Pat Hobby and Orson Welles

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hot on the heels of David Fincher's Mank, a hotly disputed retelling of the origins of Citizen Kane, we explore F. Scott Fitzgerald's own take on the rise of Orson Welles. In the final year of his life, without income from Hollywood studios or loans from his longtime agent, Harold Ober, Fitzgerald supported himself by cranking out seventeen short stories about the Hollywood hack Pat Hobby, which he sold to Arnold Gingrich's Esquire for $250 each. (Five of the stories appeared posthumously). The most historically interesting of the series is May 1940's "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles," which pokes fun at Old Hollywood's fear and trepidation at the arrival in Tinseltown of the wunderkind notorious for his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. Fitzgerald's story appeared in print just as Herman Mankiewicz completed a 267-page doorstop draft called American, which Welles shortly shaped into a withering assault on William Randolph Hearst that ensured we would never hear the name "Rosebud" the same way again. The filmmaker that the hapless scrapper Pat Hobby must contend with has thus not yet made the most celebrated movie in American cinema. Rather, Welles is known for the extravagant contract RKO offered him in 1939, including a $150,000 salary and authority over the final cut. Strangely enough, what gossip columnists are most curious about is the boy wonder's newly grown beard, which threatens old-timers like Pat as much as the changes to the studio system his arrival augurs. As we discuss the legacy of the Pat Hobby stories and their relationship to The Love of the Last Tycoon, the Hollywood novel left incomplete by Fitzgerald's premature death in December 1940, we debate auteur theory, the Hollywood production process that Fitzgerald at once loathed and idealized through his adoration of Irving Thalberg, and the creative parallels that have saddled Fitzgerald, Welles, and Mankiewicz with the troublesome label "genius."