Sedona, AZ: Visitors to Sedona should be sure to check out the concluding film in the Sedona International Film Festival’s “OctoberFEST of Film.” The last of the films included in the special series is narrated by Johnny Depp and is the definitive film biography of the mythic American figure, Hunter S. Thompson.
Making its northern Arizona premiere, “Gonzo, The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” is a new documentary playing to rave reviews from critics and audiences world-wide. The film is directed by Alex Gibney, the Academy Award nominated director of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room and the director of the Academy Award winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side.
A man that Tom Wolfe called our “greatest comic writer,” and whose suicide by gunshot led Rolling Stone Magazine, where Thompson began his career, to devote an entire issue (its best-selling ever) to the man that launched a brash, irreverent, fearless style of journalism - named “gonzo” after an anarchic blues riff by James Booker.
Borrowing from Kris Kristofferson, Thompson was a “walking contradiction, partly truth, mostly fiction.” While his pen dripped with venom for crooked politicians, he surprised nervous visitors with the courtly manners and soft-spoken delivery of a Southern gentleman. Careening out of control in his personal life, Thompson also maintained a steel-eyed conviction about righting wrongs.
Today, in a time when “spin” has replaced the search for deeper meaning, Thompson remains an iconic crusader for truth, justice and a fiercely idealistic American way. Like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (and the movie made from it) remains a wanderlust myth for generation after generation of American youth. And for America’s most esteemed journalists – from Tom Wolfe, and Walter Isaacson (former editor of Time) to the NY Times’ Frank Rich – he remains an iconic freelance, never afraid to gore every sacred cow in his path. He believed that writing could make a difference. It could change things.
