Fear on the Thompson trail

He thought it would be fun, but making a documentary about the life and work of the great gonzo journalist, Hunter S Thompson, proved to be hellish at times, director Alex Gibney tells Donald Clarke

FOR GOOD OR ill the most singular journalist of his era, Hunter S Thompson shot himself in the head on February 20th, 2005. You might argue that he has still not quite gone away. Fine books such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegasand Hell's Angelsremain in print and young journalists of a certain bent - particularly those concerned with popular culture - continue to preserve the wrong bits of his reputation by writing about their drink and drug habits rather than the actual subject of their commission.

On the other hand, you could say that the real Thompson left us as long ago as the mid-1970s. All his great pieces were written in the decade preceding his brilliant, deranged, fantastic coverage of the 1972 US presidential election. Thereafter, the recreational paranoia became more disturbing and the linguistic anarchy less easy to excuse.

So why has Alex Gibney, Oscar-winning director of such esteemed documentaries as Taxi to the Dark Sideand Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, chosen this moment to release Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson?

"Well, it took a long time to do, much longer than I expected," he says. "I was approached after his suicide and thought it would be fun. It, in fact, turned out to be kind of hellish. It was very hard to work through the archive and get the rights. There is still a lot of resentment among some people he knew. It was hard work."

The work has been worthwhile. Gonzo tells an extraordinary story in brisk, digestible fashion. Diverse interviewees such as Tom Wolfe, Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter and Ralph Steadman queue up to explain how a lower-middle-class misfit from Kentucky somehow rose to become the Benzedrine-marinated Pepys of the counterculture.

One of the most hilarious moments finds Tom Wolfe accusing Thompson, without any apparent irony, of becoming a slave to the image he created. I beg your pardon, Tom?

"Yes, I know," Gibney laughs. "And there's Tom is in his shining white suit and starched collar. He emerges from the back of his apartment, where you are not allowed to go, in this carefully composed costume. It is ironic."

Following early adventures in Puerto Rico and San Francisco, Hunter S Thompson came to national prominence with a series of articles on the grim world of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gangs. Published as a book in 1966, the pieces helped launch him towards the project he would describe as gonzo journalism. It is still difficult to define that phrase, but the key articles - often written for Rolling Stone magazine - find the author's own confused, pharmaceutically enhanced experiences getting in the way of the supposed task in hand.

"That was part of it," Gibney agrees. "He had a unique way of being playful on the one hand, but also doing some very good reporting on the other. When he got going he had this almost poetic vibe. He broke free of conventions, but he never quite lost the flat-foot skills of a good reporter."

A LARGE PART of Gibney's documentary deals with the pieces that were later knocked together into Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. As the 1972 Democratic primaries drifted towards their conclusion, Thompson became increasingly enamoured of George McGovern, the distinguished liberal candidate, and increasingly suspicious of his rival, Edmund Muskie. Thompson mischievously suggested that Muskie was whacked-out on an obscure Brazilian drug named Ibogaine and was astonished when several mainstream news sources took the story seriously.

"I said there was a rumour to that effect," Thompson explains in Gonzo. "I made up the rumour."

Still, for all his championing of McGovern and his rabid hatred of Richard Nixon, it is not quite correct to class Hunter S Thompson as a man of the left. In his last decades, living an addled existence in Woody Creek, Colorado, the writer increasingly came to resemble Uncle Duke, the quasi-fascist nutter created in his honour by cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

Gibney, whose most famous documentaries attacked the Bush administration's policies on the war in Iraq and the collapse of Enron, is happy to acknowledge that puzzling paradox.

"It's a fascinating question," he says. "I think he was a creature of both worlds. I was invited on a lot of right-wing radio shows that I couldn't have got on with Taxior Enron. They loved him because he was a kick-ass motherf***er who said 'f*** you!' to everybody. He lived by himself out in the country and shot off a lot of guns. There is that strain in the right: 'Leave me the hell alone.' And that's why they liked him."

Gibney was happy to discover that, despite this later decline, a lot of young people still know and admire Hunter S Thompson's work. The growing popularity of Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas- the star of that film, Johnny Depp, narrates Gonzo - has certainly helped to keep Thompson's memory alive.

Yet he does, in some ways, have a malign influence. To this day, many student journalists, when writing up their first interview, will begin with a detailed description of what they had to drink the previous night. The gonzo aesthetic has inspired almost as much bad, unstructured writing as the Beat movement did.

"No question about that," Gibney agrees. "He does leave us with a lot of roads that shouldn't be taken. But part of the process of becoming a writer is beginning through imitation. Hopefully you then come out the other side. Hunter himself began by typing out The Great Gatsbyover and over again, but he soon found his own style."

Gibney, whose father was editor of Newsweek, sees a few connections between Thompson's attitude to journalism and his own approach to documentary film-making.

"You hear a lot of film-makers saying: 'I don't want to impose my own view. I just want to show what's going on.' That's such a load of crap," he says. "Don't edit anything then. Just show them your raw footage. But, yes, it's true that people do focus on Hunter's drug use, and you want to point out that a lot of artists are imbalanced and self-medicating. It wasn't heroin that made Charlie Parker a great alto player."

So was it the drugs that eventually did for Hunter S Thompson? In his early pieces, despite his chemically inspired fug, he still managed to compose balanced sentences that - after the odd psychedelic circumlocution - touched down somewhere in the vicinity of earth. His later ramblings read like the sort of pieces the editors of newspaper letters pages generally receive scrawled in green ink.

"I think it was the booze that got him in the end," Gibney says. "But cocaine is not good for writing. Here is a guy that woke up and would pour himself a Chivas Regal scotch before breakfast. I know people would meet him and for a very brief period he was very charming. He got drunk enough to get rid of the hangover and he'd be fine. Then, very quickly, he would begin slurring and he was gone."

QUITE CORRECTLY, Gonzo focuses most closely on the glory years of the great man's career and makes a convincing case for Hunter S Thompson as a significant innovator. Displaying a deathly grim humour and a sharp sense of injustice, he did more than any other writer to shatter the illusion that there is such a thing as objective reporting.

It is, therefore, unsurprising that his death was greeted with such noisy mourning. I guess it's pointless to ask if Gibney figured out why, exactly, the great man did take a gun to himself.

"I don't think we ever truly know why anyone commits suicide," he says. "I think he was bipolar, and then there was the drink.

"He had this sense of his legacy: how are people going to see him? He had this notion that, like Hemingway, he could go out in a blaze before his powers failed him - but, in truth, his powers failed years before."

Happily, those fine early books remain stubbornly in print.