Destination Hollyweird

By the time Art Linson and John Kaye arrived in Aspen in the summer of 1978, it looked as if the deal were actually going to happen: Universal Studios had agreed to make a movie out of a magazine story called The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. The studio A liked the idea of a low-budget comedy fictionalized out of Thompson's rip-and-slash journalism, with all its drugs and violent fantasies, its mock slander and dark humor. Thompson had spent the last half of the Sixties and the first part of the Seventies cursing after politicians, professional football players, cops and (continued on page 182)Hollyweird(continued from page 143) motorcycle thugs, and the cinematic possibilities seemed endless--and very American.

Universal especially liked the part about the low budget, which meant around $4,000,000, because the studio accountants figured that when the movie was through in the theaters, it could be sold to television for at least $3,000,000, and then about the only way they could lose money on the deal would be for someone to hold up their wheelbarrow on the way to the bank.

Linson was producing the movie, and he was a good bet, too. He was 37 years old and had made three feature films, one of which was Car Wash, a certifiable monster on which he'd spent $2,000,000, from which Universal got back about $10,000,000. That gave him a certain amount of juice in the negotiations, and when he told them he wanted to direct this one as well as produce it, they said fine and gave him the money to buy the screen rights.

Thompson took their check and told them he had been through that before and didn't believe the movie would ever be made, which was fine with him, he said. Linson assured him he was wrong this time. He was proud of his reputation for getting unlikely stories and characters onto film, and he told Thompson that he was about to hire a screenwriter and that the three of them ought to meet in Colorado to see if they liked one another enough to go ahead.

Kaye was the writer. He and Linson had gone to school together at Berkeley, and they had collaborated on two movies. Neither Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins nor American Hot Wax was particularly successful, but Linson and Kaye worked well together--which was going to be especially important on this one, because, along with the usual wind shifts and tide changes that worry every Hollywood production, they'd be dealing with a man who was said to be a dangerous loon who could turn on them at any moment and blow their project to rags. The only thing they knew for sure was that he would spend the money they gave him.

So the two of them had come to Aspen to take their iffy deal one more careful step: to meet the famous inventor of Gonzo Journalism on his own turf, to stay up late with him, to hang out at the Hotel Jerome and get a little twisted, maybe. To see if the outrageous behavior they had read about and heard about was real or just the product of an imagination that had stayed too long at the pharmacy.

Kaye was skeptical. He had read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the book about the Hell's Angels, and the one about the 1972 Presidential campaign; he knew that the man who had written those things had to be somewhat disordered. But surely the books were hyperbole. He couldn't be that wild--could he?

Well, yes he could, it turned out, and when Kaye tells the story of that first meeting, he chain-smokes, and fidgets, and works himself into a nervous sweat all over again.

Thompson had flown home to Aspen from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where he had made one of his campus appearances. His mood is never very good after these so-called lectures, and, in fact, he often tells his rapt college audiences that he does these gigs only to pay for his drugs--that otherwise he hates everything about them. This trip had been no exception, and he came off the plane raving to a stranger next to him about the flight and at least six other things. He had on a Mexican shirt and his L. L. Bean walking shorts and his tennis shoes, and all 6'3" of him was festooned with bags and pouches. Linson and Kaye met him in the waiting area and after quick introductions, the three of them went out front to a huge rented Oldsmobile parked in a loading zone.

"I better drive," said Thompson. "I know the roads." Kaye got in the back seat, Linson in front. Thompson took the wheel, started the engine and looked around, but there was nowhere to go: They were sandwiched between a parked car and an airport shuttle van. Thompson put his head out the window and yelled over his shoulder, "Move that fucker!" When there was no response, he put the car in reverse and rammed the van. Kaye says he didn't believe what was happening. Neither did the driver of the van, who could do nothing but sit there helplessly with his load of frightened people as they were all pushed backward by this lunatic smoking a cigarette through a holder and looking very much as if their terror meant nothing to him. When he had room, Thompson fishtailed the car through the parking lot and out onto the road to Woody Creek.

Linson said nothing. He was sitting on the edge of the seat, his body stiff, his hands against the dashboard. When Thompson got the car up near its top speed, Kaye, who is a nervous man anyway, had to speak. "Hunter," he said, "this is insane. You have to slow down. I've never been with anyone who drives like this. You're scaring me shitless."

"Don't worry about a thing," said Thompson. "You're perfectly safe. I'm prouder of my driving than I am of my writing. If I spun out on one of these turns, it would be much more embarrassing than anything that could happen to me on a writing level."

