modern film. I'd love to do it, but I don't know who has the rights. Anyway, a wonderful book. Highly recommend. :)

F Scott Fitzgerald. Need I say more?

Great short stories, full of humor and 1930s Hollywood, by a great author

These stories about a has been screenwriter are much lauded by some, but there is a reason they are so forgotten. A product of Fitzgerald's last couple of years when he had fallen to being a second tier hack screenwriter at Universal, they are proof that he was not really capable of more near the end.The stories are of a comic nature with the main character of Pat Hobby serving as their punchline. Hobby is an unappealing self-pitying schlub of a character, and much of the humor is of a nasty and cartoonishly meanspirited variety. It all reads like warmed over Nathaniel West without the warmth or vivacity, it is genuine hack work. Fitzgerald may be a great writer but there is a reason that his reputation ends with the 1920s.

These stories are not up to F. Scott Fitzgerald's standards.

Thanks.

"Most writers look like writers whether they want to or not. It is hard to say why - for they model their exteriors whimsically on Wall Street brokers, cattle kings or English explorers - but they all turn out looking like writers, as definitely typed as 'The Public' or 'The Profiteers' in the cartoons."This collection of humorous stories would be 5 star if written by anyone else. F. Scott Fitzgerald has done so much better that I could only give this a 4 star.Pat Hobby is a 49 year old screen writer who has been in pictures for 19 years. He is on the outs with most of the studios and is lucky to get $250 a week and an office every once in awhile. These stories were written when Fitzgerald was trying to make a living at the studios so this is partially autobiographical, but mostly a satiric take of what working in Hollywood was like.My favorite stories are "Two Old Timers" and "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles".The Old Timers are Pat and Phil Macedon an aging film star, who have a car accident and get picked up and put in jail to check on their alcohol content. It's quite funny and displays the special treatment "movie stars" enjoyed in Hollywood.The Orson Welles story is very good. Welles at this time was known as the boy wonder and his arrival in Hollywood with a $150,000 paycheck was making screenwriters and studio heads worry over his changes to studios and movies themselves. Pat is having a tough time even getting on a studio to pitch a storyline so he gets talked into dressing like Orson and the reactions from people are hilarious.These stories are a great diversion and originally appeared in the 1940's in Esquire magazine. Pat is a very likeable character even if he was a bit of a drunk and slacker.

Granted how good the best of Scott Fitzgerald is, I was anxious to read The Pat Hobby Stories as well. I knew, of course, that they reflected his period in Hollywood. But having read them, I have to say that they are very slackly written, and throw nothing like the same light on Hollywood as, say, William Goldman's books. They don't have any great style, or insights, or surprises.

Needed for compilation of a course reading list. Delivered promptly. Remarkably inexpensive. Thank you.

Great

In questi brevi racconti troviamo uno Scott Fitzgerald forse minore, ma con una vena di amara ironia. Scritti nell'ultimo periodo della sua vita quando lo scrittore, ormai alcolizzato e misconosciuto, li vendeva per sbarcare il lunario.Narrano le avventure di Pat Hobby, un mediocre sceneggiatore, brevemente affermatosi nel periodo del cinema muto quando scriveva le didascalie e poi caduto nell'oblio, che cerca di arrangiarsi in tutti i modi per procurarsi dei lavoretti di scrittura presso gli studi cinematografici di Hollywood.Si intuiscono certi riferimenti autobiografici (Fitzgerald stesso fu sceneggiatore a Hollywood e con poca fortuna) nel tono di grottesca comicità che caratterizza questi racconti in cui il non più giovanissimo Pat Hobby cerca di tirare avanti girando per gli studios in cerca di lavoro e di idee e procurandosi umiliazioni, circondato da un insieme di personaggi cinici e ambigui: attori, produttori, registi, segretarie...

There's an urgency to the writing, where the story and only the story matters, as if delivered between drinks in some Hollywood bar. Obviously there's a 'pictorial' influence, a screenwriter's sense of scene, an oral sense of brevity rather than pretty verbal exposition. As an expose of life on the studio lot in the 1930s there is nothing to match these stories. As a 'writer', Hobby is a Falstaffian hustler who was 'big' in the silent era, and now struggles to get any screen credits at all in the talkies. Forty-nine years old and living from fantasy to fantasy -- often ripped off from some other wannabe sucker -- he lurches around the studio lot like a bit player from the silents trying to keep up to the relentless future. In fact, in one story he blunders into the middle of a live scene while trying to graft a loan from a producer and is then forced to wear a iron stunt vest and allow himself to be driven over by the star. Desperate for money, he agrees but the scene goes awry and he's left in a ditch all night trapped by his iron vest until rescued by a studio cop at dawn.Many screenwriters no doubt felt as if they were wearing an iron straight jacket as they laboured cruelly, tricked by easy promises and their own desperate optimism. Fitzgerald was definitely writing under such pressure in the three years before his death, recovering from his 'Crack-Up' period, struggling to find the cash to pay for his wife's medical quarantine, their daughter's school, and whatever it takes to pay for food and lodging.[quoted from my article, "F. Scott Fitzgerald: the last chapter", posted at culturecourt.com]