He was an American Journalist born on July 18, 1937. Why do we care? Because he wrote a great novel that became a great movie. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
He was ahead of his time and he is credited as the creator of Gonzo Journalism, a style where reporting reporters get involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figures of their stories. He is also known for his promotion and use of psychedelics, alcohol, other mind-altering substances, firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority.
The book for which Thompson gained most of his fame had its genesis during the research for Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, an exposé for Rolling Stone on the 1970 killing of the Mexican-American television journalist Ruben Salazar. One of Thompson’s sources for the story was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a prominent Mexican-American activist and attorney. Finding it difficult to talk in the racially tense atmosphere of Los Angeles, Thompson and Acosta decided to travel to Las Vegas, Nevada, and take advantage of an assignment by Sports Illustrated to write a 250-word photograph caption on the Mint 400 motorcycle race held there.
The result of the trip to Las Vegas became the 1972 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which first appeared in the November 1971 issues of Rolling Stone as a two-part series. It is written as a first-person account by a journalist named Raoul Duke on a trip to Las Vegas with Dr. Gonzo, his “300-pound Samoan attorney,” to cover a narcotics officers’ convention and the “fabulous Mint 400”. During the trip, Duke and his companion (always referred to as “my attorney”) become sidetracked by a search for the American Dream, with “…two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers […] and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.”
The book became the movie where Johny Depp plays Raould Duke and Benicio del Toro as the attorney, here is a clip:
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But recently I discovered another movie about the same guy! This one is called “Where the Buffalo Roam” and Hunter is played by Bill Murray and Peter Boyle is the attorney. This is a more biographical story rather than an adaption of Hunter’s novel. Here is a clip
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