#hunter s thompson the crazy never die

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Jim and Artie Mitchell’s Hunter S. Thompson: The Crazy Never Die(1988)

The Mitchell Brothers, the San Francisco pornographers who made Behind the Green Door (1973), made this 30-minute documentary about the famed New Journalist. You get to see the great writer mumbling some jabs at Reagan in front of appreciative audiences, firing guns, jittering around the office, golfing, and hanging out with naked girls (oh, those Mitchells!). He predicts that Reagan’s presidency will devolve into a scandal “much worse that Watergate,” but I guess hindsight is 20/20. He also trashes Garry Trudeau (“that filthy little animal!”), who turned Thompson into “Uncle Duke” in his Doonesbury comic strip. Bon mots like “Almost all politicians and lawyers should be castrated so their genes don’t pass along” seem fairly thin sauce from the social satirist and prose stylist behind Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Maybe the crazy never die, but they sure do fade away.*

*(Well, except in the case of poor Artie Mitchell, who became a hopeless cocaine addict and was shot to death in 1991 by Jim, who claimed self-defense. Jim Mitchell served three years in San Quentin, and went back to running the brothers’ famous O'Farrell Theatre, which I bet was pretty gloomy by that time. He died in 2007. You can see his side of the story in Emilio Estevez’s Rated X, starring Estevez as Jim and Charlie Sheen as Artie).