Unfortunately, Hunter went to rest with the Lords of Karma with The Rum Diary very much in limbo. Johnny displayed his enormous love and respect by making Hunter’s outrageous funeral wish possible, as documented in When I Die. And, then Johnny did something even more important to Hunter: he kept The Rum Diary alive. Now it’s finally a movie, opening in theaters in just a few days. No doubt, the Beast is stirring and quite pleased.

Tracey Jacobs, Johnny’s dedicated agent from the beginning of his career, having booked him on the TV series “Twenty-One Jump Street” in the 80′s – set up a day long series of pitch meetings for them. Johnny graciously offered the Tiki Hut by the pool in his backyard as a venue, and we arrived early in the afternoon and stayed until almost midnight. Johnny’s mansion in Hollywood is reported to have been built for Bela Lugosi, and those who have seen Breakfast with Hunter will remember the scene I shot at 4am inside with Hunter and Johnny almost two years earlier.

That cool day in December was truly a marathon for all, but we still had fun. The ultimate test for Hunter was always “will it be fun.” Not a bad rule for living.

1999 was the year in which The Blair Witch Project had made a phenomenal amount of money at the box office as the result of the first guerrilla internet movie marketing campaign. The success of Blair Witch caused the Intermedia executives – Nigel Sinclair and Kathy Goodman – to think that strategy could be applied to a project involving Hunter. Given the lightning like evolution of the internet, it’s hard to remember how novel the world wide web was in 1999, but while filming the conversation I was thinking the whole time “I’m shooting it already, guys!”

This is the first of two webisodes in this series set in the Tiki Hut. Watching Johnny and Hunter together in these scenes will give you a sense of their relationship more, I think, than any interview could possible tell. They truly loved and respected each other.

Now having seen The Rum Diary at the world premiere last Thursday night in LA, I can safely say that Hunter would be extremely pleased with the movie that Johnny is finally releasing twelve years later. If nothing else, it’s a lot of FUN!

While enduring this bleak reality, a twenty-two year old Hunter Thompson began writing The Rum Diary. Thirty-eight years later, he finished the novel in the summer of 1998, as you can witness here in Episode Three of The Rum Diary Back-Story.

Hunter’s 1960 letter pleading for help continues:

“I can’t even get to people. I don’t know where they are. I am 13 miles from San Juan in a negro community and not a goat-sucking soul speaks English. I must have FOOD. The swine seems to think that I am above eating. Jesus ate – why can’t I? Oh God give me the strength to dump in their eyes.”

Hunter had hope for more than starvation in Puerto Rico. In 1959, he saw an ad in Editor & Publisher for a sports editor position at the San Juan Star – an English language daily somewhat like that depicted in The Rum Diary. But, his cheeky letter applying for the job was rejected by the editor – William Kennedy, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Ironweed. Hunter’s reply to Kennedy was classic Gonzo:

“your letter was cute my friend, and your interpretation of my letter was beautifully typical of the cretin-intellect responsible for the dry-rot of the American press. But don’t think that an invitation from you will keep me from getting down that way, and when I do remind me to first kick your teeth out and then jam a bronze plaque far into your small intestine.” HST letter to William Kennedy, August 30, 1959

After being rejected by the San Juan Star, Hunter applied for a job at the Puerto Rico Bowling News and was rejected. Determined to get to Puerto Rico, he applied to a new English language weekly bowling publication – El Sportivo – and was accepted. Only a few months after he arrived in Puerto Rico, El Sportivo folded, leaving Hunter with no pay and no food.

Hunter had an amazing ability to insult people into deep, long-lasting friendships, and that odd talent somehow affected Kennedy since they became lifetime friends following their series of acidic letters in 1959.

This unusual talent to berate people into friendship comes into play in later episodes of The Rum Diary Back-Story as Hunter battles to have his novel turned into a movie.

To be continued.

Stay tuned and click on “RSS feed” above right to be automatically notified of new episodes.

