Don't Eat the Baby
Synopsis
Gonzo is the definitive film biography of a mythic American figure, the man who Tom Wolfe called “our greatest comic writer,” whose suicide by shotgun, led Rolling Stone magazine, where Thompson began his career, to devote an entire issue (its best-selling ever) to the man who launched a brash, irreverent, fearless style of journalism named “gonzo” after an anarchic blues riff by New Orleans’s own famed piano man, James Booker. From Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and producer Graydon Carter (Surfwise, The Kid Stays in the Picture) Gonzo is a probing look into the uncanny life of national treasure and gonzo journalism inventor Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. A fast moving, wildly entertaining documentary with an iconic soundtrack, the film addresses the major touchstones in Thompson’s life—his intense and ill-fated relationship with the Hell’s Angels, his near-successful bid for the office of sheriff in Aspen in 1970, the notorious story behind the landmark Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his deep involvement in Senator George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, and much more. While director Gibney shaped the screen story, every narrated word in the film springs from the typewriter of Thompson himself. These words are given life by Johnny Depp, the actor who once shadowed Thompson’s every move for the screen version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and who bankrolled Thompson’s spectacular funeral (photographed for this film), in which the good doctor’s ashes were fired from a rocket launcher with a towering two-thumbed fist whose palm held a giant peyote button.
