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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (film)
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a 1998 film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo.
Previous attempts to adapt the book into a film included Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando as Duke and Gonzo. At one point, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered for the duo; John Cusack was also almost cast. Animator/filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone all tried unsuccessfully to direct an adaptation.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a 1998 film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo.
Previous attempts to adapt the book into a film included Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando as Duke and Gonzo. At one point, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered for the duo; John Cusack was also almost cast. Animator/filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone all tried unsuccessfully to direct an adaptation. Thompson met Depp and was convinced no one else could play him. Filmmaker Alex Cox was eventually hired to direct with Depp and Del Toro committed to starring in the film, but the filmmaker had "creative differences" with Thompson over the script treatment as documented in the documentary Breakfast with Hunter. Gilliam was subsequently hired and made the film with the writer's approval.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a box office failure, grossing USD $10.6 million at the North American box office, well below its $18.5 million budget. It has since become a cult classic due in large part to its release on DVD, including a Special Edition released by The Criterion Collection.
Plot
Journalist Raoul Duke (Depp) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (del Toro) travel to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1971 to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race for a sports magazine, and experience a haphazardly-planned vacation. The working vacation is experienced while the two consume copious amounts of illegal drugs and alcohol, commit various acts of fraud, and generally wreak havoc upon the citizens of Las Vegas.
Cast
Author Hunter S. Thompson also has a brief cameo in the film while Duke has a flashback to a San Francisco music club, The Matrix, where Thompson can be seen sitting at a table as Depp walks by narrating his inner monologue, "There I was... Mother of God, There I am! Holy Fuck!"
Production and history
Basis for characters
Dr. Gonzo is based on Thompson's friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, who disappeared sometime in 1974. Thompson changed Zeta Acosta's ethnic identity to "Samoan" to deflect suspicion from Zeta Acosta, who was in trouble with the L.A. Legal Bar. He was the "Chicano lawyer" notorious for his party binges.
Previous attempts
During the initial development to get the film made, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando were originally considered for the roles of Duke and Gonzo but he and Brando both grew too old. Afterward, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered for the duo, but that fell apart when Belushi died. John Malkovich was later considered for the role of Duke, but he too grew too old. At one point John Cusack was almost cast, but after Hunter S. Thompson met with Johnny Depp he became convinced that no one else could play him. Cusack had previously directed the play version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with his brother playing Duke.
Animator/filmmaker Ralph Bakshi tried to convince a girlfriend of Hunter S. Thompson to let him do Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as an animated movie, done in the style of Ralph Steadman's illustrations for the book. Bakshi is quoted as saying: "Hunter had given the rights to a girlfriend of his. I spent three days with her trying to talk her into me animating it - she wanted to make a live action of it - I kept telling her that a live action would look like a bad cartoon but an animated version would be a great one. She had a tremendous disdain for animators because it wasn't considered the top of Hollywood. Hunter also could not make her change her mind. So she made the pic with Johnny Depp, and got the film I told her she would get - it would have been more real in a cartoon using Steadman's drawings."
Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone each tried to get the film off the ground, but were unsuccessful and moved on.
Rhino Films began work on a film version as early as 1992. Head of Production and the film's producer Stephen Nemeth originally wanted Lee Tamahori to direct, but he wasn't available until after the January 1997 start date. Rhino appealed to Thompson for an extension on the movie rights but the author and his lawyers denied the extension. Under pressure, Rhino countered by green-lighting the film and hiring Alex Cox to direct within a few days. According to Nemeth, Cox could "Do it for a price, could do it quickly and could get this movie going in four months."
Cox started writing the screenplay with Tod Davies, a UCLA Thompson scholar. Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro then committed to starring in the film. During pre-production, Cox and producer Laila Nabulsi had "creative differences" and she forced Rhino to choose between her and Cox. She had an arrangement with Thompson to produce the movie and the studio fired Cox and paid him $60,000 in script fees. Thompson's disapproval of the Cox/Davies script treatment is documented in the film Breakfast with Hunter, in which he rails against the writers for planning an animated portrayal of the "wave speech," which he considered "probably the finest thing [he'd] ever written."