Just as Hunter’s inimitable traits provided the inspiration for the lead character Paul Kemp in The Rum Diary (played by Johnny Depp in the movie), Hunter reveals at the end of this Episode that Sandy was the model for the character Chennault (played by Amber Heard in the film). Like Amber, Sandy was clearly a gorgeous young woman. This picture taken by Hunter in Puerto Rico can be found in Gonzo an excellent, over-sized book of Hunter’s photos. He obsessively documented his life and times with a keen eye. I highly recommend the book, which also has an insightful, well-written introduction by Johnny Depp.

“I live 5 miles from town, on the beach, 4- room house, motor scooter, no job, writing freelance stuff for Stateside newspapers, also fiction, so many bugs I can barely breathe, wife here and cooking, no money, vagrant artist from New York also living here, all in all life is not bad.” The Proud Highway, letter from Loiz Aldea, Puerto Rico 5/25/1960

Given Hunter’s incredible sense of self (who else would saved almost every letter they wrote, certain they would be published one day?) he undoubtedly figured that his life in Puerto Rico was like a movie, and sure enough, now that’s true. The question is: would Hunter like what Johnny Depp and the director Bruce Robinson have done with his story? Having seen quite a bit of the film, my guess is he’s smiling right now as he rests up for his eventual return to this world as a “Road man for the Lords of Karma,” as he predicted in Breakfast with Hunter.

This is Episode One, and it begins, like most days back when my friend Hunter was still alive, with a phone call.  Now when the phone rings at 3am, I know it can only be trouble.  Back then, they were calls to action and fun.  At one point, I planned to structure my first film about Hunter – Breakfast with Hunter – with these messages Hunter left me over the years.

The living room interview conducted by Timothy Ferris is one of the few times we purposely set up such a formal scene, as if his good friend Ed Bradley had come to interview Hunter for “60 Minutes.”  We were actually trying to make an “EPK” – Electronic Press Kit – to promote the upcoming release of The Rum Diary in the fall of 1998 after spending the previous six months editing the book, along with Doug Brinkley, Curtis Robinson, Marysue Rucci of Simon & Schuster, and Heidi Opheim – Hunter’s assistant and girl-friend at the time

Hunter always liked to respond to intelligent questions, and sometimes when the words were terminally blocked between his brain and mouth or typewriter, we would resort to questions and answers.  Science writer Timothy Ferris was a respected friend from their days in the seventies at Rolling Stone, and Hunter flew him in from San Francisco to lead the conversation.  Heidi operated the second camera on Ferris and did a great job under the kind of pressure only Hunter could invoke.

Simon & Schuster’s marketing department ignored the EPK, making no use of it whatsoever, and we were quite disappointed at the time.  Funny how things turn out: now it seems perfect that these scenes will be viewed on the internet, like long lost pictographs on the wall of an electronic cave, reflecting the unique vision of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and the persistence of his fine friend and great actor – Johnny Depp – to bring Hunter’s wild and infectious way of living to the wide screen.

This is the first of ten (10) webisodes that I will be releasing here at least once a week leading up to The Rum Diary opening on October 28.  Subscribe to the “RSS Feed” above right to be automatically notified or check back for more.

It was a brave act for a self-proclaimed “elderly dope fiend” to call out the pigs in the Denver Police and challenge them to a street fight. But, as the Road Manager on this trip down from Woody Creek, I saw nothing but trouble, even though our entourage included Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, and famed criminal defense lawyer Gerald Goldstein. The Sheriff was actually a liability since he had no authority in Denver and his public stance against drug enforcement made him an additional attractive target for the cops. Goldstein, on the other hand, would at least make our bail.

I figured my video camera was our best defense. If nothing else when we got busted, I’d have an interesting scene for my work-in-progress – Breakfast with Hunter – and interesting evidence for the inevitable trial later on. Ultimately, my footage from that trip became the heart of my third film about Hunter – Free Lisl: Fear & Loathing in Denver.

The last week in Woody Creek preparing for the Free Lisl Rally had been intense. Hunter’s son and daughter-in-law – Juan and Jennifer Thompson – were working with a Denver public relations person – Matt Moseley – on the details of the rally which Hunter was both hosting and funding. Endless phone calls about the mechanics of the event – security, the sound system, the order of appearances, etc. – keep Hunter on edge…exactly where he liked to be. The rally was set for Monday, May 14, 2001, and Monday was also the day when Hunter’s weekly “Hey Rube” column had to be filed for ESPN.com.

