"Omnibus" Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision (1978)

TV Series:

"Omnibus" (1967)

Original Air Date:

1978

Genre:

Documentary | Biography

Plot:

Cast

John Dean	...	Himself
Brian Doyle-Murray	...	Himself / Nixon Voter
Mel Ferrer	...	Himself (archive footage)
Audrey Hepburn	...	Herself (archive footage)
Dean Martin	...	Himself (archive footage)
Bill Murray	...	Himself / Nixon Voter
Ralph Steadman	...	Himself
Hunter S. Thompson	...	Himself

Runtime:

USA:51 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Filming Locations:

Aspen, Colorado, USA

Company:

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

Trivia:

This documentary is featured on second disc of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) DVD released in 2003 by the Criterion Collection.

Goofs:

Factual errors: In the narration, it is stated that Dr. Thompson was a former Hell's Angel. This is incorrect. Although he rode with the Angels for about a year, it was in the spirit of research for a book he was writing about them. Thompson even went so far as to buy a British motorcycle (as opposed to the Angels' trademark Harley Davidsons) to set himself apart from the gang.

Quotes:

Hunter S. Thompson: [after spilling his drink on the ground] Yes! In front of the camera and it will be on film, won't it? The way, well, the water's without chlorophyll, and the whiskey kills the, what would be the chlorophyll substitute so everytime I get a drink, the ice, I put the drink in the ice and then the whole thing into the grass...

Movie Connections:

Featured in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008)

Intermediate Madness

I suppose if you want to understand who you are, the bits you borrowed in assembling yourself, you won't escape the seventies which repackaged and invented myths of the sixties as nibbles of insight.

One of the worst commercializers of those societal yearnings was "Rolling Stone" which among its rock celebrity fawning gave us gonzo.

Its a rather embarrassing notion, actually, one that has in modern time made the blog possible. The idea is to reflect the journalist and what he (always he) sees equally. And to make it entertaining, you have to twist both away from the norm.

Ted's law applies. The difference in weirdness between us and the guy telling us the story is equal to the difference between him and the story. By his acting out, the bizarre nature of the story is made real. I call this folding.

And in the 70's we were prepared to believe that some stories were imperially bizarre. Nixon, the war, drugs, motorcycle gangs...

So along came this man of thin talent and great command of the self-promoting niche that the so-called counterculture afforded him.

This sort of documentary or profile is pretty good in an unplanned way. You get to see this fellow pretending to be insightful by being outrageous in all the performance modes available to him and his cartoonist buddy.

The odd thing is that while it is transparent -- this guy is as much a nitwit as your average rightwing radio nut -- it is also amazingly effective. (Well, also like the radio nuts.) We will remember Nixon, for instance, more through the eyes of this guy and similar than by either the president's men or those who seriously wrote about them.

That aside, if you cheer a similar twist in film-making, you may be rooting for the immensely flawed and gifted Terry Gilliam. If so, his only successful film is based on Thompson. See this and that together.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.