Dobbs's earliest work in the film industry was as a child actor in The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972), a short film that was the last collaboration between director Michael Powell and the screenwriter/producer Emeric Pressburger.
In 1979, Dobbs wrote Edward Ford, an original screenplay that remains unproduced. Critic Matthew Dessem has called the script "famously brilliant, famously unproduced", and asserts that "most of Hollywood" agrees it is a "masterpiece". On the basis of another unproduced screenplay, The Marvel of the Haunted Castle, Dobbs was hired to rewrite Diane Thomas's screenplay for Romancing the Stone (1984), though his contributions went uncredited.
Following that film's success, several films based on Dobbs's screenplays were produced: Hider in the House (1989), The Hard Way (1991), Kafka (1991), which Dobbs wrote in the 1970s, and The Limey (1999). He was also credited as co-writer on Dark City (1998), The Score (2001), and Haywire (2012), an action-thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh (who also directed Kafka and The Limey).

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