Hunter was eager to write about the Free Lisl rally for the column, but since his was ostensibly a sports column, getting this subject accepted by ESPN was far from certain. The editors at ESPN had allowed Hunter once before to write a bit about the case of Lisl Auman – a 21 year old convicted of a cop killing that someone she had just met committed while she was handcuffed in the back of a police car. The response on the web was overwhelming – ESPN claimed 100,000 clicks on his piece – and now Hunter hoped to write a complete column just about Lisl’s case and Monday’s rally to be published the day of the rally.

For Hunter writing was never easy. To witness this excruciating process was like watching gooey paint dry with odd moments of humor and ill temper thrown into the mix. You can see for yourself in my last film- Animals, Whores & Dialogue – which revolves around a long night of trying to write a column.

The rhythm of writing the column usually entailed getting a lead down by midnight Sunday followed by at least another 1000 words to be written and filed by the time Hunter went to bed on Monday morning. I’d usually stay around until the lead got written and then Anita would somehow miraculously finish the piece with Hunter by dawn. Given the rally on Monday in Denver, this one would have to find its way onto paper much earlier.

Hunter was a professional in this case, given his dedication to freeing Lisl. By Saturday he had over half the column written, and by Sunday it was done, and sent off to ESPN in time for us to get on a chartered plane to Denver, courtesy of Gerry Goldstein.

Hunter put us all up at his favorite hotel in Denver – The Brown Palace – footing the bill for at least a half dozen rooms, including the Sheriff, journalist Curtis Robinson, historian Douglas Brinkley, and songwriter Warren Zevon. The bar at the Brown Palace – The Ship’s Tavern – became our new headquarters, just as the bar at the Jerome Hotel in Aspen was Hunter’s de facto campaign headquarters when he ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County.

If nothing else, Hunter was a superb politician. How else can you explain the fact that he almost became Sheriff in 1970 on a campaign of Freak Power? Now, thirty years later, Hunter’s acute political instincts were aided by years of successfully manipulating the media and turning himself into an icon with his own Gonzo brand. His effort to free Lisl Auman was his last and most successful political campaign, and his most significant achievement in the last years of his life.

Lisl’s lawyers were fearful that Hunter would create a back lash. Her first appeal was scheduled to be filed the day of the Free Lisl Rally.

Hunter’s boss at ESPN, John Walsh woke me up on Monday morning with a phone call to my room at The Brown Palace. I was ready to hear that ESPN had rejected the column entirely, but Mr. Walsh seemed relatively unperturbed and said that they had done some editing and were faxing a copy of the approved column to me to give to Hunter.

Looking back now at the original version and comparing it to what ESPN finally published, it’s notable what they left out – an amazing riff and against police brutality and treachery. Some edits for other columns were restored for the book of his ESPN columns, also called Hey Rube, but these words were left behind:

Police atrocities are common in cities like Denver, Cincinnati and New Orleans. Police in L.A. and Long Island have recently admitted making women they pull over for speeding strip naked and perform oral sex on them. That happens everywhere, all the time. It is standard practice in Texas and Florida.

A bit of Gonzo reporting – exaggerated, yet true – but over the top for ESPN. Fortunately, ESPN did keep a central passage about standing up for what’s right:

It is very Important to learn early in life, that you CAN beat City Hall, and that You Can change the System. You might be beaten and gassed by Police a few times before you succeed – but that stuff goes with the territory. And you will be proud of it later, just as you will make smart friends who will stand with you all your life.

Hunter was so relieved that the Free Lisl column would be published that he did not fight for the deleted screed against police brutality. In the end, his main bitch with ESPN was how they changed his title for the piece from his words:

THE MOST DANGEROUS SPORT OF ALL

To theirs:

GOING TO WAR FOR JUSTICE

If nothing else, Hunter’s title was meant to justify the piece as a “sports” column.