Saying that, he came out of a wide turn and opened the machine all the way up. Then, at 75 miles an hour on a road marked for 40, they passed a sheriff's deputy who was parked on the shoulder.

"He must have been fucking astonished," says Kaye when he tells the story. "We went past him like a shot. My first thought was, We're all going to jail. We had everything in the car: coke, weed, booze. I sat there thinking, Great. I've been with this guy for 20 minutes and I'm history."

By the time the deputy pulled them over, they had managed to stuff an open bottle of Wild Turkey under the seat. When the cop reached the window, Thompson said, "What's wrong?"

"You've committed a very serious speeding violation," said the officer.

"What? Speeding?"

"Let me see your driver's license."

"Why not?"

While the cop ran the license, and while Linson and Kaye tried to decide to whom they would make their telephone calls, Thompson said, "This deputy must be new. Most of them know me."

The men at headquarters knew him, all right, some of them going back to 1970, when Thompson himself had run for sheriff on the promise that if he were elected, he'd allow his deputies to eat mescaline on slow days and also have them tear up the streets of Aspen with jackhammers and replace the asphalt with sod. He shaved his head and campaigned with an American flag around his shoulders, and finally, he came close enough to victory to frighten a lot of people in the valley, including himself. Whatever they told the deputy, he was back from his radio in no time at all, telling them to move on and to have a nice day.

"That was my first half hour with him," says Kaye.

Seventy-two hours later, the boys from Hollywood, as they were being called around town, had done about all the running with Thompson they could stand. They had barely slept and they hadn't eaten much, except for some strawberry mescaline that was working (continued on page 230)Hollyweird(continued from page 182) hard against the alcohol and the cocaine, and both of them were sick and confused. They finished the pitiless marathon with Linson leaning on his palms against the big glass door of the Jerome, legs spread as if he were being arrested, and Kaye at the bar, near tears, drinking Fernet Branca and trying to focus on Thompson, who was playing, over and over, an Amazing Rhythm Aces song about a Civil War soldier who had his legs shot off and asking the two of them if they really understood the significance of the lyric.

At seven that morning, Thompson put the two of them in a Mellow Yellow Taxi and told the driver, "See that these two don't die in Colorado." Fifteen minutes later, Linson and Kaye sat next to each other on the grass in front of the airport, rocking and moaning and trying to decide which one of them needed the last Valium worse. Linson finally took it.

•

Eight months later, Kaye delivered his script, called Where the Buffalo Roam. It was centered loosely on Thompson's off-and-on friendship with a chicano lawyer named Oscar Zeta Acosta, a lawn-burning, drug-eating troublemaker who called himself the Brown Buffalo. Acosta had disappeared somewhere in the Caribbean around 1974 or 1975 amid a squall of rumors about machine guns, high-speed boats and homicide. No corpse was ever found, and some versions of the tale had him escaping with a suitcase full of money into the Florida swamps, but almost everybody who knew him believed he was dead.

The magazine story from which the screenplay had taken its inspiration was Thompson's reminiscence of their years together as outlaws in Richard Nixon's America. It was a strangely sentimental piece of writing for Thompson--not soft but affectionate in a rough sort of way, admiring of this man Acosta, whose madness outstripped Thompson's at every turn and who was plainly headed for a very bad end.

Linson showed the script to Peter Boyle, who liked it fine and immediately signed to play the part of Acosta, at that point called Mendoza in the script. A group of chicano actors changed that, however, by threatening to make trouble if Boyle weren't replaced by a latino actor. So Linson de-Mexicanized the character and called him Lazlo.

That left Thompson's part to be cast, and for a while, names like Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and John Belushi were tossed around. Finally, Bill Murray, another of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, was offered the job. Murray had no screen credits at the time but was a good comic actor and a talented mimic; besides that, he knew Thompson and appreciated his no-tomorrow sense of humor. In fact, one summer afternoon around the Jerome pool, not long after the two of them had met, Murray was himself the main player in a piece of Thompson's impromptu mischief. Thompson introduced Murray as Harry Houdini, the greatest escape artist of all time--then sat him in a cast-iron garden chair, lashed his hands and feet to it, carried him over to the pool and dumped him in.

After about a minute, it was obvious to everybody that Murray was going to drown if they didn't haul him out, which they did. Murray took the whole thing in the right spirit, though, and he and Thompson became friends. When the part came up, Thompson urged him to take it.

