Going Gonzo Again

The trailer for the Alex Gibney-directed, Graydon Carter-produced Hunter S. Thompson documentary Gonzo is up. Narrated by Johnny Depp. Whee!

The Not-So-Merry Widow

Anita Thompson, the widow of Hunter S. Thompson, is a bit peeved at the way Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner portrayed the good doctor in his recent book Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, An Oral Biography. Anita, who started as Thompson’s personal assistant and was only married to him for two years before he killed himself, was supposed to pen an intro to Wenner’s book but then he and his co-author put in some facts that were maybe potentially embarrassing, so she went and wrote her own damn book The Gonzo Way. But there’s still bad blood. Daily News gossip wags Rush & Molloy spoke to both parties involved in the fracas.

She said:

“When Hunter was compiling his second letters book, there was some humiliating correspondence between Hunter and Jann. His publisher was urging him to put it in, but in the end, Hunter didn’t run it. It would’ve sold more books. But he protected his buddy. I’m sad that Jann didn’t do the same.

He said:

“She’s attacking the book because she’s not in it,” Wenner told us. “We just took her out. We took her narrative thread out and had other people tell the story. Anita and I get along fine, but she has an exaggerated sense of who she was in terms of Hunter. She had another kind of role.”

Hmm. But is that really all it boils down to?

“I think deep down, Jann loved Hunter,” said Anita. “Maybe he feels Hunter didn’t return that love enough.”

Hunter S. Thompson as an unrequited Wenner crush? Totally plausible.

Also: Anita Thompson’s book has a sales ranking of 5, 302 on Amazon.com while Wenner’s is at 303.

[via BoingBoing]

Correspondence: The Hunter S. Thompson Symposium

Hard to believe, but Ephemerist does occasionally receive letters and communiques. The following concerns the first ever Hunter S. Thompson Symposium, and since sometimes I’m nothing but a wholesale clearinghouse of information, here’s the missive in its entirety:

Juan Thompson and the Aspen Institute hosted a symposium on July 21, 2007 on the work of the late writer Hunter S. Thompson who created his own genre of writing with Gonzo Journalism and changed American political reporting forever with his book Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.

Thirty-five years later journalists Carl Bernstein, Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Loren Jenkins of NPR, John Nichols of The Nation and others came together in a symposium moderated by Professor Douglas Brinkley to discuss the effect of Hunter’s work on political reporting and American politics.

The hour and half event is exclusively available at www.HunterThompsonFilms.com in nineteen clips of free, streaming video produced by Wayne Ewing.

Related: The current issue of geriatric music magazine Rolling Stone has a cover feature on the good doctor, entitled “Growing Up Gonzo: Excerpts From the Oral History of Hunter S. Thompson.” Snippets are available online, but to read it in its entirety, you’ll have to shell out for the mag. (Don’t be embarrassed, just tell the guy at the newsstand you’re buying for your dad.) Or, you can wait for the book Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson to be released on October 31st, the source from whence the article sprang.

The Gonzo Widow

Ah, dearly departed Hunter S. Thompson: while his corporal remains may have been shot out of a cannon, his influence lives on. There’s the news of a big screen adaptation of The Rum Diary, starring approved Thompson stand-in Johnny Depp. And, according to the Village Voice, his widow Anita is hard at work securing his enduring legacy.

[S]he’s published The Gonzo Way: A Celebration of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. It’s a small yet insightful book that discusses what Anita learned from Hunter, specifically how to live life without letting fear get the best of you. The book isn’t so much about the crazed persona that Hunter came to be known for; rather, it’s a series of lessons about courage and the constant quest for truth. It’s this attitude that defines the “Gonzo Way,” according to Anita. “Every time a young person reads a page of Hunter S. Thompson’s,” she writes in The Gonzo Way, “he gains confidence in himself to have courage, and, in my opinion, the world becomes a better place.”

While I think there are lessons to be learned (mostly in the art of conspicuous consumption), I somehow doubt that the tome will earn a place in college classrooms or self-help sessions. It seems that the casual Thompson fan is content with aping his drug and alcohol excesses on a weekend trip to Vegas, rather than applying some sort of pseudo-life lessons to conquer their fears. The courage she speaks of, methinks, consists of the liquid variety. Still!

As she writes in The Gonzo Way, Hunter was “a champion of fun and a champion of the underworld, which combined to make him most of all a champion of individualism.”

Anita says she plans to stay on Owl Farm and maintain it as “a thriving place for the study of things important to Hunter—politics, literature, history, and journalism.” There’s also another book of letters coming out in the next few years, and a recent symposium at the Aspen Institute on Hunter’s literary contributions is expected to become a yearly event.

Gawd, would I love to see Owl Farm become some sort of artist’s colony, along the lines of Yaddo. Now that would be a good extension of the Gonzo brand.

And who is out there now representing the Gonzo journo style? Well, two come to mind: Matt Taibbi, doing the political outrage trip over at Thompson’s old stomping ground Rolling Stone, and holding down the drunken ne’er do well end of the spectrum is literary pugilist Jonathan Ames. Beyond that, it’s a shambling collection of pale imitators.

Gonzo Redux

According to Variety, Johnny Depp is set to star in an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s roman à clef The Rum Diary.

Depp will play Paul Kemp, a freelance journo writing for a rundown newspaper in 1950s Puerto Rico and surrounded by a bunch of lost souls bent on self-destruction. The journo was 22 when he wrote the autobiographical novel and had yet to develop his trademark gonzo style. It was written in 1959 but not published until 1998.

Sweet! Never mind that Depp is a decade or so older than the Kemp character, the idea of him careening around Puerto Rico in full Thompson mode is sooo satisfying.