Pre-production
Rhino hired Terry Gilliam and was granted an extension from Thompson but only with the stipulation that the director made the movie. Rhino did not want to commit to Gilliam in case he didn't work out. Thompson remembers, "They just kept asking for more [time]. I got kind of agitated about it, because I thought they were trying to put off doing it. So I began to charge them more... I wanted to see the movie done, once it got started." The studio threatened to make the film with Cox and without Depp and del Toro. The two actors were upset when Nabulsi told them of Rhino's plans. Universal Pictures stepped in to distribute the film and Depp and Gilliam were paid $500,000 each but the director still did not have a firm deal in place. In retaliation, Depp and Gilliam locked Rhino out of the set during filming.
The decision was made to not use the Cox/Davies script which gave Gilliam only ten days to write another. The director enlisted the help of Tony Grisoni and they wrote the script at Gilliam's home in May 1997. Grisoni remembers, "I'd sit at the keyboard, and we'd talk and talk and I'd keep typing." One of the most important scenes from the book that Gilliam wanted to put in the film was the confrontation between Duke and Dr. Gonzo and the waitress of the North Star Coffee Lounge. The director said, "This is two guys who have gone beyond the pale, this is unforgivable - that scene, it's ugly. My approach, rather than to throw it out, was to make that scene the low point."
The lead actors undertook extraordinary preparations for their respective roles. Del Toro gained more than 45 pounds (18 kg) in nine weeks before filming began, and extensively researched Acosta's life. In the Spring of 1997, Depp moved into the basement of Thompson's Owl Farm home and lived there for four months, doing research for the role as well as studying Thompson's habits and mannerisms. The actor went through Thompson's original manuscript, mementos and notebooks that he kept during the actual trip. Depp remembers, "He saved it all. Not only is [the book] true, but there's more. And it was worse." Depp even traded his car for Thompson's red Chevrolet Impala convertible, known to fans as The Great Red Shark, and drove it around California during his preparation for the role. Many of the costumes that Depp wears in the film are genuine articles of clothing that Depp borrowed from Thompson, and the writer himself shaved Depp's head to match his own natural male pattern baldness. Other props, such as Duke's cigarette filter (a TarGard Permanent Filter System), Hawaiian shirts, hats, a patchwork jacket, a silver medallion (given to him by Oscar Acosta) and IDs, belonged to Thompson.
Initially, the studio wanted Gilliam to update the book for the 1990s which he considered, "And then I looked at the film and said, 'No, that's apologizing. I don't want to apologize for this thing. It is what it is.' It's an artifact. If it's an accurate representation of that book, which I thought was an accurate representation of a particular time and place and people."
Principal photography
According to Gilliam, there was no firm budget in place when filming started. Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini was hired based on an audition reel he sent Gilliam that made fun of the fact that he had only one eye (he lost the other to retinal cancer). According to Pecorini, the look of the film was influenced by the paintings of Robert Yarber that are "Very hallucinatory: the paintings use all kinds of neon colors, and the light sources don't necessarily make sense." According to Gilliam, they used him as a guide "While mixing our palette of deeply disturbing fluorescent colors."
Shooting on location in Las Vegas began on August 3, 1997 and lasted 56 days. The production ran into problems when they wanted to shoot in a casino. They were only allowed to film between two and six in the morning, given only six tables to put extras around and insisted that the extras really gamble." Exterior shots of the Bazooko Casino were filmed in front of the Stardust hotel/casino with the interiors constructed with a Warner Brothers Hollywood soundstage. In order to get the period look of Vegas in the 1970s, Gilliam and Pecorini used rear-projection footage from the old television show, Vega$. According to the cinematographer, this footage heightened the film's "already otherworldly tone an extra notch."
