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anything Hunter ever wrote, even though much of it was pulled together out of the basement from existing published and unpublished material.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

Ten years later I was right next door and looking for a subject for a new film, having just finished two for the series “Frontline” on PBS – A Journey To Russia, and The Bloods of ‘Nam.  When I heard that Hunter was working as the Night Manager of the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco, I called David Fanning, the Executive Producer of “Frontline,” and suggested a film about Hunter and his work as the Night Manager of a sex theater. Fanning was surprisingly receptive to the idea, and said that he would consider it if I could get Hunter to agree, but I’d have to pay my own expenses to get the project going.

I was able to make contact with Deborah Fuller, Hunter’s assistant at the time (and into this century as well) and made my pitch on behalf of “Frontline.” Then I waited to hear from the Doctor. A few days later the phone rang at 3am. (The beginning of decades of 3am calls, but as Sheriff Bob says, “Now when the phone rings at 3am it can only be trouble”) Hunter said he was interested in doing a film and invited me to visit him in San Francisco for the weekend, as long as I brought Deborah along with me. Elated, I booked two plane tickets and two hotel rooms that March of 1985.

Deborah is an unrepentant refugee from the sixties. Having lived in a commune in Northern California, she seemed to have the right tolerance for Hunter’s life style. She was also fiercely protective of him and his privacy. (see my story Never Call 911 and The Night We Shot Keith Richards Part 1 herein for more about Deborah)

Our hotel was on California Street, just a few blocks from the O’Farrell, but Hunter was staying across the Golden Gate Bridge in Sausalito where we met him for dinner the first night. For an icon of the sixties, he chose an odd, country club like restaurant filled with wealthy retirees with fancy, blue hair bee hives. A bit like a Steadman drawing from Fear and Loathing come to life, I thought, as Hunter entered, wearing shorts, and accompanied by Maria – a short, dark-haired beauty that was undoubtedly one of the great loves of his life. Maria was the student coordinator for one of Hunter’s appearances at the University of Arizona, and had probably not left his side for long since she picked him up at the airport one fateful day in Phoenix.

Hunter was charming, and immediately exceeded my expectations, except his mumble was annoyingly hard to understand. The film producer in me flinched, but I figured that the right sound man and a bit of direction would solve that problem. Little did I know that his mumble would be one of the main objections at HBO when I showed them the Gonzo Pilot a year later.

After dinner we went with the Night Manager to work. The O’Farrell Theater was owned by Jim and Artie Mitchell, the creators of the seminal film Behind the Green Door with the Marilyn Chambers. Hunter wrote about them eloquently in the beginning of Kingdom of Fear:

Jim and Artie Mitchell were as bizarre a pair of brothers as ever lived. I loved them both. But the sex business had made them crazy…They were deep into San Francisco politics, but they were always in desperate need of sound political advice. That was my job. The Night Manager gig was only a cover for my real responsibility, which was to keep them out of jail, which was not easy.

I came to San Francisco hoping that Hunter’s fascination with the sex business was essentially political, not unlike the anarchists of the early twentieth century who believed in free love as the ultimate liberation from societal domination of the individual. I was not disappointed. Warren Hinkle was also at the O’Farrell that weekend. As the legendary editor of Ramparts and then Scanlans, Hinckle commissioned the first piece of Gonzo Journalism from Hunter. (look for Hinckle’s new book this winter, Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?) With Hunter’s help, the Mitchells had made pornography and live sex shows a cause celebre and were now winning the battle with Mayor Diane Feinstein.

Here are the notes for the film I made that night at the O’Farrell for Hunter with his comments handwritten in red

The Night Manager’s office was just above the entrance on the second floor with a large semi-opaque picture window looking out on O’Farrell Street. There was no desk. Instead a pool table filled the room, and the walls were peppered with dings and holes from a wad shooting pistol the Brothers had given Hunter. Beautiful, naked women walked in and out from the dressing room next door, sometimes wearing at most slender g-strings for decorum, between their stints downstairs.

Hunter insisted that Deborah and I take the full tour of what he called “the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America.” On the first floor were three venues – the New York Stage where one girl would dance while others gave lap dances to the audience, the Copenhagen Room where patrons sat around the perimeter with flashlights and girls performed in the middle or on your lap, and the Ultra Room, a room with private cubicles from which you watched while the girls did each other in the box and you fed them tips through slots in the glass.

