Hunter Thompson

[BFrank]

Anita was on C-SPAN a week or two ago speaking and taking questions in a bookstore.

[7/4]

June 29, 2008

Film

Fear and Loathing on a Documentary Screen

By DAVID CARR, NYT

HUNTER S. THOMPSON, who has been lionized in two feature films, served as the model for a running character in “Doonesbury” and is the subject of enough doctoral dissertations to build a bonfire, now has a documentary devoted to him, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” by Alex Gibney. Thompson, who always seemed to keep one drug-crazed eye on posterity behind his ever-present shades, would surely be pleased but not surprised.

But how to freshly document the life of a man who was his own Boswell, whose books and articles slavishly documented his own every tic, whoop and hallucination? A journalist who announced his arrival in American letters by riding with the Hells Angels and in the end choreographed a memorial from the grave that made the Burning Man bacchanal seem chaste?

Few writers have commodified narcissism so completely — his participatory style of journalism became its own genre and gives the film its title — but still we are invited to sit in the dark of the theater and have a flashback about his flashbacks. When the film opens on July 4, why will people, as Thompson would say, buy the ticket, take the ride?

The documentary by Mr. Gibney, who also made “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” does not attempt to work around Thompson’s endless self-consciousness but uses it as leverage instead. Produced by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and narrated by the actor Johnny Depp, “Gonzo” mirrors the subjectivity and immersion of the journalism Thompson and his trusty arsenal of psychoactive agents perpetrated in Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Mr. Gibney eschews narrative conventions and switches point of view on a dime, creating a prism of interviews and episodes that gradually assembles into a compelling portrait.

In his long-running fever dream about America and its abundant pathologies, the bald man, with the tumbler of whiskey and head full of Schedule 1 narcotics, captured not only a mood — your government is not your friend — but many realities of civic life, most notably that if candidates were willing to do what it takes to get elected, they would probably arrive in office corrupted beyond hope.

Thompson, whose defects of character could occupy a separate ZIP code, was not just an original, he was also a patriot and a romantic. Working from the far reaches of the culture and often lucidity, Thompson, who died in 2005 at 67, changed the way that much of America thought about itself, in part because his version of journalism threw a grenade at the bland convention of formal balance and straight reporting.

“I would argue that Hunter and Tom Wolfe are the two most original voices to come out of journalism in the last century, and it’s no coincidence that they both worked for Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone,” Mr. Carter said. “No one else was willing to push it that way, to take those risks.” Mr. Gibney’s documentary plays appropriate tribute by restricting its gaze to the nascent Thompson of the ’60s and early ’70s. By the time most of America knew who Thompson was, he was pretty much washed up, having gradually been overtaken by his own legend, with steady assists from the bottle, the drugs and his coven of enablers.

August men line up to pay their respects in the documentary — Patrick J. Buchanan, George McGovern, Jimmy Buffett, Gary Hart and Timothy Crouse, the author of the campaign memoir “The Boys on the Bus” — as do the women he loved. Both his first wife, Sandy, and second wife, Anita, testify to his courage and courtliness, in between pointing out that he could be mean as a snake and far less predictable. He broke through by covering a biker gang from the inside — he “rode with the Angels,” as Mr. Wolfe puts it in the film — and took a serious beat-down on the way out. Journalism, as practiced by Thompson, was not something for sissies.

It’s clear in the documentary that what became a sort of pillar of the so-called New Journalism — nonfiction writing that borrowed from the techniques of fiction writing — began at the Kentucky Derby, when Mr. Thompson ignored the race he was there to cover. “We had come to see the real beasts perform,” those in the stands, Mr. Depp says, reading an article over Ralph Steadman’s illustrations.

In 1971 Thompson went looking for the American dream while on assignment, and rather presciently he did what many tourists do today: He went to Las Vegas. “Gonzo” borrows a lot of footage from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” the 1998 film that stars Mr. Depp as Raoul Duke, the nom de persona of Thompson in the book of the same name.

