Greg Burchall (The Age newspaper, Melbourne, Australia)
October 19, 2008
HUNTER S. Thompson may have been somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the Nevada desert when the drugs began to take hold, but filmmaker Eva Orner was somewhere around 14 on the edge of Melbourne when the maverick journalist's gonzoid words took hold of her.
"My brother, Michael, gave me a copy of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail and while I didn't get it contextually, or know many of the people that it was about, I got hooked on the writing, on the writer," she says.
Orner, who this year won an Oscar for her documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, never got to meet Thompson but was in Colorado at his Woody Creek property some 20 years later to shoot the pyrotechnic memorial service that followed his suicide in early 2005.
The filming was funded by Johnny Depp, who played the Thompson altered-ego Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and narrates the documentary Orner made with Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson.
While Thompson never won a Pulitzer Prize for his wild, participatory, highly flammable style of political commentary — described by one politician as being "the least factual but most accurate" reports of the 1972 presidential campaign — Orner and Gibney wanted to concentrate on Thompson's literary legacy.
"It would be easy to focus on the sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, party and celebrity stuff, but he was an incredibly significant writer and journalist," says Orner.
"Indeed, while it's nice to reminisce about the craziness, there are many who say we really need Hunter — or someone like him — to challenge, to challenge authority in these times, especially relevant in an election year."
Siem Reap bureau chief of the Phnom Penh Post, Peter Olszewski, who back in 1976 was "manager" of Thompson's often disaster-prone Australian lecture tour, says he was surprised by how "writerly" the Kentucky-born Thompson was.
"He worked on every word," Olszewski remembers.
"He told me how he wrote Las Vegas — what was true about the book and what was fiction — and that he set out to write an American classic, and even that admission gives the measure of the man.
"He deduced that most US classics were short books and he told me that if I did a word count on Las Vegas and The Great Gatsby, I would discover that the two were identical in word count, down to the last word."
Australia and Olszewski do not feature in Orner's film but an impressive roll-call of writing and political identities do: Tom Wolfe, Timothy Crouse, Ralph Steadman, Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, George McGovern, Pat Buchanan and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner (who does a fair imitation of Thompson's shrieks and howls, and also breaks down in tears). Thompson's two wives and son Juan also make heartfelt contributions.
"Gathering the talent is always the fun, challenging and frustrating part of documentary-making," says Orner. "You start with such an incredible list but we got just about everyone that we wanted.
"Alex and I have made three films together now and he's always amazed at how being an Australian producer seems to help us get access to people — it seems to disarm them."
The pair having won an Oscar doesn't hurt either.
"It's true that it changes access," says Orner, who is now based in Los Angeles after four years in New York. "It becomes much easier to meet with people you want to meet with.
"But it's always hard to finance a film and even though there's significantly less money around in these days of unprecedented recession, there's still a lot more than in Australia.
"Still, I think the film industry is one of the better survivors — TV is pretty safe, the studio machine will still work — but it's the $10 million to $40 million projects that are hit hardest, the ones normally financed by hedge funds and new wealth."
Thompson's adage "Buy the ticket and take the ride" certainly applies to Orner, the Mount Scopus and Monash University graduate who worked as a production manager on Blue HeelersStrange Fits of Passion and Josh Jarman, before turning to documentary-making with the Logie and AFI Award-winning Untold Desires. and gained producing credits on features
She looked into Thompson's Melbourne connection for Gonzo, particularly his notorious smoking-drinking-swearing appearance on The Don Lane Show, but after a thorough search "in the bowels of Channel Nine's archives" discovered that all footage had been lost or destroyed.
Olszewski remembers it well. "This just confirmed the stupidity, crassness and ineptness of commercial TV producers at that time," he says.
"Rather than let Hunter the talent present himself as himself, the producer pushed him into appearing like a poseur, with coat casually draped over one shoulder. It looked so fake that when Thompson saw himself in the monitor he swore and brushed the coat aside, and of course the expletive was not deleted and it became a quite large story the next day in the morning papers."
The expat journalist's connection continues, with news that his 1976 interview with Thompson for free Melbourne underground magazine Loose Licks will be included in a collection of conversations being compiled by the writer's widow, Anita.
Olszewski, who as J.J. McRoach stood for the Senate as an Australian Marijuana Party candidate, wrote about his often nightmarish job minding Thompson in Mandraxed WombatsThe Monster in Room 450, which was published in his 1979 book A Dozen Dopey Yarns. and
His worst moment came when he "disobeyed the doctor's instructions" and swallowed a small piece of powerful blotter-paper LSD.
"Several hours later, after I had crashed a Fairlane into a concrete pillar in the car park under the Southern Cross Hotel, Thompson admonished me with, 'I clearly told you to chew it slowly'," he recalls.
"But he told me how much he liked some of the creative stuff I'd devised to promote his tour, encouraged my writing and informed me that one of my weaknesses was a tendency towards shyness."
As for Thompson, there were already signs that he was starting to be trapped in the gun-toting, alcohol-soaked, mumbling maniac image that would be exploited in the 1980 film Where the Buffalo Roam and in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip.
Olszewski remembers one such moment on stage at the Melbourne Town Hall. "People weren't all that interested in meaningful discourse — they wanted gonzo madness. At one stage he turned to me and said, 'Help me in this thing. I feel trapped. I feel like a goddamned animal in a cage with people poking sticks at me.' "
There's gonzo madness in Orner and Gibney's film — it's hard to avoid Thompson's Freak Power run to be elected sheriff of Aspen or his falling in and falling out with the Hell's Angels — but also plenty of serious discussion.
"We wanted to focus on what a great writer he was in this particular period of time and the film has a very strong political element because of that," says Orner.
"We need more people today to stand up against what's wrong, to door-knock, blog, write — in many ways, it's a call to arms."
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson is at ACMI from October 23 to November 4.
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