Gonzo (2008)

 Gonzo (2008)

Written and Directed by Alex Gibney

This well crafted documentary portrait of the legendary writer is also a recap of the times of Hunter S. Thompson’s short career. Short, because it only really lasted from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s.

The movie could have been set into sub-chapters,
“The Gonzo Years: 1965 - 1975”
And
“The So-Gone Years: Portrait of  Middle-aged Alcoholic. 1975-2005”

The movie is a lucid journey through the promising and ultimately disturbing times of the Gonzo years in sad dying America.

“The Gonzo Years: 1965 - 1975”
It all starts for Thompson with his penetrating work with the phallus-choppered manboy-cult of the sick assed all-American Hell’s Angels with their homoerotic Brando Wild One cosplay routine that includes gang rape. They were tough-guys when the gang was there to engage in group beatings of rivals. Shame on Ken Keasy, the Merry Pranksters, The Rolling Stones, etc for falling for these thugs and their militant romantic outlaw 1% cowboy image of themselves. But they surely did fall for them and invited them to party and even, insanely, music festival security. Eventually Thompson was alienated and turned on them when witnessing a gangbang at a Prankster party and then their attack on anti-Vietnam war protesters. Good ole patriotic all American boys.
Thompson was treated to one of their gang boy stompings, beat up badly. A good book came out of all that.

On to the Aspen Co sheriff campaign which is kind of interesting.

Then this documentary really gets rolling with the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas segment. This is Thompson’s most famous work and has sustained partly because of the 1998 film adaptation by Terry Gilliam with handsome young actor Johnny Depp as Thompson. Clips from the movie are used extensively, maybe too much, in this segment of the film. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a good read and a rather popular book in it’s day. It was probably the most successful in sales of any of his work and is a surreal picture of the glitzy shiny neon underbelly of the USA, the mobster-created gambling paradise in the desert. (See Bugsy for further fictionalised information. With Warren Beaty as the charismatic loony cold-blooded killer, mobster-entrepreneur, and sucker for woman.)
Actors seem to like to play the cigarette holder chomping, gun loving macho writer. We also see a clip from Where the Buffalo Roam with Bill Murry in the role. In the clip he deals ruthlessly with oppressive authority when he opens fire and murders his fax machine. How dare “The Man'' trouble an artist with a deadline?

The really heartbreaking part of Gonzo is not the decline and eventual suicide, he was basically a drunk, burnt out, jerk celebrity by then. The hard part was the recap of the 1972 presidential campaign which Thompson covered for Rolling Stone and out of which came another successful and artfully crafted new journalism book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972.
This part of Gonzo makes the whole movie worthwhile, not so much for Thompson’s part in it but the way the movie covers the coverage of the hopeful, but tragically doomed, campaign of eventual Democratic candidate Sen. George McGovern running against slime-ball Richard Nixon. Viewers of age are reminded what a good man McGovern was, how he promised to end the war in Vietnam and REDUCE THE BLOATED MILITARY BUDGET. Was this the only time a democratic presidential candidate threatened the military-industrial complex? Don’t expect Joe Biden to do that even as we all go down the tubes economically, that old hack will give us serious austerity before touching the holy war machine that is America's most important product. George McGovern is interviewed in the movie. He was a sadly missed opportunity and a great individual. This part of the movie brings back what a discouraging disappointment that was. Tricky Dick won and then resigned after the Watergate breakin, etc.
(1972 was the first time this writer was eligible to vote. It was cast for McGovern.) 

“The So-GoneYears: Portrait of  Middle-aged Alcoholic. 1975-2005”

Gonzo kind of winds down after that and the last quarter of it covers Thompson’s later and final years. Basically broken hearted by the USA political atmosphere, he became yet another bloated victim of that most American of all the drugs; alcohol. He became a heavy booze hound and pain in the ass to his intimates while riding in the remnants of his fame to the great prize in the winning circle of  American success; “Empty Hedonism”. That’s sad, but it's a horrible sad little “culture” we have here. With the body count steadily on the rise. Thompson was maybe too American for his own good. His final statement before suicide at age 67 morned the end of pro-football season, another old dog pissing around the goal post of the great American brute pastime.