Mr. Depp developed a lasting affiliation with his subject, and narrates much of Mr. Gibney’s documentary — in one instance while holding a six-shooter at the ready — with a bit of the rumble that made Thompson’s speaking voice distinctive as well. (The film also uses some scenes from “Where the Buffalo Roam,” the biopic starring Bill Murray.)

Stylistically the documentary combs the extensive archive of tapes, both audio and video, some made by Thompson familiars who spent time with him in his bunker at Woody Creek, Colo. The rest of the film uses standard talking heads and narration drawn mostly from Mr. Thompson’s two most celebrated books, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.”

“I wanted to have some fun in the film, because nobody really appreciated me trying to put laughs in ‘Taxi,’ ” Mr. Gibney said over breakfast this month at the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “It was too dark.”

Mr. Gibney said he thought of “Gonzo” as a bit of comic relief from “Taxi,” this year’s Oscar-winning documentary, which tells the story of an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by American soldiers while in extrajudicial detention at Bagram Air Base. But Mr. Gibney and Thompson are both known for driving big dump trucks of truth toward power.

“As a journalist Hunter never seemed to get trapped or hoodwinked into the phony balance,” said Mr. Gibney, who agreed to the documentary after being approached by Mr. Carter even though Mr. Gibney never met Thompson. As read by Mr. Depp in the film, Thompson suggests that objectivity was for suckers, a way to allow evil to triumph: “It was the built-in blind spots of the objective rule and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.”

Sometimes that subjectivity could slip into something less benign. In 1972, when he took it upon himself to attempt to drive the presidential candidate Edmund S. Muskie slowly insane, he suggested that Muskie was hooked on Ibogaine, an obscure Brazilian drug. Thompson had made it up and seemed surprised when others took the bait. Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of the McGovern presidential campaign, is seen in the film saying that that Mr. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing” book about the 1972 race, a collection of his articles for Rolling Stone, was “the least accurate and most truthful” account of the campaign.

That campaign proved to be the high-water mark of his career. Although Mr. Gibney is quick to say that Thompson wrote as he did in spite of the drugs and alcohol, the substances — hallucinogens for the vision, amphetamines to get it on the page, booze to take the edge off both — didn’t just beckon the muse, they were stamped into everything that eventually popped out. Always far past deadline of course. “Hunter could manufacture a crisis out of almost anything,” said Mr. Wenner, his friend and longtime editor at Rolling Stone. “He did amazing, amazing work, but it got to the point where it was hard for Hunter to travel, because of all the stuff he would need to take with him.”

There are extensive segments with Mr. Steadman, the long-suffering British illustrator and accomplice who could chronicle the internal and external demons Mr. Thompson spied everywhere. The poles of love and hate that characterize many great collaborations are clearly visible in the film.

As the documentary demonstrates, the bottom for the pair came when Mr. Thompson was assigned to cover the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Mr. Steadman explains in the film that in an act of enormous cocaine-assisted hubris (or perhaps fear that Mr. Ali, one of his heroes, was about to take a huge beating), Thompson gave away his tickets to the fight and went for a swim in the hotel pool. In doing so, he missed one of the greatest upsets in boxing history and, more important for a journalist, did not get the story.

By the accounts of many Thompson never recovered from that episode, gradually morphing into the character of Uncle Duke that Garry Trudeau introduced in “Doonesbury,” a cartoon figure who fired automatic weapons from his sun deck at apparitions and enemies that only he could see. He became the sum of his trademarks — the sunglasses, cigarette holder and inchoate rage — and ended up imprisoned by them.

“He was the master persona maker,” said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and friend of Thompson’s who serves as executor of the estate. “If Ernest Hemingway was going to go big-game hunting in Africa, Hunter wanted to use a submachine gun to hunt wild boar in Big Sur, Calif. He was dangerous, like handling nitroglycerin, and he liked to keep it that way.”

In the end everyone wanted to be around Thompson except Thompson. And on a bright winter day in Woody Creek, with his son in the house — Juan Thompson sardonically terms it a “warm family moment” in the film — he called his own bluff and blew his brains out.

He was infirm at the time, spending time in a wheelchair. Given his fundamental allergy to institutions like hospitals, his decision to set the terms of his exit is unsurprising.