“Be careful not to touch the walls,” one girl thoughtfully warned Deborah with whom I shared a cubicle.

Deborah and I bonded in the way that only the newly acquainted can when confronted with raw sex and confined to a sperm-lined box three feet square. Back upstairs, Hunter wanted a full report. I tried to be blasé, but Deborah took a comic approach to the experience which Hunter clearly liked more. Maria was writing intently in a school book with ruled paper.

“What are you writing,” asked Hunter.

“Just making some notes after watching a group of Japanese men who got off a tour bus” she replied.

Almost twenty years later, when we were working on Kingdom of Fear, I found that piece of ruled paper with the girlish hand-writing amongst Hunter’s papers. Maria was a keen observer: the writing was quite erotic and had little to do with Japanese tourists.

The next night we all went to dinner with Jim and Artie, and a couple of girls from the O’Farrell at a Mexican restaurant far out on Geary Street. I sat between Jim’s wife who seemed like a normal suburban mother/housewife and Bambi from the O’Farrell who wanted to know where to get cowboy chaps for her act.

[As you can see in the comment below, I misidentified the girl in the gorilla suit as "Bambi" when in fact it was Simone Corday. Bambi was actually the victim. Simone has written a fascinating memoir of her life at the O'Farrell entitled 9 1/2 Years Behind the Green Door and has a web site where you can buy the book. Thankfully, other than the confusion on names Simone says that I remembered the scene and dialogue quite accurately]

When Hunter heard her asking about wardrobe he interjected, “Do you still have that gorilla suit, Bambi?”

“Oh yeah,” purred Bambi. “One of my favorites.”

“And the strap on?”

“Always,” said Bambi

“When we go back to the O’Farrell, I want you to wear both and do another girl on the New York Stage,” commanded the Night Manager.

“Anybody I want?” she asked.

“Any body who wants to as well,” he said.

A strange joke to impress me, I assumed and concentrated on getting out of the restaurant balancing a half dozen large Styrofoam containers of margaritas Hunter had insisted on ordering to go. A wild ride down Geary in an open convertible with Hunter driving took us back to the O’Farrell. I sat in the back clutching the margaritas, trying to pass a joint in the horrific slip stream, thinking that this is just about what you would expect after reading his books, and regretting I wasn’t filming right then. If it was just ten years later when cheap digital video became available, I would have been shooting my brains out. Today the distinction between research and principal photography gets lost. Back then, it was a given, and this was pure research.

The research got even stranger back at the O’Farrell. I lost half the margaritas on the way inside and then Hunter ignored the rest when I offered them up. Instead, he was intent on taking his place on a stool upstairs next to the spot lights above the New York Stage. Down below a young blonde was finishing her act when Bambi entered wearing her full gorilla suit and a strap on dildo. The blonde stayed to play out the scene with Bambi as the Night Manager had instructed. Even given the conditioning of the Ultra Room, I was still amazed and shocked.

As the girls left the stage, I turned to Hunter and asked, “What did you think?”

“Not what I expected,” he said, and walked away to his office.

I wondered what the scene lacked. It certainly worked for me. But that was Hunter’s nature; he wasn’t an easy man to please.

When I got back to Woody Creek on Monday, I called David Fanning at “Frontline” to report a great work-in-progress, but his reaction was also not what I expected.

“Forget about it. I must have been on drugs last week. How would I explain to Congress using Federal money to do a show about the Night Manager of a sex theater?”

“But it’s more than that. It’s about politics and personal liberation, and…”

“You’re not going to talk me into this, so don’t even try,” said Fanning, rudely hanging up on me.

And that’s one of the last times anyone at “Frontline” would ever take my call even though my last film for them, The Bloods of ‘Nam, was nominated for an Emmy.

Just as well, since it made me realize that to make a film about Hunter I would have to do it on my own, and over a long period of time. In the end, Breakfast with Hunter only took 18 years and was a hell of a lot more fun than another “work-made-for-hire” for “Frontline.”

Copyright 2009 By Wayne Ewing