Let’s start with a few of the good doctor’s words:
“Outside my new front door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it.”
Pretty bucolic stuff from Hunter S. Thompson, the guy who famously invented “gonzo” journalism.
A jaunt a few sentences south gives us this: “When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life. . . . ”
So begins director Alex Gibney’s favorite Thompson work, the spectacular “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”
“It’s fantastic,” says the Oscar-winning filmmaker whose “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” opens today at the Esquire.
“And what was great about it for me was you hear all these names like Muskie and Humphrey and it feels so fresh and relevant today.”
The ’72 campaign was a battle among Democrats George McGovern, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie, to name but few, for the right to face incumbent Richard Nixon. It figures mightily in “Gonzo.”
“I did an interview a day, which was like having some sort of psychic whiplash,” Gibney recounts about the making of his documentary.” All morning I talked to George McGovern. All afternoon it was Pat Buchanan.”
The former struck a chord with Thompson, who tossed objectivity (as if his firm stance was ever that) as his coverage of the campaign marched forward. Buchanan, Nixon’s special assistant at the time, became a friend, too.
Buchanan makes for an unexpected and engaging interview. Others especially telling: Rolling Stone’s founder, Jann Wenner, and Thompson’s first wife, Sondi Wright. She reminds viewers of the writer’s destructive power and bursts any gas-filled notions that suicide is laudable. Thompson killed himself in 2005.
Gibney succeeds in making a bio- doc that tempers Thompson’s celebrity mystique with the very thing that made the Kentucky-born writer so remarkable in the first place: his deft, barbed and lyrical prose.
“We’d heard a lot about Hunter, the wild and crazy guy,” Gibney says. “And that was amusing and interesting. But I don’t think anyone would have cared how many drugs Hunter did if he hadn’t been such a great writer. It seemed to me that if we could highlight his writing, it would be great.”
There was a spell — 1965 to 1975 — when the writer was truly “in the zone,” says Gibney.
And this is the work he relied on.
It was a way, he says, “to have Hunter at the center of the story, telling his own life story through his letters, through his articles, through his books. He’d be this undependable narrator, but he’d be the entertaining, funny one who could write like hell.”
Johnny Depp, who portrayed Raoul Duke in Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” recites Thompson’s words. At one point, reading from the period in 1970 when Thompson ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, he absent-mindedly waves a six shooter in his hand.
In a gesture worthy of Thompson’s work ethic during his most robust years of hitting his IBM Selectric, Gibney was editing “Gonzo” while also cutting “Taxi to the Dark Side.” The dismaying documentary about Diliwar, an Afghan taxi driver handed over to U.S. forces and sent to prison at Bagram Air Force Base where he was killed, won the Academy Award in March.
“It was crazy,” admits Gibney of the grueling back and forth. “But in a funny way it helped me keep my sanity. ‘Taxi’ was so dark. It was useful and fun and necessary to go get a few laughs with Hunter. In addition I think the darkness of “Taxi” helped take Hunter’s stories to a dark place. It wasn’t unwarranted, it just reminded me that there was this dark side to Hunter. And Hunter understood there was a dark side in the American psyche, as well.”
Indeed, the best moments of “Gonzo” capture the pitiless tango between hope and disappointment that Thompson — a thinking, demanding patriot — experienced and suffered.