For the desert scenes, Pecorini wanted a specific, undefined quality without a real horizon in order to convey the notion that the landscape never ended and to emphasize, "A certain kind of unreality outside the characters' car, because everything that matters to them is within the Red Shark." With the scene where Duke hallucinates a lounge full of lizards, the production was supposed to have 25 animatronic reptiles but they only received seven or eight. The production used motion-control techniques to make it look like they had a whole room of them and made multiple passes with the cameras outfitting the lizards with different costumes each time.
Gilliam 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." 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."
While making the movie, it was Gilliam's intention that it should feel like a drug trip from beginning to end. He said in an interview, "We start out at full speed and it's WOOOO! The drug kicks in and you're on speed! Whoah! You get the buzz - it's crazy, it's outrageous, the carpet's moving and everybody's laughing and having a great time. But then, ever so slowly, the walls start closing in and it's like you're never going to get out of this fucking place. It's an ugly nightmare and there's no escape."
To convey the effects of the various drugs, Gilliam and Pecorini assembled a list of "phases" that detailed the "cinematic qualities" of each drug consumed. For ether, Pecorini said they used a "loose depth of field; everything becomes non-defined"; for adrenochrome, "everything gets narrow and claustrophobic, move closer with lens"; mescaline was simulated by having "colors melt into each other, flares with no sources, play with color temperatures"; for amyl nitrite, the "perception of light gets very uneven, light levels increase and decrease during the shots"; and for LSD, "everything extremely wide, hallucinations via morphs, shapes, colors, and sound."
Writers credit dispute with WGA
When the film approached release, Gilliam learned that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) would not allow Cox and Davies to be removed from the credits even though none of their material was used in the production of the film. According to WGA rules, Gilliam and Grisoni had to prove that they wrote 60% of their script. The director said, "But there have been at least five previous attempts at adapting the book, and they all come from the book. They all use the same scenes." Gilliam remarked in an interview, "The end result was we didn't exist. As a director, I was automatically deemed a 'production executive' by the guild and, by definition, discriminated against. But for Tony to go without any credit would be really unfair." David Kanter, agent for Cox and Davies, argued, "About 60 percent of the decisions they made on what stays in from the book are in the film - as well as their attitude of wide-eyed anarchy." According to the audio commentary by Gilliam on the Criterion Collection DVD, during the period where it appeared that only Cox and Davies would be credited for the screenplay, the movie was to begin with a short scene in which it is explained that no matter what is said in the credits, no writers were involved in the making of the movie. When this changed in early May 1998 after the WGA revised its decision and gave credit to Gilliam and Grisoni first and Cox and Davies second, the short was not needed. Angered over having to share credit, Gilliam publicly burned his WGA card at a May 22 book signing on Broadway.
Reception
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas underwent preview test screenings - a process that Gilliam does not enjoy. "I always get very tense in those (test screenings), because I'm ready to fight. I know the pressure from the studio is, 'somebody didn't like that, change it!'" The filmmaker said that it was important to him that Thompson like the movie and recalls the writer's reaction at a screening, "Hunter watched it for the first time at the premiere and he was making all this fucking noise! Apparently it all came flooding back to him, he was reliving the whole trip! He was yelling out and jumping on his seat like it was a roller coaster, ducking and diving, shouting 'SHIT! LOOK OUT! GODDAMN BATS!' That was fantastic – if he thought we'd captured it, then we must have done it!" Thompson himself stated, "Yeah, I liked it. It's not my show, but I appreciated it. Depp did a hell of a job. His narration is what really held the film together, I think. If you hadn't had that, it would have just been a series of wild scenes."
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and Gilliam said, "I'm curious about the reaction...If I'm going to be disappointed, it's because it doesn't make any waves, that people are not outraged." The film opened in wide release on May 22, 1998 and grossed $3.3 million in 1,126 theaters on its first weekend. The film went on to gross $10.6 million, well below its budget of $18.5 million but it was not considered a financial disaster.
