As celebrated and wasted as a lead guitarist, Thompson was known as much for his drug-gorging persona as his colorful, inflammatory writings.įor studio execs too wet-behind-the-ears to remember Thompson’s heyday, Fear and Loathing was based on Thompson’s excursion to Las Vegas, ostensibly to cover an off-road race for Sports Illustrated. Thompson, the era’s most flamboyant, outrageous journalist whose combative political pronouncements and incendiary volleys against the reigning establishment stoked countercultural fires then burning in college youth.
In the slapstick cinematic, Johnny Depp stars as Dr. Nostalgia-crazed baby boomers who remember being glazed and grazed by Thompson’s writings way back when will be sorely jilted by this simplistic reduction of the writer’s work and experiences to bald-faced buffoonery.
