Pat Hobby could always get on the lot. He had worked there fifteen years on and off — chiefly off during the past five — and most of the studio police knew him. If tough customers on watch asked to see his studio card he could get in by phoning Lou, the bookie. For Lou also, the studio had been home for many years.

Pat was forty-nine. 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. But the good old silent days you got somebody’s plot and a smart secretary and gulped¹ benzedrine ‘structure’ at her six or eight hours every week. The director took care of the gags. After talkies came he always teamed up with some man who wrote dialogue. Some young man who liked to work.

‘I’ve got a list of credits second to none,’ he told Jack² Berners. ‘All I need is an idea and to work with somebody who isn’t all wet.’

He had buttonholed Jack outside the production office as Jack was going to lunch and they walked together in the direction of the commissary.

‘You bring me an idea,’ said Jack Berners. ‘Things are tight. We can’t put a man on salary unless he’s got an idea.’

‘How can you get ideas off salary?’ Pat demanded — then he added hastily: ‘Anyhow I got the germ of an idea that I could be telling you all about at lunch.’

Something might come to him at lunch. There was Baer’s notion about the boy scout³. But Jack said cheerfully:

‘I’ve got a date for lunch, Pat. Write it out and send it around, eh?’

He felt cruel because he knew Pat couldn’t write anything out but he was having story trouble himself. The war had just broken out and every producer on the lot wanted to end their current stories with the hero going to war. And Jack Berners felt he had thought of that first for his production.

‘So write it out, eh?’

When Pat didn’t answer Jack looked at him — he saw a sort of whipped misery⁴ in Pat’s eye that reminded him of his own father. Pat had been in the money before Jack was out of college — with three cars and a chicken over every garage. Now his clothes looked as if he’d been

分享到：