Street Writing Man

It’s not unusual for a film studio to get suddenly behind an Oscar-winning product when, prior to awards season, they hadn’t realised its full potential. The Academy-Award winning director Alex Gibney must therefore have thought he’d somehow fallen into Bizarro-World when, last year, he took home the Best Documentary gong from the Oscars only to discover that the distributors weren’t that keen on letting people see his meisterwork.

Across the room from me, Mr. Gibney shakes his head. He can’t say for certain why so many people seemed to suppress Taxi To The Dark Side, a terrifying investigation into the murder of an Afghan taxi driver on Bagram Air Base. He has, however, a pretty good idea.
“It all came out of the blue,” he says. “Just as I was realising we had a distribution problem I got a phone call from the Discovery channel telling me that they wouldn’t broadcast the film either. I protested and went on TV, so we were able to sell it to HBO but the theatrical release was much messier.”
An independent observer might suggest that a biographical portrait of Hunter S. Thompson must have seemed like light entertainment in a CV that includes such acclaimed heavyweight titles as Taxi To The Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room. But Mr. Gibney insists that his Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson has no less gravitas than his controversial, politically-driven output.
“Hunter was important,” the director insists. “I wanted to remind everybody just how important he was. Sure, he was a wild and freaky guy. He loved getting really high and blowing things up. And sometimes all this other stuff prevented people from seeing what a great writer he was. It seemed to me that for someone that was overexposed, his writing and the stuff that really mattered, was underexposed.”
Dr. Thompson, though an ideal candidate for documentary treatment, emerges as a subject that’s difficult to pin down. For all his anti-establishment charms, the film illuminates a conservative core, the Hunter S. Thompson who believed in marriage and gun ownership.
“He was certainly contradictory,” nods Mr. Gibney. “You have to embrace those contradictions if you want to understand who he was. He was a guy who was manic and light on his feet. I found that people frequently speak of him as a classic Southern gentleman. But in a snap, he could become vicious and cruel, violent even. I think that’s what made him such a great chronicler of American life which is equally rife with contradictions.”
It is in Dr. Thompson’s efforts as a folk historian that Gonzo finds its focus. A fascinating chronicle of the years between 1968 and 1972, a period when the drug-addled scribe produced his best-loved work and ran for Mayor of Aspen, the film revels in the contemporaneous turbulence of its subject’s own life and the wider world.
“A lot of people see Vegas as Hunter’s On The Road and who doesn’t love its wild, hallucinogenic qualities?” says Mr. Gibney. “But Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail, Hunter’s account of George McGovern’s presidential campaign is, for me, more interesting in that it has so much of the zeitgeist in it. He’s seeing things from so many different perspectives. He’s mediating through an untainted politician and a whacked out gonzoid. It’s really unique.”
Like ...Campaign Trail, Gonzo seems to suggest that George McGovern’s failed bid for the presidency was the moment that America doomed itself.
“He wrote it like Nixon’s victory was the end of the world,” the filmmaker avers. “But Hunter was such an incurable romantic. He hears a Jimmy Carter speech months later and he’s in love all over again. As an approach it worked. Some of his best writing comes when he’s at his angriest and most crestfallen. When he writes that passage suggesting that America was a nation of 100 million used car salesmen, you can feel his pain. He took it personally. It’s never dispassionate analysis. That’s what brings his writing to life. Later on, he was just as passionate about John Kerry’s presidential campaign.”
This becomes quite apparent during the film when Thompson’s widow Anita claims that George Bush’s re-election pushed her late husband over the edge.
“I think it was more a confluence of things. He was in poor health. He felt his powers were slipping away. And ultimately, he was a narcissist and for a narcissist, suicide is always an option. He was thinking about how his death would be perceived, not how it might affect the people around him. I really don’t think he pulled the trigger on account of John Kerry. At least I hope not.”