Murray said he wanted to but wasn't sure about the script. Was this, he asked, exactly what they intended to shoot--or would he be free to add a little something here and there to incorporate his own ideas about who this character Thompson was? Linson promised him, in the well-known Hollywood tradition, that the writer's words were not cut in stone, more like sand, and that, as director, he was going to be real flexible. Then, with Murray's name on the line, Linson drafted a shooting schedule, hired a production crew, cast the supporting roles, reserved a sound stage at Universal, scouted locations around Los Angeles and told everyone he was going to make a very funny movie.

As word got around that Thompson was dealing with Hollywood, it was inevitable that some devotees of his work would start grousing that he had sold out. For the most part, Thompson ignored it or laughed it off; but in late June 1979, just before filming started, he received a note from Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip Doonesbury, which for years had featured a character called Uncle Duke who bore an almost perfect resemblance to Thompson in both spirit and action. Trudeau evidently bemoaned the fact that Thompson had turned his work over to hacks. Thompson's reply was swift and began without a salutation:

You silly little fart. Don't lay your karmic nightmares on me, and don't bother me with any more postcards about your vomiting problems. The only other person I know who puked every time he said the word integrity was Richard Nixon.

And what lame instinct suddenly prompts you to start commenting on my matériel? You've done pretty well by skimming it for the past five years, so keep your pompous whining to yourself and don't complain.

If you must vomit, go down to Mory's and use that special low-rent stall they keep for lightweight Yalies who steal other people's work for a living.

But don't worry, old sport. You'll get yours...and in the meantime, feel free to call on me for professional advice at any time. I'm not like the others.

Sincerely, HST

•

I phoned Thompson the day they began filming. It was the middle of July and I was in a dumpy little motel just down from the Sunset Strip. He was in Key West and had been for several months, borrowing a house from his friend Jimmy Buffett and trying to write. I asked him how he was and he said terrible. He had missed two deadlines on a script about smugglers he was supposed to be working on for Jann Wenner and he was about to miss another one, which he couldn't afford to do, he said, because he was almost broke.

"What about the Buffalo money?" I asked him, meaning the money he had received for rights to the movie.

"I spent it," he said, "all of it, in a mean, deliberate frenzy. I didn't even enjoy it."

"Are you coming out here to watch them film your life story?"

"I don't know," he said. "I have only two options: I can stay away completely and denounce the whole thing, or I can go out there and become involved. I probably ought to be there for some of it, anyway. I'm executive consultant, you know. I don't have any official veto power, but my presence alone should amount to a veto of some kind."

"Hunter," I said, just before we hung up, "why are you letting them do this?"

"Three more zeros," he said.

He was talking about the money, of course, because money is what Hollywood does better than anything else. "They don't call it show art, they call it show business" is the way Kaye explained it to me. There is so much money in Hollywood, and they throw it around in such large chunks, that when the studio executives talk about it among themselves, they talk shorthand: $100,000 is called a dollar in this industry, as if it would take too much paper and too much breath to spell out the whole cost every time; as if, like astronomers, they were dealing with numbers so vast that they needed translation from miles into light-years.

When they talk to writers, though, they always use the full dollar amounts. I think they like to see what happens to the author's balance when they use the words low budget in the same sentence with $4,000,000. You might not impress everybody with that kind of talk, but you can make most writers sway like a drunk with anything over a couple of thousand bucks, plus expenses.

That was not lost on Linson. When we talked about who was getting what out of this movie, he narrowed his eyes and pointed at me when he got to the part about Thompson's share. "I got him a six-figure deal," he said, and then he told me something I heard him say at least four other times in front of cast and crew and whoever else was listening. He said, "I gave Hunter Thompson the only real money he ever had."

Which was true. And Linson had made it plain that there was more where that came from, money for other deals and other movies, if Thompson played his cards right. If he behaved.

•

The morning of the second day's shooting, I crept in through the back door of sound stage 26 on the Universal lot. The huge barn was dark except for a swatch of light along one wall, where Murray sat at a desk, lit by 100 lights, smoking a cigarette through a holder, wearing a green eyeshade and sunglasses, using one hand to type on a big IBM Selectric and the other to pour prop whiskey into a glass. I knew it was Murray only because I had just talked to Hunter in Key West. Otherwise, the resemblance was perfectly spooky; in the way he cocked his head back out of his own smoke, the way he snatched the holder out of his mouth and banged it on the big ashtray, the way he piled fistfuls of ice into the glass. Even when Linson yelled "Cut!" and Murray stood up to relax, the character Thompson stood up with him; and when he talked, it was in Thompson's unique barking mumble.

