Breakfast with Hunter

Directed by Wayne Ewing

A documentary of Hunter S. Thompson with John Cusack, Benicio Del Toro, Johnny Depp, P.J. O'Rourke, George Plimpton and Ralph Steadman

91 minute runtime

Unrated—Probably R for language

Release date: Not released as of July, 2004

Finally, a movie about one of America’s greatest writers and social activists, the eminently messed up Hunter S. Thompson.  A movie about fear and loathing, the fear and loathing that have been a part of Thompson’s life for longer than we mere readers know.   A movie that brings back the 1970s, 80s and 90s with all of the anarchy, and, at least, most of the honesty.

17 years in the making, according to writer, director, editor and cameraman Wayne Ewing, the odyssey revolves around three classic Hunter Thompson escapades.  The first is his running for Sheriff of his adopted home of Pitkin County, Colorado (Aspen area) in 1970. The second is his false arrest on a trumped-up drunk driving charge in the same period.  The third is the making of the movie, “Fear and Loathing,” (starring Johnny Depp) in the mid 1990s.

The documentary is formed from a series of interviews with the author and readings of his work, combined with real life scenes of his interactions with friends and co-workers.  The scenes appear to be candid and to show a fair and balanced look at Thompson, nearly all of which is bad.  Social commentary on the nature of art in America today, the film is a surgery of digging out the pain that an artist feels in producing work that is generally transformed into commercial garbage before his eyes.  Not only is the work distorted and cheapened, but the distorted and cheapened version of the work becomes the artist’s identity from that point forward.  The system steals the artist’s identity as it prostitutes the artist.  Just ask Thompson’s inflatable sex doll, she’ll tell you…

The movie doesn’t go into Thompson’s background—born privileged and then unhinged to the point of jail time before high school graduation, his family estranged.  But he tries to re-establish those lost familial ties with a nation that never accepts him as their native son.  In the role of artist and social critic, Thompson is anything but passive in his actions; he is a control freak from the get-go and cannot accept the fact that he cannot control those around him.  The lack of acceptance in his life works for him as it makes his pain a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Like Neil young (in his biography, “Shakey,” 2002) Thompson surrounds himself with “no” men.  And if his followers are not “no” men from the start, he does everything in his power to turn them against him in his continued struggle for complete anarchism.  Unfortunately for his causes, he becomes, at times, more interested in the chaos than in the cause.  He needs chaos to create, and he doesn’t seem to care what he destroys or who he alienates in the process.

His fights with the conservative elements of Colorado society are predictable and of little interest to knowledgeable viewers of the movie, who have seen it all before.  Like the Black Panthers of Chicago reportedly said to the Chicago Seven in the days before the Democratic Convention riots in the summer of 1968; you can go get tear gassed and beat up if you want, but we will pick better battles.  A genius, Thompson could not have picked the hopeless battles by mistake; he wanted to show he had the skill to manipulate his enemies to their victories as well as to their defeats.  And he wanted to show he had the strength to pick him himself up and carry on.

The best scene in the movie is a sequence filmed in Thompson’s home in which he discussed the “tidal wave” scene planned for the movie version of “Fear and Loathing” with director-writer Alex Cox and his co-writer Tod Davies.  The sequence starts out with Thompson excited about the visit and the imminent completion of the script.  In an ominous sign of dark things to come, Thompson prepares sausages for the (unbeknownst to him) vegetarian pair.  The trio proceeds to discuss the treatment of parts of the book and ends up at the passage wherein Thompson describes his return to Las Vegas on a tidal wave of social upheaval.

Long prior to the meeting at Thompson’s house, the writers agreed that the metaphor was central to the story and struggled to find a way to include it in the movie.  Their solution was to extend the gonzo artistry of the book’s illustrator, Ralph Steadman, to an animated portrayal of Thompson riding a tidal wave to Vegas.  This was a gutsy move on their part and one that showed an amazing ignorance of Thompson.  Even those in the audience who knew nothing about Thompson probably guessed he was not a big fan of cartoons.

Predictably, Thompson goes ballistic.  Ewing, who was courageously filming the entire time, said he was afraid Thompson was going to hurt someone.  In his words, “There were weapons everywhere.”  The director/writer duo virtually ran out the door and were never seen again (eventually, a new director for “Fear and Loathing,” Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame, was selected).  In a scene shortly after the near-assault, only Benicio Del Toro is even half able to get to the bottom of the misunderstanding--too bad he wasn’t on the scene at the time.  (Del Toro starred as Oscar Acosta in “Fear and Loathing.”  In extra film clips on the DVD, Thompson disclosed that Acosta had been murdered at sea--shot in the stomach three times and thrown overboard.)

As for Thompson’s work as a writer, he reports that he always knew he would be a writer, even at an early age.  In his words, “I knew I would be a writer because it was the only thing I could do.”  The only thing he could do?  In fact, he was smart, handsome and rich, and could have done anything.  He choose writing, one has to assume, because that was the best way to infuriate his family, who had raised him to join their club of controlling elite.  And, although writing is lonely, it does give one the ability to control at least the words that go on the page.

“Gonzo Journalism” is the term that has been coined to describe “Fear and Loathing.”  The movie version of the book did Thompson a great injustice by framing Gonzo Journalism almost exclusively in a drug context.  The idea seems to be that the journalist ingests drugs and alcohol, writes a story, and the result is gonzo.  But this is just a fabrication by the mass media to make the work more understandable and provide the masses with a cop out to avoid confronting the horror in the words.  Like the explanation the next day after the first homosexual experience, “I did it because I was drunk.”

Hunter Thompson drank like a fish, but, unfortunately for him, he was rarely drunk enough to do anything out of character.  Drinking was an attempt to take the edge off so he could walk the earth in some relatively human form and not vaporize people by his very stare.  Few people can understand a person who spends their life torturing themselves by rejecting their family and confounding their supporters.  And even if such understanding existed, it is not considered politically smart for any established publication, even an unorthodox publication, to advocate despair to the extent that French kissing cats is the only conceivable way out (“Screwjack”—1978).  Yes, I kissed the cat.  But I did it because I was drunk…

When P.J. O’Rourke (Rolling Stone journalist and friend of Thompson’s) asked him how he put the drug experience on paper, Thompson replied that it took him two years of hard work to write about being stoned.  He first had to get very stoned, then concentrate on remembering what it was like, and then put it down on paper when he was straight.  Then repeat the experience over and over.  Not exactly every college tripper’s idea of a good time (at least, not the remembering and writing part).

Great guest appearances by alternative pop rocker Warran Zevon (“Send Lawyers, Guns and Money,” “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” and “Werewolves of London”), Johnny Depp (star of the movie “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and a surprised John Cusack who is spontaneously asked to do a Hunter Thompson reading in the Viper Room.  Some of the best “reality TV” footage yet when Thompson sprays the editor-in-chief at Rolling Stone with a live powder-based (not “clean” CO2) fire extinguisher, more-or-less trashing his office in the middle of a phone call and, of course, the scene where Thompson drives his director/writer team out of his house under threat of violence.

A must see movie for today’s anarchists, even if you don’t have an inflatable sex doll.