“Hunter was very much one to share the pain when things went wrong, but he would share the glory as well,” said Anita Thompson, who married him in 2003. “He was a generous person, but he ended up surrounded by leeches and hanger-on-ers. It is the curse of fame.”

It is a curse that he embraced and held dear. The theatricality of his end, followed by a huge memorial in which his ashes were shot out of a cannon while people partied below, suggested that he understood his life as a kind of performance that required one final, deadly act. Throughout the film he speaks with such specificity about his legacy and its discontents that he seems to know he is speaking from the grave.

“I’m really in the way as a person,” he said. “The myth has taken over. I find myself an appendage. I’m no longer necessary. I’m in the way. It would be much better if I died. Then people could take the myth and make films.”

[7/4]

Documentary tells full story of Hunter S. Thompson

The filmmaker drew from a stash of recordings made by the man himself.

By Mark Olsen, LAT

July 3, 2008

OF COURSE, there were the drugs. And the drinking. And guns. And more drugs. Given his notorious lifestyle, it can be hard to keep in mind that Hunter S. Thompson was first and foremost a writer, a frontline chronicler of the promise and adventure of the 1960s and the burnout and aftermath of the 1970s.

The revitalization of Thompson's literary and cultural legacy is at the center of "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," the new documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. When he was drafted onto the project by producer Graydon Carter, Gibney says he was passingly familiar with Thompson's work but had never actually met the man himself, who took his own life in 2005.

"I wasn't going to be able to be the insider," Gibney recalls. "I was the outsider. But one of the things I could do that was valuable was to remind people how good the writing was. I think Hunter the character had overwhelmed Hunter the writer. Everybody knew him as this wild and crazy guy who just did lots of drugs, and had forgotten why they paid attention to him in the first place."

To create his portrait of the writer, Gibney drew from a wealth of sources, including Thompson's unpublished manuscripts, personal letters and photographs; interviews with his contemporaries and family members; and chunks of a 1978 BBC documentary -- which some might recognize as an extra on the DVD for the film adaptation of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

But to those steeped in Thompsonalia, the film's biggest get may be the audiotapes that came from Thompson's ever-present recorder. They include an excerpt from the recording of an out-of-control mid-'60s party at the Northern California ranch of writer Ken Kesey that was chronicled in Thompson's book "Hell's Angels" and Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

The stash of Thompson's vintage audio recordings was excavated by archivist Don Fleming, hired by Gibney to comb through the boxes and boxes of material Thompson had carefully organized before his death. (And yes, for those of a certain age, Don Fleming is the one and same who has been a member of such stalwart indie-rock outfits as the Velvet Monkeys.)

Thompson's archive "just totally blew our minds," Fleming says. "We were hoping to get a few tapes with him on it, but this was a whole different level than what we expected.

"Basically he recorded everything from '64 until he died. He never stopped. And they were all dated, they all had titles. It's not just random tapes, it's very deliberate. He certainly made a lot of written notes as well, there's a bunch of journals, but he really did use the cassette deck as a tool for the way he created his work. A lot of it shows up verbatim in the text of his books."

For Gibney, the challenge in focusing on Thompson, who is somehow both overexposed and underappreciated, was to create a film both for fans and neophytes, as well as a cleareyed tribute to that which will last. The words come before the myth.

"It's a story about an artist, a writer," Gibney says. "The lesson is there's a benefit to following your path and finding your own voice and being fearless. The other lesson is it gets very hard, when you have some success, to have any perspective on yourself. That's more a life lesson, but the artist lessons are don't be precious, think about the way the world works and find your own way through it."

[BruceH]

Maybe Hunter just couldn't take four more years of W.

Clem, F & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is a great read and too often overlooked in the shadows of LAS VEGAS, IMO.

Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 was the first Hunter Thompson book I ever read, in high school, before even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which I didn't get around to until college.) For ages it was my favorite Thompson, though I'm not certain how I'd like it now. But I agree, it is a bit overlooked.

[7/4]

I read it again a few years ago....strange book.

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