Gonzo but Not Forgotten

A chat with Hunter S. Thompson documentarian Alex Gibney

by Sam Adams

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Hunter S. Thompson's jagged-edge prose isn't most people's idea of an anti-stress agent, but when you're spending half your time making a documentary about torture, even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes as a welcome respite.

At the same time he was finishing Taxi to the Dark Side, which won an Oscar earlier this year for its eye-opening investigation of torture at U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan, Alex Gibney was editing his new doc, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Although he was working on the films in separate rooms, they inevitably came to influence each other. "Hunter got a useful dose of the dark side," Gibney says over coffee in Philadelphia, "and I desperately needed relief from the misery that Taxi presented."

Both films reflect Gibney's interest in the corruptions of power and the crusading journalists who uncover them. Due in part to Ralph Steadman's pop-eyed illustrations, Thompson lives in the popular imagination as a drug-addled caricature, a mad scribbler filing dispatches from the vilest reaches of the American empire.

Part of Gibney's project was to reclaim Thompson from his own self-created myth, and to distinguish him at his incendiary best from the flagging inspiration of his later days. "Nobody would have cared if he took all these drugs and drank all the time if he hadn't been a great writer at some point," he says.

But Gibney presents Thompson as a journalist as well as a crank, pointing to his coverage of the '72 Democratic convention. Thompson ignored the rules of off-the-record conversations and the pretense of objectivity, which Gibney sees crippling much of today's media. When he started Gonzo, "It seemed like the press were getting snookered, in part because they were being forced to play by rules that were increasingly to the advantage of the rich and powerful. So I thought, 'Wouldn't it be interesting to look at someone who didn't play by those rules?'"

Gonzo openly laments the lack of an heir to Thompson's throne, but Gibney takes solace in the satire of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. "They use humor in an angry way, to skewer the powerful," he says. "They say, 'Look, he's lying,' and they laugh at that. I like that."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse. See review on p. 31.