We stayed in Denver for one more night after the rally, hanging out in Hunter’s suite at the Brown Palace and in the Ship’s Tavern, celebrating our success. Personally, I would have preferred to leave straight from the Capitol for Woody Creek. Why the cops hadn’t already busted us at this point for just being in Denver was a mystery to me.

My paranoia level went even higher when I learned that the Doorman at the Brown Palace was the son of the former Denver Police Chief. Shortly after getting this vital piece of intel, I went to retrieve our rental car for the ride back to Aspen. The police chief’s son, dressed like some Queen’s Beefeater, said that he had “lost” our car keys, but was hopeful that he might find them “soon” so we could leave.

I immediately ran to the rental agency and rented two cars, and then, drove back to the Brown in one car with a rental guy driving the other. I parked them both in front of the main entrance, locked the doors, and took the keys, despite the Doorman’s protest. Upstairs I collected Hunter and Anita, all our bags, and most importantly, my video camera.

As we emerged from the front door of the Brown, the Doorman led us to our cars, eyeing the video camera that I held up with it’s red light on so everyone could see I was recording. Thus, a Sony DCR VX-1000 had become our only means of protection during the Escape from Denver.

I asked Anita to drive Hunter’s car while I followed in my rental, openly videotaping our progress with the raised camera, hoping this might give some pause to a mass of pissed off Denver cops I was convinced were waiting to swarm us before we reached the city limits. The first few blocks went smoothly, except the emergency lights were flashing on Hunter’s car. Suddenly, Anita pulled over in a No Standing area on W. Colfax. I couldn’t believe that we were now sitting ducks, giving the cops the pretext they needed to swoop down. I pulled up behind them, got out and ran up to the car as Anita emerged.

“What’s wrong.” I implored.

“He wants to drive,” she said with resignation.

And, so he did, driving like a maniac to the edge of town and beyond. I shadowed him as best I could until he pulled off the freeway at the exit for Buffalo Bill’s Grave at Lookout Mountain. “Perfect,” I thought as I continued on up the road to Woody Creek.

Anita reported later that it was the most terrifying ride of her live. She huddled under a blanket on the floor in the back of the car most of the way home.

As for Lisl Auman, almost four years later and a few weeks after Hunter’s suicide, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in her favor, reversing her conviction and remanding for a new trial. A plea bargain set her free, although she remains on probation for many years to come.

Copyright 2011 By Wayne Ewing

Every December there was a Christmas tree decorated in the living room at Owl Farm, and in January, Deborah Fuller – Hunter’s dedicated secretary for two decades – would take down the tree, but leave it either on the porch or by the wood pile out front in case Hunter wanted to burn it.

On January 9, 1990, Hunter had a visitor from Time Magazine, a reporter who Deborah remembers by a first name of Allen, but his surname has been lost unless he happens to read this and corrects the record.

“Let’s give the journalist a memorable experience to write about,” declared Hunter. “He needs to learn how to burn the creosote out of a chimney. We can’t run the risk of a chimney fire during the year.”

Of course, there’s a fine line between burning the creosote out of a chimney and starting a creosote fire that burns at 2100 Degrees Fahrenheit and sounds like a jet airplane taking off just before it explodes through the sides of your chimney and burns down a log cabin style house like Owl Farm.

In preparation, Deborah gathered all the fire extinguishers in the living room, while Hunter set up a video camera since I wasn’t there to shoot it. (I was back East, finishing a TV special for NBC News with Tom Brokaw called “The New Hollywood.” Believe me, Hunter was a hell of a lot more interesting to hang out with than Tom Brokaw, but as they say in show business: “Theater is life. Film is art. TV is rent.”)

I used some of Hunter’s Christmas tree video in Breakfast with Hunter when Ralph Steadman reads from a 1995 Time/Life book titled “The Enigma of Personality” which so far as I know is the only printed reference to the burning of the Christmas tree other than interviews in which I have mentioned it. Allen the Time Magazine reporter seems to have produced only this anecdote for the book and nowhere else from his 1990 winter’s journey to Owl Farm, but somebody please correct me in the comments section below if I’m wrong on this point.