Linson looked pleased. He had given me complete access to the set, for all six weeks of the shooting if I wanted it, except for the first day, when he had asked me to stay away. I understood his nervousness. It was, after all, his debut as a director, and no one was sure how that was going to work out. Between takes, when he saw me standing among the 30 or 40 crew members, he sauntered over and the first thing he said was, "You shoulda been here yesterday. It was crazy. The Doberman went right for Nixon's balls."

Ah, Hollywood, I thought. You shoulda been here yesterday pretty much sums up all the business I've ever done in the town. Especially my last visit, the only time a producer had ever talked to me about filming one of my magazine stories. He flew me into Los Angeles, picked me up at the airport in his Mercedes and took me to an Italian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard. We talked for an hour or so, met some friends of his, and then he excused himself to go to the bathroom. When he came back, he said, "Ah, Craig, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this." Then, just under the table, he held out his hand and showed me an empty one-gram cocaine bottle. I wasn't sure then, and I'm not sure now, why the man bothered to show it to me at all, but the effect was very much like finding yourself in a fishing boat with someone who suddenly confesses he's eaten the bait. I took it as a sign.

Murray and I said hello between takes. I told him that his rendering of Thompson was good enough to be eerie, then I asked him if he thought the actual Thompson were going to show up. "I talked to him last night," he said. "I think when Steadman arrives, he won't be far behind." He was referring to artist Ralph Steadman, who had collaborated with Thompson on many projects--and who, at Thompson's suggestion, had been hired (and flown from London) to sketch promotional material for the movie.

Then, when I mentioned it, Murray said, "I didn't know you guys were together in Washington that summer."

"Yes," I said, "we sat together in the basement bar of the Watergate with a little Japanese television set on our table and watched Richard Nixon resign. Sounds like a triumphant moment, I know, but it wasn't. In fact, the whole thing was a very sick trip. But that's another story...."

"A Hunter story," Murray said. "When things get slow on the set, we all tell Hunter stories."

When they finished the typing scene, the lights came up on a set at the other end of the barn. It was the interior of a San Francisco apartment, bedroom and kitchen, and the action called for Boyle and two nude women to be roused from the bed by a telephone call, and then for Boyle to stumble into the kitchen and make himself a doper's eye opener. While the set was being dressed, Linson opened the refrigerator door and said, "Come on, we need raw eggs and amyl nitrite in here--let's go!" Then, just before the cameras started to roll, he bent down to the bed, arranged the covers so that the women's breasts showed and said, "All right, girls, you've been taking mescaline for three days. Nobody smile."

They shot the scene ten or 12 times, till everyone was rummy with it, and then Linson called a lunch break. He and Murray and some others went off to watch the rushes from the first day. Boyle and I drifted to his dressing room--a motor home parked in an alley just outside the sound stage.

"This story is right out of my life," Boyle said while two hairdressers worked on the stringy hairpiece that made him look like an aging hippie. "The Sixties changed everything for me, just like they did for this guy Acosta. I got into drugs late, had all kinds of problems. I became politically conscious in Chicago around the time they almost burned the place down. I remember the only night Second City ever canceled a performance--because the Yippies were trashing Wells Street." He struggled for a minute to get a large silver peace-sign ring off his finger. "Abbie Hoffman gave me this ring, I think during the '68 convention. Those were amazing times and Thompson and Acosta were right in the middle of them. People want to see this movie. I don't know if Hunter realizes it, but when this thing comes out, it's going to change his life."

Linson and the others came back from the screening excited. "It's really funny," Linson said. "I mean, even the hard-core production people were cracking up, and they never laugh at anything. At least I know I'm going to be doing this stuff for the next ten years or so."

"I'm all smiles now," Murray told me when I asked him about it.

"Hunter," said Kaye, "is absolutely going to shit when he sees this."

•

A week later, Steadman, his wife, Anna, and their five-year-old daughter, Sadie, checked into the Sheraton-Universal, a high-rise hotel that sits on a small hill directly above the studio. It was Anna's first trip to Los Angeles, and while Steadman dealt with the bellman, she opened the drapes and looked down onto the low blank roofs of the sound stages, prop warehouses and tool shops. "Oh, look, Ralph," she said in her neatly cut English accent. "They've put us above a factory."

