Wayne Ewing’s 2003 documentary Breakfast With Hunter is a portrait of a baffling cultural and literary presence that's truthful and respectful at the same time. In most instances, you might expect those two things to be mutually exclusive. But not always, and not in this case.
Shot over the course of 1996 through 1998, it covers the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the Modern Library edition, the 25th anniversary of the publication of Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72, the making of the movie version of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, some kind of Hunter Thompson Appreciation Day in Louisville and a DUI case with questionable evidentiary and procedural issues in Aspen.
I’ve been a fan of Doctor Thompson’s work for about 30 years. I was 14 when I first read Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which knocked me out, and not because of the drug intake or the any of the reasons people usually seem to glom onto Thompson’s work — many of them the same reasons you’d expect a 14-year-old boy to get a kick out of it. It was the writing: the vivid, visceral impact and poetry of the words. But it made its point without any kind of tenderness or sentimentality. By the time Raoul Duke staggers into some kind of redemption, it’s filthy and tattered; ragged and compromised, and it only counts as redemption because it’s mere survival . . . which doesn’t seem like much. But when destruction is the only other alternative, survival looks like victory. The impact of that book was visceral and cerebral all at once. Who didn’t want to drive to Las Vegas after reading that book, with or without the alcohol, drugs, disruptive intention and burning outrage?
And I guess a lot of people didn’t need more than that book. Not me. I had to read everything, of course, starting with Hell’s Angels and right on through everything else — the Rolling Stone work, all the collected stuff in The Great Shark Hunt and as much as I could find outside of the hardcover offerings, including things that hadn’t been collected at that point — the 1967 piece for the New York Times Magazine about Haight-Ashbury, for example, along with everything else listed in the bibliography of works in the back of Shark Hunt. There was also the Craig Vetter Playboy interview . . . from 1974, I think, while Thompson was still riding high following Campaign Trail ’72.
One of the things that all that reading confirmed was what a tremendous reporter Thompson was, and, I guess, what an excellent reporter he still is, although there seems to be a lot less reporting now than there used to be; it’s not something he does as much now. And even when he was reporting, there was always a clearly defined point of view. But the stuff for the National Observer from all over South America offers one example after another of deep insight and the kind of understanding that can only be gained from going to a place and talking to the people there, as well as really working hard to analyze everything you see and hear, as well as working to synthesize it with a lot of other knowledge and wisdom. As he’s said, he became a journalist because it was a way for somebody who wanted to be a writer to earn a living. And Thompson was a writer from a very early age. As he says in Ewing’s film, it was the only thing he knew he could do that wasn’t against the law. And now that The Rum Diary has been published some forty years after it was written, maybe somebody will publish Prince Jellyfish, since the excerpt of it that was in Songs of the Doomed shows it to be polished, evocative and finely wrought. And if they could published The Neon Bible, which John Kennedy Toole wrote when he was sixteen . . . and then make a movie out of it, well why not Prince Jellyfish? Unlike a lot of other fiction I stagger through these days, once I got to the end of the excerpt, I wanted to read more. I don’t know if that’s the novel he was working on in that cabin in Cuddebackville in upstate New York, after being fried from the Middletown Daily Record or not. But given the quality of work in the two volumes of letters, The Rum Diary and just about everything else (with the exception of Better Than Sex, which is a low point and may be nothing more than a day-late-dollar-short effort to keep lawyers and contracts from crushing him — I don’t know) that’s come out of his typewriter and/or pen, I’d be happy to see everything he’s ever written collected and/or published properly. He’s written at a very high level from the get-go: his membership in Louisville’s literary society, for one thing, in addition to the well-documented practice of writing out pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald prose as part of an effort to understand their techniques and “rhythms.”
The writing’s all been vivid, and because of that it’s easy to see why there’s been a drive to bring it to the screen. But that’s been as fraught as his Thompson’s publishing history (especially as detailed in Fear and Loathing In America, the second volume of letters.) Part of the problem with the movie work, though, seems to have been — as in a lot of other places and times, and with a lot of other people — confusing the author with the work; Thompson has probably had more trouble and more well-meaning stupidity perpetrated on his behalf by people who thought they were doing him a favor than just about any other writer I can think of. Well, Hemingway, maybe. But even that’s a stretch.
