Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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Morris, Chris. (October 26, 1996). Hunter S. Thompson Brings 'Fear and Loathing' to Island. Billboard magazine, 43, 10 McGovern: Well, he cut us up in California to the point where we probably never fully recovered from that, either. HST: That’s one of the secrets. The other … well, it depends on who you’re running against. But because of the Eagleton thing, Nixon didn’t really have to run at all. Any candidate who’d offered a real possibility of an alternative to Nixon – someone with a different concept of the presidency – could have challenged him and come very close to beating him. That was the prevailing theory among the Democrats all along in the primaries, which is why there were so many people getting into it early… Nixon was so vulnerable, he was such a wretched President, that almost any Democrat could beat him.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.… Duke, Raoul (November 25, 1973). "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Part II". Rolling Stone. Vol.96. pp.38–50. Hunter S. Thompson's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (The Graphic Novel), Adapted by Troy Little!". Top Shelf Productions. May 27, 2015 . Retrieved 2015-11-12. Ebert, Roger (May 22, 1998). "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". RogerEbert.com . Retrieved February 18, 2017. Ed: You have said already that you doubt McGovern could have won. What do you think is going to happen in ’76?There is a comfortable kind of consistency in this kind of finish, because that’s the way all the rest of my presidential campaign coverage was written. From December ’71 to January ’73 – in airport bars, all-nite coffee shops and dreary hotel rooms all over the country – there is hardly a paragraph in this jangled saga that wasn’t produced in a last-minute, teeth-grinding frenzy. There was never enough time. Every deadline was a crisis. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example. Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Jim Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed, and relatively complex stories every day– while my own deadline fell every two weeks – but neither one of them ever seemed in a hurry about getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.

However, this job is repeatedly obstructed by their constant use of a variety of recreational drugs, including LSD, ether, cocaine, alcohol, mescaline, and cannabis. Thompson might proudly have self-identified as a misfit, but he was also a journalist, so this seems a strangely self-castigating statement, until you consider what it was that he did for journalism, which was to redefine it. This is his contribution to the American canon. Contemporary resonanceHST: Journalistic. If you have half a story and you don’t know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone. I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.” The book also makes fun of society and formal education. For example, Dr. Gonzo would say, “As your attorney, I would advise…..” Or, Raoul would talk about being a doctor of journalism. They didn’t take themselves too seriously. HST: He told me when I stopped in Denver on the way to the Super Bowl that he’d sensed it as early as September, but when I asked him when he knew, he thought for a minute and then said, “Well, I guess… it was around October 1st…” According to Pat Caddell’s polls they had known – when I say “they,” I mean the McGovern top command – had known what kind of damage the Eagleton thing had done and how terminal it was ever since September. Pat said they spent a month just wringing their hands and tearing their hair trying to figure out how to overcome the Eagleton disaster.

According to Gilliam, there was no firm budget in place when filming started. [23] He felt that it was not a well-organized film and said, "Certain people didn't... I'm not going to name names but it was a strange film, like one leg was shorter than the other. There was all sorts of chaos." [16] While Depp was on location in Los Angeles, he got a phone call from comedian Bill Murray who had played Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam. He warned Depp, "Be careful or you'll find yourself ten years from now still doing him… Make sure your next role is some drastically different guy." [24] And no, Fear and Loathing isn’t the first plotless novel or the first to feature the author as main character. It’s not the first to have a road trip or hallucinations feature prominently - I don’t mean it’s original in that sense. But there had never been a voice like Thompson’s before in literature - he’s the only reason this book is so much fun and so famous - and he would set a style that would be oft imitated for decades to come. What would Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas look like if it took place today? Call Uber when your car breaks down? Do people even look up from their smartphones to recognize that someone is out of their mind on drugs? You definitely can’t pull your car out on the runway to meet the plane anymore. Where are these hotels that will wash your car when you valet park? My own theory, which sounds like madness, is that McGovern would have been better off running against Nixon with the same kind of neo-“radical” campaign he ran in the primaries. Not radical in the left/right sense, but radical in a sense that he was coming on with … a new … a different type of politician … a person who actually would grab the system by the ears and shake it. And meant what he said. Hell, he certainly couldn’t have done any worse. It’s almost impossible to lose by more than 23% … And I think that conceivably this country is ready for a kind of presidential candidate who is genuinely radical, someone who might call for the confiscation of all inherited wealth, for instance, or a 100% excess-profits tax… For example, Wallace, if he’d understood how much potential strength he had, and if he hadn’t been shot, could have gone to the Democratic Convention with a nasty bloc of votes – enough to probably dominate the convention, not to win the nomination, but enough to give him veto power on the candidate. Wallace did so much better in the primaries than even he expected, but by the time he realized what was happening, it was too late for him to file delegate slates in the states where he was running…

The film has been re-screened at various cinemas such as The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, London, and a special screening from original VHS tape at Swordtail Studio London in 2016. [49] Alger was a 19th-century author who typically wrote rags to riches stories; in Vegas, his relevance is about greed as a distinctively American quality. In fact, Duke eventually finds the “main nerve” of the American Dream in the Circus-Circus casino. The owner, who dreamt of running away to join the circus as a child, now has his own circus, and a licence to steal. He, it is said, is the model for the American Dream. If this seems cynical, so it should. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a 1971 novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. Ed: Do you think Eagleton was the chief reason for them changing their minds? Those Wallace people?