Steadman and Thompson had known each other for ten years, and it had been a lucky friendship for both men. Steadman was a gifted artist whose best work was pen-and-ink drawings of the ugly, the gross and the ridiculous--which made his the perfect set of eyes to go with Thompson's voice. They had met in 1969 at the Kentucky Derby and their mutual revulsion at the depravity of the scene had produced drawings and text that fit together so exactly that they seemed to have been produced out of a single tormented imagination. Thompson and Steadman worked together again in 1970 at the America's Cup, and in 1972 at the Democratic Convention, and in 1973 at the Watergate hearings, always as outlaws among the press, always patrolling the weird fringes of the story until they mustered the outrage that is essential to the work of both. Thompson said he liked Steadman's raw sense of humor and called him "a Gila monster with a ballpoint pen for a tongue."

True to Murray's instincts, Thompson flew into Burbank a few days after Steadman arrived, and the first thing he did when he saw his old friend was to go to work on his conservative British trousers with a hunting knife. They were in a screening room at Universal, along with Linson and a dozen or so of the cast and crew, waiting to see the first day's rushes. Thompson set his drink on the floor, took out the knife, grabbed Steadman's pants leg and slit it to the knee. "You're in America now, Ralph," he said. "You gotta have flair." Steadman then politely asked for the knife, took hold of Thompson's T-shirt and slashed it from the neck to the hem.

All of which made Linson and the rest of the company a little nervous. This was the first they had seen of Thompson since they began shooting, and they had no idea what his reaction would be when he saw what had already been put on film. Almost anything seemed possible.

Once Thompson and Steadman had completed their strange hellos, Linson signaled the projection booth; the lights went down and the film came up, the camera panning a lighted fireplace, across a sleeping Doberman, past a dummy dressed to look like Nixon, to Murray, who was sitting at the desk, drinking, smoking and typing. ("My God," said Steadman later. "For the first 30 seconds, I got a funny feeling in my stomach. I thought it was him.") The typing stopped abruptly. Then Murray lifted his fist, slammed it down on the machine and let out a scream that might as well have come up from hell. He stood, lit a joint, talked to himself and paced. A minute later, he exploded; he pulled a large pistol from a holster on his hip and began bobbing and weaving and shooting up the room. When the gun was empty, he looked down at the dog and said, "Nixon." The animal immediately sprang across the room and began tearing at the dummy's crotch.

Most of the people in the room had seen the footage before, and while Thompson sat in the near darkness smoking, drinking and watching the screen, they watched him. Whatever his feelings, he was keeping them to himself. At least he wasn't lunging for the screen with his knife, nor was he going after Linson or Kaye, and everyone took that as a positive sign. Later, they swore he had been suppressing his laughter.

Murray was living in a rented house just off Mulholland Drive and, sensing that the place afforded what he calls "wide latitude for weird behavior," Thompson moved in with him. Then he rented a little red Mercedes convertible, placed orders all over town for the various nerve syrups and brain powders he needed and began introducing himself this way: "Hi, I'm Hunter Thompson and I'm in show business." Linson had promised him $1000 a week behave-yourself money and Thompson demanded his first payment. The producer arranged for it and then formally invited Thompson to visit the set, which was being moved up the hill from the studio to the Sheraton.

The next morning, both the entrance and the lobby of the hotel were commandeered by the movie people. A huge banner that said WELCOME SUPER BOWL VI hung across the façade of the building, and the circular drive out front was littered with cameras, sound equipment and technicians. Extras dressed as football fans milled around and the Los Angeles police redirected the normal hotel traffic and held back the tourists.

The action called for Murray, as a hung-over Thompson, to arrive at the hotel in a limousine, get out, deal with the chauffeur, then make his way into the lobby. When everything was set, the associate producer/unit production manager, Mack Bing, picked up a bullhorn and said, "Quiet, everybody. Let's make a meat loaf. Action, please."

The limo pulled up to the curb and a black driver jumped out from behind the wheel and moved quickly to the passenger door. When he opened it, Murray bolted upright and screamed, "Mother of sweating Jesus!"

Almost everyone was watching the scene unfold as Thompson, with a beer in one hand and a newspaper under his arm, wandered through the spectators and stopped to watch. What he saw was Murray leaping from his seat, grabbing the driver by his lapels and pinning him against the roof of the car. "I can't watch this," said Thompson. "I'm going up to Ralph's room."

Upstairs, Steadman was at a jerryrigged drawing table strewn with pens, bottles of ink and bottles of beer, and the paraphernalia for rolling cigarettes out of rough-cut English tobacco. The drawing he was working on was a special request. Thompson got a beer, snorted some cocaine, lit a cigarette and looked at the sketch. "What is this shit?" he said. "It's awful."