Visitors to Owl Farm usually came in search of an experience with Hunter that would make a good story whether they were journalists or fans, and Hunter always delivered. But, the story wasn’t necessarily what they expected. In this case, Hunter got more than he bargained for as well; you can see how desperately he pokes at the burning Christmas tree, trying to contain the raging fire. The heavy wooden mantle still has the burn marks to this day.

Before he put the tree in the fireplace, there was a small fire burning already. The mass of the tree almost snuffed out the first fire when he jammed it in, so Hunter threatened to splash lighter fluid on it. In the original video, you can barely hear Deborah and Allen screaming, “NO, HUNTER DON’T DO IT” above the Cowboy Junkies playing “Misguided Angel” at maximum volume over the array of living room speakers.

I said ‘mama he’s crazy and he scares me
But I want him by my side
Though he’s wild and he’s bad
And sometimes just plain mad
I need him to keep me satisfied’
(lyrics by Margo Timmons & Michael Edward Timmons)

Hunter gets a bit of lighter fluid onto the tree, and then throws a match after it, creating the conflagration you see in the film and then in the aftermath below. The flames were coming out of the top of the chimney in a four foot cone of fire, like the exhaust of a jet engine. Hunter, Deborah and Allen retreated to the front porch where Hunter taped the inferno with pride. No one remembered to carry out the manuscript of the latest book in progress which was lying on the living room table.

That evening Hunter played his video back over and over again, sometimes in slow motion, marveling at the scene he had dared to create. After that night, Deborah never left the used Christmas tree close at hand ever again.

Copyright 2010 by Wayne Ewing

“He taught me how to gamble,” I replied, without even thinking about it.

Those were expensive lessons in the beginning. One Sunday, Hunter got me going worse than Harvey Keitel in The Bad Lieutenant who cineastes will remember kept doubling down on successive games in the World Series on his way to death. For me, a mild losing streak on the early games that Sunday, turned into a total disaster as I kept doubling down and losing every bet. By the end of the evening game my debt to Hunter was $800. It never occurred to me that I would not pay. I just didn’t have the money. Fortunately, my brother bailed me out.

Hunter had closely studied the habits of amateur gamblers, as he wrote in his “Hey Rube” column for ESPN.com in December, 2001 called “Skunks Like Me.”

The Holiday season is always a bad time of year for amateur gambling addicts. They are weak people, as a rule, and they are not built for grueling long-distance work….Gambling losses that seemed harmless in October have swollen out of control when Christmas rolls around. The math is working against you and Doom and Disaster have taken on a personal meaning….I know these things from many years of close personal association, to put it gently, with the Debt Collection business.

Hunter told me that one football season, when he had little money, he got so deeply in debt to a Bookie that he saw no way out.

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of brutal things; of broken legs and shattered dreams, of bleeding eyes and whores….(also from “Skunks like me” and note the usual reference to “whores” as in my latest film about Hunter Animals, Whores & Dialogue)

But the Bookie had a backup plan for Hunter. They always do. The Bookie explained that he and his “friends” had scheduled Hunter on a lecture tour (one of the ways Hunter supported himself in the 70′s and 80′s, as did Mark Twain). All Hunter had to do was get up in time for the show and the Bookie and his friends would take care of everything else: food, lodging, limos and, most importantly, the lecture fees which they kept. Hunter said it was the most well organized tour he ever did and the only one where he showed up on time for every lecture.

While gambling was the fuel that drove the scene during football games at Owl Farm, the experience transcended money. The betting made you pay attention to the game and created an atmosphere of fun – the same kind of fun that kids were looking for, as Hunter’s Mother reported, when they hung on his front porch in Louisville for hours, waiting for him to come out and play when he was just six years old.

The usual game bet was twenty bucks with point spreads negotiated with individual bettors by Hunter. You had to beware of divulging the spread he gave you when a new rube came in the room, or suffer serious abuse. Side bets provided the real action and they could be on anything and in any amount. And, the “action” was the real attraction for us all, not the money.

The basic pre-game bets are more like the price of admission to the back room of a very exclusive fight club than a casual invitation to “watch the game at a friendly neighbor’s house.

