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Truths About Gonzo Unfold On New DVD

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By CURTIS ROSS

cross@tampatrib.com

Published: November 23, 2008

For Hunter S. Thompson, the truth was more important than the facts.

"There was a tension in his writing between straightforward reporting and wild flights of fancy," says Alex Gibney, director of the documentary "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson."

After a limited theatrical release this summer, the film was released Tuesday on DVD.

That tension was there regardless of what Thompson was covering, even a presidential campaign.

The book "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" seamlessly mixes factual accounts of the campaign with bizarre claims about Sen. Edmund Muskie being addicted to an exotic hallucinogen.

Frank Mankiewicz, manager for Sen. George McGovern's 1972 campaign, called it "the most accurate, least factual" account of the race.

Gibney, who received an Oscar nomination for his 2005 documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," took it as his brief when creating "Gonzo."

"I'm a big believer that form follows content," Gibney says.

Thompson's approach, he says, gave him the "license to move between fiction and fact, to not always be factual but be accurate."

Like Thompson's writings, "Gonzo" moves effortlessly between straight documentary and more fanciful approaches. Actors re-create scenes based on Thompson's audiotapes. Faces of people in a crowd morph into reptiles. Thompson types away as scenes from the war on terror unfold outside his window.

Gibney also uses scenes from Thompson's television appearances, including a particularly priceless shot on "To Tell the Truth." ("We had to go to Australia to find that one," Gibney says.) Gibney also draws on director Terry Gilliam's film version of Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," in which Johnny Depp portrayed the writer. Depp also narrates "Gonzo."

Also central to the film are the audiotapes Thompson made throughout his career. For Thompson, the tape recorder was as essential for his reporting, if not more so, then a pad and pen.

Archivist Don Fleming was brought in to go through the boxes and boxes of tapes, find out what was on them and make digital transfers.

"The earliest were from 1964," Fleming says. "There were a few reel-to-reels but almost everything was cassette.

"I only transferred a portion of them," Fleming says. "Hunter really documented quite a bit of his life all the way to the end."

The tapes proved so intriguing that Fleming compiled a five-CD box set from them. That box, "The Gonzo Tapes," was released in October.

"Mainly what I wanted to try to pull off with the box set was not show the wild and crazy Hunter but show that he was deep into his craft," Fleming says. "It gives us a better perspective on how the stories came out. He was a real craftsman."

But it's the image of Thompson as a crazed, gun-wielding, drug-scarfing maniac that tends to overshadow Thompson the writer.

Thompson created the image himself, inserting himself, sometimes under the guise of Raoul Duke, into his work, most notably in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

"He did create it and then he had to live up to it," Gibney says. "Raoul Duke, that's a pretty high bar.

"I think to some extent, he created the problems for himself," Gibney says. At some point, Gibney speculates, "Thompson decided, 'If that's what people want me to be, that's what I'll be.' People were expecting him to be wild and crazy, and increasingly he was,"

That craziness could come out in unpredictable and violent ways, perhaps never more so than when Thompson ended his life with a gun in February 2005.

From delving so deeply into Thompson's work and life, Gibney says, "I got a sense that maybe Hunter had a quality of being somewhat bipolar, and that may have hurt him personally, particularly later in life.

"But I think it helped him as a writer," he adds. "It helped him point out the deep contradictions in the American character."

Reporter Curtis Ross can be reached at (813) 259-7568.

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