We are in the midst of technicalities.

‘The trouble is this composer Reginald de Koven didn’t have any colour,’ said Dick Dale. ‘He wasn’t deaf like Beethoven or a singing waiter or get put in jail or anything. All he did was write music and all we got for an angle is that song O Promise Me. We got to weave something around that — a dame promises him something and in the end he collects.’

‘I want time to think it over in my mind,’ said Pat. ‘If Jack Berners will put me on the picture —’

‘He’ll put you on,’ said Dick Dale. ‘From now on I’m picking my own writers. What do you get — fifteen hundred?’ He looked at Pat’s shoes, ‘Seven-fifty?’

Pat stared at him blankly for a moment; then out of thin air, produced his best piece of imaginative fiction in a decade.

‘I was mixed up with a producer’s wife,’ he said, ‘and they ganged up on me. I only get three-fifty now.’

In some ways it was the easiest job he had ever had. Director Dick Dale was a type that, fifty years ago, could be found in any American town. Generally he was the local photographer, usually he was the originator of small mechanical contrivances and a leader in bizarre local movements, almost always he contributed verse to the local press. All the most energetic embodiments of this ‘Sensation Type’ had migrated to Hollywood between 1910 and 1930, and there they had achieved a psychological fulfilment inconceivable in any other time or place. At last, and on a large scale, they were able to have their way. In the weeks that Pat Hobby and Mabel Hatman, Mr Dale’s script girl, sat beside him and worked on the script, not a movement, not a word went into it that was not Dick Dale’s coinage. Pat would venture a suggestion, something that was ‘Always good’.

‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute!’ Dick Dale was on his feet, his hands outspread. ‘I seem to see a dog.’ They would wait, tense and breathless, while he saw a dog.

‘Two dogs.’

A second dog took its place beside the first in their obedient visions.

‘We open on a dog on a leash — pull the camera back to show another dog — now they’re snapping at each other. We pull back further — the leashes are attached to tables — the tables tip over. See it?’

Or else, out of a clear sky.

‘I seem to see De Koven as a plasterer’s apprentice.’

‘Yes.’ This hopefully.

‘He goes to Santa Anita and plasters the walls, singing at his work. Take that down, Mabel.’ He continued on . . .

In a month they had the requisite hundred and twenty pages. Reginald de Koven, it seemed, though not an alcoholic, was too fond of ‘The Little Brown Jug’. The father of the girl he loved had died of drink, and after the wedding when she found him drinking from the Little Brown Jug, nothing would do but that she should go away, for twenty years. He became famous and she sang his songs as Maid Marian but he never knew it was the same girl.

The script, marked ‘Temporary Complete. From Pat Hobby’ went up to the head office. The schedule called for Dale to begin shooting in a week.

Twenty-four hours later he sat with his staff in his office, in an atmosphere of blue gloom. Pat Hobby was the least depressed. Four weeks at three-fifty, even allowing for the two hundred that had slipped away at Santa Anita, was a far cry from the twenty cents he had owned on the shoeshine stand.

‘That’s pictures, Dick,’ he said consolingly. ‘You’re up — you’re down — you’re in, you’re out. Any old-timer knows.’

‘Yes,’ said Dick Dale absently. ‘Mabel, phone that E. Brunswick Hudson. He’s on his New England farm — maybe milking bees.’

In a few minutes she reported.

‘He flew into Hollywood this morning, Mr Dale. I’ve located him at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.’

Dick Dale pressed his ear to the phone. His voice was bland and friendly as he said:

............