Hunter S. Thompson of Film
At the top of the mountain,
we are all snow leopards.
In many ways, Hunter S. Thompson was to the late 1960s and 1970s what William S. Burroughs was to the 1950s.
A number of actors, directors, writers, journalists, and politicians speak about the impact of Hunter S. Thompson and clips from interviews with Thompson also appear.
Some of my favorite commentaries include:
In the labyrinth that America became in the '60s and '70s, Hunter S. Thompson just might have been at the center. And in a way, that center still holds. Straddling the worlds of journalism and literature, politics and rock and roll, sports and film, Thompson found himself at the intersection of some interesting times. But interesting times are the oldest of curses and mazes have monsters in them, too. Eventually the permanent address for the good doctor became Owl Farm at Woody Creek, Colorado. A literary salon and a firing range.
~narrator Nick Nolte
Open letter to the youth of America, 1955
Oh youth of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and harken to all of the future! Do you realize that you are rapidly becoming a doomed generation? Do you realize that the fate of the world and of generations to come rests on your shoulders? ...Oh ignorant youth, the world is not a joyous place. The time has come for you to dispense with the frivolous pleasures of childhood and get down to honest toil until you are sixty-five. Then and only then can you relax and collect your social security and live happily until the time of your death. -signed fearfully and disgustedly, yours, John J. Righteous Hypocrite
~prophetic words by Hunter S. Thompson as read by a childhood friend
It was a beautiful rural location [Thompson's Owl Farm] where Hunter could get away with a lot of stuff he couldn't do downtown. Like target practice, blowing up dynamite, blowing up cars. Hunter got a big rush out of putting a half a case of duPont dynamite, 25 pounds of black powder, five gallons of gasoline inside an old Jeep Cherokee and blowing it 300 feet in the air. You can't do that across the street here.
~sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado
The word is "gonzo." It helped push Hunter Thompson into prominence. And it dogged him to the very end. He created a character, an attitude, a voice, and arguably, a genre to deploy it, an audience to enjoy it, and an entire air to go along with it. In a pivotal moment in the American experience, he minted sentence after sentence that were more furious, funny, and just plain fast than anything else you could get. Many of us discovered him in Roling Stone magazine where Thompson formed a fruitful but combative relationship with editor Jann Wenner.
~narrator Nick Nolte
I think he was a beacon for dissent throughout his whole life. He was a place people could turn to get a moral argument from an immoral outlaw.
~John Cusack
For years I regarded Nixon's very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes to corrupt the American dream. He was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except may a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the levers on the voting machine.
~William F. Buckley reading (with a smirk) from Thompson's Presenting the Richard Nixon Doll
Just as Hunter Thompson intuited the last days of the '60s as the end of the beginning, something about the late '70s must have felt like the beginning of the end. In Hunter Thompson had always been a movie waiting to happen. Released in 1980, Where the Buffalo Roam appropriates the life of one Hunter S. Thompson from the campaign trail to the Super Bowl. Hunter's hottest property to this point was himself.
~narrator Nick Nolte
Hunter Thompson never acted his age a day in his life. He was born old and he remains forever young. "Buy the ticket," he once counseled, "take the ride. But the ticket costs more all the time. And the ride gets a little slower. A little shorter every year."
~narrator Nick Nolte
Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, Benicio del Toro, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Wolfe, Ed Bradley, Gary Hart, Leonard Maltin, George McGovern, and many others are also interviewed.
Excerpts from films made from his works include Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas and Where the Buffalo Roam.
Directed by Tom Thurman. Made for Starz TV.
This film would have been better without the brainless prima dona Gary Busey's attempt to direct the interviewer. Looks like he was having yet another of his many gonzo actor moments. But otherwise this was an interesting insight into HST.
Run time: 1 hour, 13 minutes.
My personal rating: B-