"It's a sketch for Linson's wife," said Steadman. "She wants to make a button to give everybody who's worked on the film. It's a secret." Thompson looked at it again. It was a buffalo head with a bow on top and printed below it were the words BABY BUFFALOES ARE CUTE.

"You terrible hack," Thompson railed. "You shameless hustler. They paid you too much for that poster you did, and now you've come over here to turn out this hopeless crap for them. Your life will be ruined by this, Ralph."

"This won't be the first time--you've ruined my life before," Steadman snapped. "I'm not even sure why I'm here. But I feel like I ought to be doing something. And don't talk to me about being a hack. None of us would be here if you hadn't sold out. My God, I don't know why I should be feeling guilty about all this."

"Everybody's guilty," said Thompson; "the air is heavy with the smell of it."

"What are they doing downstairs?" Steadman asked.

"God only knows," Thompson shrugged. "The first thing I saw was Murray beating up some Negro."

Steadman looked at the sketch in front of him for a while. "You're right," he said finally. "This isn't good. There's no anger here. We're not outlaws anymore, Hunter."

"Well, Ralph." said Thompson, "maybe we ought to print up some buttons of our own."

Steadman's Welsh eyes lit up. "Wonderful! We can leak them, one at a time, till everybody on the set has one except Linson. It'll drive him crazy." With that, Steadman dropped the cute buffalo onto the floor and began work on a rat that was vomiting. He worked quickly, standing back now and then, diving in, scratching, poking, standing back again.

"Hunter, Hunter. Hunter," he said at one point, without looking up from his drawing. "I don't know what we're going to do about this movie."

"Do about it?" said Thompson. "There's nothing to do about it. It's like a huge tit: we're just supposed to fasten onto it and feed."

An hour later, Steadman had finished sketches for three buttons that he intended to hand out surreptitiously, beginning with the lowliest grips and make-up girls on the set. The first one said. GONZO GUILT, next to a small ugly buffalo that was smoking a cigarette through a holder. The second said, I am A REAL FRIEND OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON. The third, which was to be held back until the others were out, carried the picture of the puking rat and said, I AM NOT LIKE THE OTHERS.

Thompson liked them, and that pleased Steadman, who finished each sketch by hurling ink across it from four feet away. When he was done, he looked up at Thompson, who was sitting quietly, reading his paper. "I get it," Steadman said. "You don't care. You just don't care--about the movie, about any of this--do you?"

"Ah, Ralph," said Thompson. "You always were the sharpest bastard of them all."

The mood was good when the work was done. There was, at last, mischief in the air, small potatoes, perhaps, but mischief just the same. It was invigorating to both of them. Thompson suggested calling a nearby slaughterhouse for a side of freshly butchered beef. "Can you see their faces down there, with three geeks in bloody white coats pushing a side of beef on a rolling rack, asking for Mr. Steadman's room?" Instead, the two of them cut a cantaloupe in half and called room service for a bottle of Scotch and a big spoon.

That afternoon, Thompson went downstairs again. The action had moved into the lobby, where Murray stood at the desk, checking in. The cameras rolled and suddenly Murray wheeled around, yanked the midget bellboy by the lapels and shook him viciously. Thompson stood watching from the back of the large crowd. Linson spotted him and wandered over between takes. "Well," he said, "what do you think?"

"Why am I always beating up Negroes and midgets in this film?" Thompson asked him.

•

Over the next few days, Thompson visited the hotel now and then, but mostly he stayed at Murray's place. The house itself wasn't much: It looked like it had been built by someone who specialized in nine-dollar-a-night motels and was decorated by someone who got a volume deal on plastic flora. There were so many plastic flowers in and around the house that when Murray was asked if a particular clump of mums was real, he said, "I'm not sure, but they don't move when the wind blows."

The grounds were a little better. There was a deck and a pool that overlooked the San Fernando Valley, and there was a Jacuzzi and a fire pit. Thompson spent most of his day swimming and lounging, and he named the outdoor features. There was the William Faulkner Garden (a small bed of real flowers that needed water), the Nathanael West Memorial Fire Pit (some volcanic rocks and a gas jet that Thompson kept burning day and night) and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Dinner Arbor (table and chairs on a small deck below a beautiful 400-year-old oak tree that Thompson frequently threatened to kill off at the base with a chain saw if his mood got too black).

When he was there, Murray was a quiet host. He picked up beer bottles, made beds, washed the dishes and answered the door to the steady troop of messengers who came asking for Thompson. At night, usually into the wee hours, the two of them sat alone and talked about the movie. Murray's first film, Meatballs, had just been released. It was doing very well at the summer box offices, and although the critics generally loved Murray's performance, they were calling the movie inane and wondering at the waste of his talent. He was eager for this movie to be something more, and he was counting on Thompson's suggestions to help. They talked about it scene by scene: Was it too wacky? Could they put an edge on it somehow? Should they bring in another writer? Would Thompson write a scene or two himself?