The side bet action is modeled roughly on the rules that apply in any cockfighting arena. Wagers are offered out loud to all parties, and accepted with a nod of the head or a recognizable hand signal by anyone in the room with cash.from “Skunks like Me”

The only house advantage for Hunter was that he won all “pushes” where the bet came out even between the two parties. We all figured that was more than fair, since he provided a well-stocked venue with an endless supply of beer in the refrigerator and bottles of every imaginable whiskey on top.

Given all the filming I did in the kitchen of Owl Farm over the years, it’s surprising that I only shot one football game, but I guess I was just having too much fun. Super Bowl Sunday in 2002 appears in Breakfast with Hunter. Hunter’s lawyer friends were invited, and he put signs on all the good chairs saying “Bettors Only.” He let me film for a few minutes, and then asked me to quit. Football and betting were more important than possibly squirreling the mood with my two cameras. Nevertheless the short scene does give you a feel for the room.

Ironically, at half-time Hunter started lobbying the lawyers to help him free Lisl Auman from a life sentence without parole (see my film Free Lisl: Fear & Loathing in Denver). Invitations to Owl Farm during football season were highly coveted, especially by lawyers. It was truly a symbiotic relationship. They all loved to imagine they might be the new Dr. Gonzo – lawyer Oscar Acosta in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas – and Hunter was a connoisseur of the trade due to his lifestyle. It was always a matter of when he would need a lawyer, not whether or not he might need one. I still have a laminated card in the back of my wallet that Anita made up for emergencies with the bedside numbers of every lawyer in this scene.

But the lawyers were not the best bettors, certainly not on a level with my brother Drew who Hunter truly loved. Drew is a paraplegic and when he would come to visit me for Christmas he would bring a foldout metal ramp in the back of his pickup that we would install for the season on Hunter’s front steps. That way if I couldn’t make it, Drew could always get into the kitchen on his own to gamble with Hunter. We appear first as characters in “Skunks Like Me.”

My winnings on the first two games were so gratifying that I swelled up with hubris and disregarded my own rules and fell into boozing and babbling. Two brothers from South Carolina lured me into getting so greedy that I went against my previous bets on the Baltimore game by doubling up on both teams at different point spreads.

That is called a Middle, and it is very risky business.

We beat him that Sunday night and “pranced around like Peacocks” in the first draft of the column (which was true), but by the time it went to press we had made him “the butt of degrading jokes.” (which was not true)

But not for long. Ho ho. Those same two evil bastards came back Monday night for the Rams- Saints game, and I beat them like gongs. They lost everything and I loved it. So let this be a lesson to weaklings who cave in to their Gambling jones. Do Not Double Up. That is all ye know and all ye need to know.

That is what I learned from Hunter – how to gamble, and more importantly, how to have fun with your friends while watching twenty-two men wage warfare over a pigskin. The last couple of years I probably broke even, and might even have made a bit of money betting on football with Hunter. The last time my brother and I spent an evening with Hunter was during the playoffs in 2005 a little more than a month before he killed himself.

The suicide note that Hunter left open in his spiral notebook on the counter had the heading “Football Season is Over.” Unfortunately, he was right for the short play, but terribly wrong at long yardage. There will always be another Football Season.

This Monday night it’s Green Bay minus 3 at Chicago. I’m taking Green Bay, Hunter.

An amanuensis is a scribe or writer’s assistant “employed by an individual to write from his or her dictation or to copy manuscripts” (from Encarta World English Dictionary) – exactly what I came to be with my camera for Dr. Hunter S. Thompson over a very long period of time. Writing was never easy for Hunter. I don’t think it is for anyone, no matter how successful they are. But, Hunter took the task to extreme levels of frustration and exasperation, as you can see in my latest film Animals, Whores & Dialogue.

When the going got too tough to actually get the words directly from his brain onto a piece of paper, Hunter would fall back on a device he discovered early in his career – a tape recorder. Perhaps that’s why he described a Gonzo journalist as having the “eye and mind of a camera.” If you could just record events and your interaction with them, then there would be no need for the pain of writing.