First, there Where The Buffalo Roam, in which Bill Murray does a reasonably good Thompson imitation, but which is more of a caricature that serves the demands — such as they are — of the picture’s lousy screenplay. Murray only has to be a caricature because that’s all the Thompson character is in Buffalo. The picture’s rotten script made no sense and must have pissed off anybody who’d read any of the books or any of Thompson’s work. Whichever coke-addled blowdog wrote the screenplay had taken the least salient aspects of a dozen passages from Thompson’s writing, mashed them together with adulterated, clumsily fictionalized anecdotes from Thompson’s life, and then torqued everything even further for reasons that can’t even be guessed at. Did it seem as though Thompson’s life and work lacked drama, or as though the material required hyping or punching up? The point in Buffalo where Thompson encounters Richard Nixon in a hotel bathroom is a confluence of two incidents: one in Campaign Trail ’72 where Thompson is in Manchester, New Hampshire for that state’s Democratic primary and happens to look up from a urinal in a men’s room (maybe at the Exeter Inn, but I’m not going to look it up right now) and finds senator George McGovern at the next urinal, and the second is a story about Richard Nixon from 1968 (also in New Hampshire, which is the only thing the two stories have in common) in which Thompson is pressed into service to take a car trip with Nixon because “the boss” wants to relax and talk football and Thompson is the only person who knows anything about the subject. The passage occurs in a magazine story about Nixon’s recasting himself yet again in order to serve his monumental — some would say monstrous — political ambition. It’s in Shark Hunt. And both cases are in their respective original places for very specific narrative reasons. In the first instance, Thompson is trying to demonstrate the lack of artifice and expectation around McGovern and his campaign at the beginning of the 1972 primary season (everybody was certain Ed Muskie was going to prevail and that McGovern would be a footnote, at best). The Nixon story comes at a point where Thompson has become convinced that there is nothing to Nixon except ambition. There are no ideals or philosophy or beliefs or goals, except to get elected. Talking about football with him humanizes him unexpectedly, and one of the things the sequence does is to (a) demonstrate that Nixon is not evil, and (b) what politics and lust for power can do to people. To mash those two things together in that preposterous sequence in Buffalo is just idiotic, which is just one of the reasons the movie didn’t — and doesn’t — work: the entire picture is a string of those kinds of false, hollow skits, crude cartoons that would satisfy only people who’d read Las Vegas and missed its point . . . and probably not even them.
It’s easy to see why nobody went near anything else with Thompson’s name on it for 20 years. The stench of Buffalo would have been enough to keep even the most stouthearted, determined Thompson fanatics away from his work.
Not that other people weren’t still trying to make it happen. There’s a sequence in Breakfast where Alex Cox and a screenwriter visit Thompson to talk about their vision for the thing and we watch the project fall apart because they want to depict the metaphor of the wave of the 1960s San Francisco cultural foment breaking literally, and to conflate it with Thompson’s aborted escape midway through the story: They want to have him go to the airport after the Fabulous Mint 400, get on a plane and then get hit by an actual wave instead of trying to drive back to Los Angeles and getting stopped by the cop. Thompson accuses them — rightly — of turning something he considers poetry into a cartoon. As the argument escalates, it becomes clearer that Cox and his cohort are really a lot more interested in making an animated version of Ralph Steadman’s drawings for the book than the book itself. Thompson kicks them out of his house, calls the producer trying to put the movie together and barks threats at her.
It’s good he prevailed, because Terry Gilliam did a terrific job making the movie. The only part that didn’t make any sense was the Gary Busey come-on in the mid-story cop sequence. But everything else was so faithful to the work and did such a good job of translating it that it’s possible to forgive that lapse, tiny as it is. And all the sequences in the documentary illustrate perfectly the weird oxymoron that working with Thompson must be: he's passionate in defending his work, passionate in a way we would hope anybody committed to their work would be. But there are also quirks that make you think about what it must mean to be Thompson's collaborator or editor or co-conspirator and think how tough that job must be.
One of the excellent supplements on the Breakfast With Hunter DVD is a two-part conversation between Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke. At one point in the first half of the conversation, O’Rourke asks Thompson about how he feels about his influence — specifically the negative aspects of it, about the thousands of godawful pages of derivative garbage scribbled by the countless scores of Thompson fans who have tried to write like him. Thompson — rightly — won’t take the blame for other people’s bad writing, although he’s clearly aware of it. Hell, a lot of that bad writing has probably been forced on him, mailed to him, faxed or pushed at him at book signings. The second part of the interview is O’Rourke’s reading the end of Fear and Loathing, with Raoul Duke reeling through the airport, yelling at Marines and ending with his description of himself as “a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.”
You come away from Ewing’s movie with a much better idea of who Thompson is and what he’s like to deal with. The three biographies didn’t really get that across as well: one didn’t bother trying; one was just an agglomeration of interview transcripts. Peter Whitmer’s book came closest. But in this movie, you can see that Hunter Thompson is who he is, was who he was long before he was made to join the Air Force to avoid jail, was who he was through all the later adulation and the early years of anonymity and struggle. Go back and read “Burial At Sea” and everything’s there: all the elements of his worldview, the distinguishing characteristics of his prose; his style, basically. Read through the letters — particularly those in the first volume, Proud Highway and it’s all there, too.
The nickel-a-throw cheap-and-easy psychological explanation probably has something to do with mistrust of the world, being angry at it and not wanting to get too close to it for a lot of reasons that make sense for the writing and the making of art, but which must always have made Dr. Thompson very tough to get along with for anybody who had to do that regularly — his friends, family, co-workers and others. But for every kind of cheap scolding a person could come up with, citing Thompson’s deviation from social norms and niceties, you have to ask yourself about what modifying his conduct would have meant for his work, because over the course of the picture, Ewing makes it clear that it’s all part of a single package, that you can’t get the poetry and the outrage and the insight without the outrageousness . . . or, if you prefer, the “special requirements.” It’s not as though the brilliance is an excuse for the behavior, but at least some of the people with whom Thompson has clashed or closed to struggled must have felt it was worth it, since they’ve continued to publish his work and to encourage him to do what he does . . . which means, of course, being who he is . . . for good or ill, as the doctor himself might say. And thank God for that. The movie is a fascinating portrait and a real through-provoking piece of work for anybody who’s ever enjoyed Thompson’s work for any reason, right or wrong.