They were a day behind schedule when they finished shooting at the hotel, but that wasn't bad. Linson looked slightly more frazzled than when he'd begun, but he was still pleased, as were his bosses, with the film they sat and watched every night. He was a little concerned with the over-all pace of the thing--all peaks and no valleys, he said--but that was a worry that could wait for postproduction. Meanwhile, he said he wasn't surprised that Thompson was taking everything so well.

"We're making him famous," he told me. "This time next summer, he could very well show up on the cover of People magazine, and that'll sell a few hundred thousand more copies of his books, which he shouldn't mind too much. He's not stupid."

Shooting moved to Piru, a hill-country location about an hour north of Los Angeles. These scenes contained the dramatic crux of the movie, if it had one. Boyle and Murray were to meet with Latin revolutionaries at a run-down farmhouse and sell them guns. There was a question in Murray's mind whether or not the action in the script was confusing to the story. Boyle's character was supposed to flee with the revolutionaries, in a hail of gunfire, aboard a light plane. Murray wasn't sure that made sense. Nevertheless, shooting began smoothly. Linson took and retook everything five, six and ten times, as he had with every scene in the movie. "Perfect!" he would yell at the cut. "Let's do it again."

Thompson played catch with a football, sat in the motor home, drinking, and became fascinated with the fact that they had hired one man for the day just to make sure a few chickens pecked in the right spot in front of the farmhouse. Steadman began giving out the buttons. GONZO GUILT was first and as he pressed them into the hands of the chosen, he said, "You can't tell Art where you got this."

Later that afternoon, Linson asked Steadman to put a series of tattoos on the various revolutionaries, and as he stood over their arms, working carefully with grease paint to make guns and snakes, he couldn't help commenting on the medium. "Human skin makes wonderful paper," he said.

"You're doing tattoos now, huh, Ralph?" said Thompson when he saw what was happening. "You're ruined."

The second day of shooting in the valley, Thompson stayed behind at Murray's. He said he was depressed. Steadman made the trip to Piru, but as the day wore on, he seemed to be slipping into a funk, too. He began nipping at a bottle of Scotch he had stashed in his car and grumbling about the comicbook character of the action he was watching. Around dusk, about halfway into his cups, he got Murray and Boyle in the same motor home and told them what he thought. This stuff they were filming was silly. Hunter was not a clown. He was a man who loved justice, and Thomas Jefferson, and Joseph Conrad; his work, funny as it was, had an underlying seriousness that these scenes were missing. There was no reason for the Acosta character to fly out of there with the bandits. They'd turned Acosta into a Looney Tunes drug dealer and Hunter into an idiot and it wasn't right. No wonder Hunter was depressed.

Boyle and Murray listened carefully to Steadman's slightly boozy eloquence, and pretty soon they were agreeing: The dialog in the farmhouse should be strengthened and made more serious and the Acosta character should not fly away with the revolutionaries. Murray fetched Linson, and Steadman made his points again.

The director listened, then cut them all off. "Lazlo's getting on that plane," he said, "and that's that." Then he took Steadman outside, put an arm around his shoulder and told him, "Don't ever do that again, Ralph. These actors are sensitive people and I don't want you messing around with their heads. You understand?"

•

That night, in a blaze of cinematic battle effects, Lazlo got onto his plane; and the next day, I got onto mine. I had been on the set for more than two weeks and the only thing that's ever bored me worse or ground more slowly than the wheels of the movie industry are the wheels of justice.

A few days later, Steadman flew back to England to begin working his sketches into finished drawings. Thompson, however, stayed with Murray for another couple of weeks and became more and more involved with the production. In fact, late one night, he and Murray actually wrote a scene in which Nixon and the Thompson character confront each other in an airport bathroom. Linson filmed it using the Nixon look-alike, Richard M. Dixon, but when I phoned him a few weeks after shooting finished, he told me he didn't think he was going to use it in the film. "It was very funny," he said, "but weird--too weird. It took over the whole movie. There was no way to put it in. I saved the footage, though, and I think I'm going to send it over to the archives, because it's so outrageous. It ends with Nixon saying, 'Fuck the doomed.' "

Over the next six months, Linson and his editor cut and pieced the film together into a working first version. Neil Young was hired to write the music and Steadman did the main titles. And then, perhaps because they had never been through a deadline crisis with him and wanted to know what the fires of hell were really like, the Universal executives hired Thompson to write a short narration for the film.

