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.
None of that is the stuff I find myself thinking about. Instead, it’s Hobby’s thoughts on adaptation – on the best way to turn a book or something else into a movie. His advice is fascinating. If it’s a book you’re adapting, don’t actually read the book. Instead, give the book to four friends and get them to read it. Then ask them what they remember of the book, and base your movie around those parts.
Fitzgerald is a maddening writer, and this is a really great example of why. I simply cannot work out if this is good advice or not. Obviously Hobby is an anti-hero, and written out like this it sounds like a comically bad idea. Don’t bother to read the book yourself? Just ask your pals to do all the work?
And yet, there’s something there, isn’t there? Kubrick always said that you needed five scenes for a movie – I think he called them “non-submersible units,” which is a very Kubrickian piece of terminology. And Hobby’s kind of getting at the same thing in his own lazy way. Faced with the intermittent vividness of something like The Great Gatsby, for example, I suspect Hobby’s approach would kind of work.