Yet  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 are enormous and unique in their illumination and critique of USA culture. They are written by an outsider embedding himself within and participating fulling. Pushed forward by the stimulating substances at hand they are purely American products. It is not surprising that they destroyed their maker in the process of their production and success. There is no shame that a mere human couldn’t keep it up and repeat the same trick again and again for our amusement. He contributed a great deal and owned us nothing to begin with.

A movie star sponsored tower cannon firing of the ashes of his remains is a sad infantile sent off for another man-boy lost in the mind-fuck that is  America. I would have been much more impressive had he committed suicide by shooting himself out of a cannon into the canyon cliff wall, Ringling-Knievel style. But that would have been redundant. He did that before, sort of, with propelling himself with coke, speed, acid and a lot of booze into the impenetrable wall of the Mad American Death Machine while sending notes back from this righteous suicide mission in the hopeless cause of saving America from itself.

Gonzo is a great documentary.  

 

My Psychedelic Love Story (2020)

 

Directed by Errol Morris

Written by Joanna Harcourt-Smith

In this documentary an old woman tells a rambling, not altogether coherent story of her time as Timothy Leary's hot young rich babe during his rapid decline to eventually becoming a FBI stool pigeon. 

Along the way there are still images from back in the day with standard “psychedelic” filters over them.

There are some sound film clips of Joanna Harcourt-Smith speaking back then. Oddly her Euro speech accent seems noticeably less than it was last year whenever the interviews for this movie were shot.

She tells how she becomes aware of who Leary is rather late in his celebrity career. She says she was pregnant in the bathtub and heard the song Legend of a Mind, one of the less good songs by Moody Blues, the one that goes “Timothy Leary’s dead, No No No No he’s outside, looking in”. It’s about all the swell stuff that Timothy Leary can do for “you”. It is idiotic celebrity deification, something Leary exploited to his own glory. In the song LSD is not mentioned at all but there are descriptions of its effects, all attributed to what Timothy Leary, what he can do for “you”. The song might as well say that the local acid dealer down the street can do these things for “you”.  
At any rate she says in the movie that at that moment she knew it was her destiny to be with Timothy Leary. Since she was a rich young attractive “socialite” she was in the position to make this happen.

In her story she name-drops her way to Timothy Leary. She tells us of hanging out with Keith Richards in some European rich people sun spot and helping to arrange an idea in which the Rolling Stones were going to tour the USA in support of George McGovern in his 1972 presidential campaign. Then they go to DC but the campaign was so defeatist that they couldn’t take up the offer, or something like that. It’s kind of a murky story as are all the rest of her stories of her drugged out life 50 years ago.

So she meets Leary who is then on the lam in Switzerland zooming around in a canary yellow Porsche. She seems quite impressed with this cool daddy sports car.
Being at the idiotic height of his career he decides almost instantly, according to her, that they are in fact destined to be together. He flashes tarot cards which verify this.
They run around Europe eventually coming back to the USA. Leary goes back to prison and she wants to help him to get out. Enter here a guy who is one of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, despite this lofty name, they are the amoral LA surfer drug dealer gangster sector of the LSD distribution scene. (More of their story is in the more lucid documentary Orange Sunshine. By the way there is another documentary on the more wholesome and helpful characters involved with LSD, The Sunshine Makers <2015> about Tim Scully and Nickolas Sand, good guys who made damn good LSD for us.)

Anyway there are more murky stories about ripping off some guy for $10,000 in a phoney(?) drug deal in order to get money to spring Leary. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love guy also arranges for Joanna to help get out of jail by becoming an FBI informant which eventually happens.

The documentary is a reminder of what a narcissistic jerk Leary was or became in the course of acquiring celebrity power, interrupted by USA extreme drugs laws which were partly as result of Leary’s lust for attention and grandstanding. 
All this is recounted through Joanna Harcourt-Smith’s rambling storytelling in this messy documentary.

The Sunshine Makers is a much better movie about more intelligent people on a more wholesome mission to bring the general public the wondrous gift of LSD and the psychedelic experience. They actually helped rather them screwing up the whole thing like celebrity Leary did.