Critical reaction to the film was mixed. It currently has a 49% rating (and a 0% "Cream of the Crop" designation) on Rotten Tomatoes. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "Even the most precise cinematic realizations of Mr. Thompson's images (and of Ralph Steadman's cartoon drawings for the book) don't begin to match the surreal ferocity of the author's language." Stephen Hunter, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote, "It tells no story at all. Little episodes of no particular import come and go...But the movie is too grotesque to be entered emotionally." Mike Clark, of USA Today, found the film, "simply unwatchable." In The Guardian, Gaby Wood wrote, "After a while, though, the ups and downs don't come frequently enough even for the audience, and there's an element of the tedium usually found in someone else's druggy experiences."
Michael O'Sullivan gave the film one of its rare positive reviews in the Washington Post. "What elevates the tale from being a mere drug chronicle is the same thing that lifted the book into the realm of literature. It's the sense that Gilliam, like Thompson, is always totally in command of the medium, while abandoning himself utterly to unpredictable forces beyond his control." Gene Siskel's "thumbs-up" review at the time also noted the movie successfully captured the book's themes into film, adding "What the film is about and what the book is about is using Las Vegas as a metaphor for - or a location for - the worst of America, the extremes of America, the money obsession, the visual vulgarity of America." Gilliam wanted to provoke strong reactions to his film as he said in an interview, "I want it to be seen as one of the great movies of all time, and one of the most hated movies of all time."
Empire magazine voted the film the 469th greatest film in their "500 Greatest Movies of All Time" list.
Soundtrack
The soundtrack contains songs used in the film with clips of the movie before each song. So considering this each song starts about 30 seconds later than it would normally. The soundtrack contains mostly the music of that time with a few exceptions; one being the Dead Kennedys rendition of "Viva Las Vegas" and others being Debbie Reynolds' "Tammy", Perry Como's "Magic Moments" and "Ball and Chain" by Janis Joplin. The Rolling Stones song "Jumping Jack Flash" is heard at the conclusion of the film as Thompson drives out of Las Vegas.
Gilliam could not pay $300,000 (half of the soundtrack budget) for the rights to "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, which plays a prominent role in the book.
Track listing
- "Combination of the Two" by Big Brother and the Holding Company
- "One Toke Over the Line" by Brewer & Shipley
- "She's a Lady" by Tom Jones
- "For Your Love" by The Yardbirds
- "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane
- "A Drug Score - Part 1 (Acid Spill)" by Tomoyasu Hotei & Ray Cooper
- "Get Together" by The Youngbloods
- "Mama Told Me Not to Come" by Three Dog Night
- "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" by Bob Dylan
- "Time Is Tight" by Booker T. & the MG's
- "Magic Moments" by Perry Como
- "A Drug Score - Part 2 (Adrenochrome, The Devil's Dance)" by Tomoyasu Hotei & Ray Cooper
- "Tammy" by Debbie Reynolds
- "A Drug Score - Part 3 (Flashbacks)" by Tomoyasu Hotei & Ray Cooper
- "Expecting to Fly" by Buffalo Springfield
- "Viva Las Vegas" by Dead Kennedys
DVD
By the time Fear and Loathing was released as a Criterion Collection DVD in 2003, Thompson showed his approval of the Gilliam version by recording a full-length audio commentary for the movie and participating in several DVD special features.
On an audio commentary track in the Criterion edition of the DVD, Gilliam expresses great pride in the film and says it was one of the few times where he did not have to fight extensively with the studio during the filming. Gilliam chalks this up to the fact that many of the studio executives read Thompson's book in their youth and understood it could not be made into a conventional Hollywood film. However, he does express frustration with the advertising campaign used during its initial release, which he says tried to sell it as wacky comedy. The film was later released by Universal Studios on HD DVD.
See also
External links
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