Fitzgerald’s Hollywood ‘Player’ : Story of a screenwriting hack has been adapted for the stage--sound stage that is

Hollywood has recently been seen from two scathing perspectives: “Barton Fink” and “The Player.” But have you heard of Pat Hobby, a literary lowlife and theater’s latest hustler, whom the movies ignored?

Hobby, an ironically humorous creation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, works on the lots, too, but he’s no Barton Fink, and he’s certainly not a Player. He’s really closer to Movieland’s flummery: a pure hack, a fool, a schemer and a horseplayer who drinks too much, often has trouble getting past the studio guard and hates to write.

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. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “A Man in the Way,” 1940).

And what better place to dramatize Fitzgerald’s “Pat Hobby Stories,” written during the author’s last struggling years in Hollywood, than on a Hollywood sound stage of ghosts past?

Those stories, originally published in Esquire magazine during 1940 and ‘41, have re-emerged as a play, “The Hobbywood Canteen,” produced under the aegis of young filmmakers who call themselves Utopia Ltd. and who have fashioned the latest twist on environmental theater. Noah Stern, 28, wrote the show and is directing it.

He discovered Pat Hobby while browsing through the library stacks his senior year at the University of Illinois and understood that no conventional stage would do for this hapless, lovable screenwriting hack.

So he and energetic co-producer Yalda Tehranian (who’s an assistant to production chief Michael Nathanson at Columbia Studios) turned their network of connections into a deal to rent a sound stage at the storied Culver Studios in Culver City, where “Gone With the Wind,” “Citizen Kane” and “ET” were produced.

The play isn’t the first to use a movie studio sound stage. Ray Bradbury has done it and so have others, but never with the aptness of “Hobbywood Canteen,” which cries for a studio setting.

The show, which adapts four of the “Hobby” stories, explores a tricky structural updating to make them pertinent to Hollywood today. The linkage of the piece is that Tinseltown’s manners and mores change, but nothing else does.

Even more apt than a historic sound stage for “Hobbywood” is Stern’s behavioral affinity to Pat Hobby himself (who is played by Paul Wininger, a recent master of fine arts graduate from UCLA). In fact, Stern, a dark, gangly sort who resembles Tiny Tim, crashed his way into the sanctums of Hollywood studios just the way Pat Hobby did. He conned his way in.

Initially, he was just lucky, doing what many have done, using jobs on the trades to leapfrog into studio jobs.

“I parlayed a writing job on a Chicago trade publication (Screen Magazine) into a production assistant’s job to Martin Scorsese, who was on location in Chicago shooting ‘The Color of Money.’ Then I met director Ed Zwick on the Chicago set of ‘About Last Night’ and asked him the best way to crack Hollywood.

“He said, ‘Write a script.’ I did. I didn’t sell it, but I did come to Hollywood.” Stern’s screen credits have since included the screenplay for Janet Jackson’s Grammy-award winning “Rhythm Nation” music video and the soon-to-be released “Rules of the Game” and “Pyrates,” with Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick.

But before that, he worked in the mail room at Samuel Goldwyn Studios, drove a truck for UCLA and then learned how to play the game Hobbywood-style.

“I spotted a classified ad for a script reader wanted at Fox. It was a job for producer Gale Hurd, and her office asked if I had ever done any script coverage. I lied and said I had.

“ ‘Will you send over some of your coverage?’ they said.”

Without blinking, and inspired by the revered Pat Hobby, Stern, an English major at Illinois, manufactured his own script coverage, taking a handful of recent movies and writing what he imagined screenplay analysis to be. A fast learner, he was hired immediately.

And he turned out to be perfect for the job, getting elevated to head story editor under producer Hurd. Again, as if under a Hobby-like curse, Hurd’s production company didn’t have enough space at Fox for Stern, so he was shunted outside.

“I actually had to work outside their offices in a corridor,” Stern said with a laugh.

Then another fickle finger of fate: “The Writer’s Guild strike came along in 1988, and I lost my job. This time I went to work writing scripts for myself.”

Said Wininger, who plays Hobby in four time periods, from the ‘30s through the ‘90s, and who starred in Stern’s first stage production here of David Mamet’s “Frog Prince” (staged in the Chaplin Space, Charles Chaplin’s old rehearsal space, in the Hollywood Hills’ Whitley Heights): “We were sitting around last summer brainstorming about projects, and suddenly Noah came up with Pat Hobby, who didn’t mean much to the rest of us.”

Stern, surprisingly, received the rights with no fuss and at modest cost from Fitzgerald’s estate, the New York-based Harold Ober & Associates, who were Fitzgerald’s last agents. They only asked to see the play before granting approval.

For Stern and his young colleagues, these are the golden days.

Stern proudly pointed to the Hollywood memorabilia dotting his set for “Hobbywood Canteen”: “See those arc lamps? They’re from old ‘I Love Lucy’ shows, and the letters over there on the desktop are the actual letters used as props in ‘Prince of Tides.’ ”

And when those lights go up, the first sound you hear is. . .

The clack-clack of typing. . .

And then Fitzgerald’s narrative voice takes over:

Fade in. . . Interior. . . The writers building. . . A studio lot, Hollywood. . . Tinseltown. . . The Dream Factory. . .

My name is Pat Hobby and I’m a screenwriter. . . .

Meanwhile, across the city, at the Tiffany Theatre on the Sunset Strip, Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age wife, Zelda, is the subject of her own show, “Zelda: The Last Flapper.”

What a theatrical summer it’s turned out to be for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who many thought was dead.