When we were working on Kingdom of Fear, the pain and frustration levels were extremely high. Hunter would recall, almost proudly, how blocked he became trying to finish Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. Holed up in San Francisco’s Seal Rock Inn after the campaign, Hunter simply could not write the conclusion to his bi-weekly reports from the Presidential race that had been serialized in Rolling Stone. In desperation, his editor recorded his conversations with Hunter and then transcribed and edited them into their final form.

Those who might think less of Hunter as a writer for relying on this method, might consider the case of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, who often worked in exactly the same way, especially towards the end of his life. In a review of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, the first volume of which is coming out this November, Larry Rohter reported in The New York Times that

Twain dictated most of it to a stenographer in the four years before his death at 74 on April 21, 1910. He argued that speaking his recollections and opinions, rather than writing them down, allowed him to adopt a more natural, colloquial and frank tone, and Twain scholars who have seen the manuscript agree.

Kingdom of Fear was as close to an autobiography as anything Hunter ever wrote, even though much of it was pulled together out of the basement from existing published and unpublished material. Given the eclectic nature of those pieces, we were desperate for some sort of thread to tie the book together, just as I use the scene of Hunter writing a column for ESPN over one long night as the glue that holds together Animals, Whores & Dialogue.

The original connective tissue for Kingdom of Fear was to be the story of “The Witness” – the 99 day saga of the early nineties when Hunter made the mistake of letting a woman who prided herself on producing pornography into Owl Farm. As a result, Hunter was busted for sexual assault and a litany of drug charges, and fought a winning battle for 99 days to stay out of the system.

Hunter wrote the first installment of The Witness which appears on pages 19 through 28 in Kingdom of Fear in early 2002. Those nine pages are some of the most concise and hysterically wonderful words he ever wrote. Take for example his description of the porn film produced by The Witness called Nazi Penetration:

Nazi Penetration has always been one of my favorite films of the sex genre. It is a story of shipwreck, sadism, and absolutely hopeless female victims confined on a tiny tropical island with only a Nazi war criminal and two cruel Japanese nymphomaniacs to keep them company. The naked white girls are innocent prisoners of some long-forgotten war that is never mentioned in the movie except by way of the frayed and often bottomless military uniforms worn by the demented villains….

And, Hunter’s description of his role in the sex business as the Night Manager of the O’Farrell Theater (where we first met as you can read in The O’Farrell herein) is classic Gonzo:

The Night Manager gig was only a cover for my real responsibility, which was to keep them [the Mitchell Brothers) out of jail, which was not easy. The backstairs politics of San Francisco has always been a Byzantine snake pit of treachery and overweening bribery-driven corruption so perverse as to stagger the best minds of any generation.

We used to howl in the kitchen when those first nine pages were read and re-read, but unfortunately that went on for many months without any more new material being written. Hunter was desperate to finish the book; he needed the money naturally. And, I was desperate as well. I wanted to finish my film -Breakfast with Hunter – and release it at the same time as the book.

Thus, we came to fall back on the tried and true method of extracting truth, wisdom, and a good laugh out of the Doctor – recordings, but now video as well as audio – ‘cause I figured if I was going to devote a year or so of my life to the book, I should at least get something for my movie in return.

I suggested we have Sheriff Bob Braudis come to the kitchen and interview Hunter about The Witness, since he had been intimately involved on the law enforcement side when Hunter was busted. The Sheriff agreed and spent two long afternoons interviewing Hunter. I filmed the scene with two cameras – one that I would leave running on its own on Hunter and the other handheld moving around on Bob. I then took that footage and transcribed the audio, and Hunter and I and Anita and Jennifer Stroup – another long-suffering, amanuensis; but young, blonde and far better looking than I – edited and massaged those transcripts into what became the second Witness section in the book (pages 116 – 142).

In the end we finished the book, Hunter got paid, and I captured a very poignant moment with the two big men. When I filmed the scene, I never even saw the gun in Hunter’s hands since I was framing the Sheriff at that moment. Years after he shot himself sitting in the same spot in the kitchen, I discovered the footage while editing Animals, Whores & Dialogue. It’s still not easy for me to watch, but that pain is lessened by the look in the Sheriff’s eyes as he listens to his best friend sum up the meaning of his life.

Copyright 2010 by Wayne Ewing