When I called him at the beginning of last January, he told me he was doing it with extreme reluctance and for the money. It was only a few hundred words, and Murray was going to share the work and the fee, but still Thompson said he dreaded it. For him, writing had always required logistics and support teams and expenses equivalent to those that had seen Hannibal across the Alps. This piece was no different, he said, except that the potential for "treachery" from the studio was massive. "It's like working with the Hell's Angels," he said. "You know sooner or later you're going to get stomped."

In fact, Thompson had been anticipating his stomping at the hands of the movie people from the beginning of the project. Several times during the year, he had said things to me like, "I made a terrible mistake ever talking to anyone in Hollywood," and "This is the garden of agony--every rotten thing that ever happened to a writer in this town is coming true for me in spades with dingdongs on them."

Then I would wait for word that the worst had happened, that the knife had been planted smartly between his shoulder blades. Instead, there was always silence after his dour predictions, which I took as the sound of another check being cashed. Then somehow things were fine again.

Thompson and Murray had begun work on the narration in Aspen in late December. A month later, nothing was on paper, and Universal flew the two of them to Beverly Hills and checked them into a ritzy hotel with all expenses paid--plus everything else. I checked into their hotel a day after their deadline had passed, and still almost nothing had been done beyond the demanding of money and the spending of it.

Thompson was in rare form. Almost the first thing he had done when he hit town was to stop at a large discount store, buy a red pitchfork, drive it onto the Universal lot, carry it into Linson's office and plant it four inches deep through the rug into the floor--by way of asking for his expense check. Linson left the pitchfork where it was, perhaps to remind himself and everyone else what he had been through on this project--or perhaps because he didn't have enough strength left to pull it out. He was tired and he wasn't finished yet, though an ending of some kind seemed to be in sight.

During the first week in the hotel, Thompson and Murray spent most of their time arguing with the studio about editing changes and assembling the machines and medicines they needed to get on with their work. Thompson had always dreamed of finding a way to eliminate that horrible moment every writer faces when he rolls the first bleached sheet of paper into the typewriter. This time out, with a studio full of equipment at his disposal, he was especially determined.

It took several days for Murray and a technician friend to build the electronic edifice that would allow Murray and Thompson to edit and dub the ending of the film for themselves, and when they had it all together, the hotel room looked like a network control bunker: There were three television screens, three video recorders and a tape recorder all wired to one another so that Thompson and Murray could lay their words directly onto the film as they watched it.

The feeling around the studio grew worse and worse. Thompson was mumbling that the film could not be saved, that the best he and Murray could do was put some "moments" into it. Meanwhile, the expenses grew every day by multiples of several thousand. The editor broke down under all-night demands and refused to have anything to do with Thompson or Murray, and everyone else connected to the project was getting testy. Thompson fended off all talk of deadlines by saying things like, "When you ask a wild pig to go into the woods and shit gold eggs, you better stand back while he does it."

Then just about the time all hope was being abandoned, the writer and the actor used the hours between midnight and eight one morning to make an ending of their own; it was as if a great dam had burst.

Thompson woke me with a phone call. "You better get up here," he said. "We've done it. Music, narration, everything. It's a miracle." Murray answered the door when I knocked. His eyes were almost swollen shut and his voice had been blown to a whisper by the night's work. Thompson was rewinding the tape and was in a triumphant puff.

"This is the whipsong," he said. "A complete breakthrough! We've jumped the typewriters, the editors, the presses! We've given the film a whole new ending and we did it right here! Oh, we've flogged the beast home with this one!"

For the next two or three hours, we watched the seven-minute tape over and over again. Thompson laughed, slapped his knee, destroyed a chandelier and literally did somersaults across the room. Around noon, he got Linson on the phone. "I think you better get over here and see this," he said. "We've solved your whole problem...this is a new high. If you thought the Nixon scene was interesting, you better wear a metallic wet suit for this one...this could spike your fucking career to the wall, Art...you have come to whistle time...we have broken the back and the neck of this thing.... Yes, it takes the movie over...we have finally achieved what we meant to do all along...we have twisted the back and the spine of your meaning. We have made it something warped. I feel a home...."

•

What Linson saw that afternoon, and said he liked, was not only an obituary for Oscar Zeta Acosta, and not only an ending for the film; it was also Thompson's comment on the film itself. There is no telling whether or not it will be in the movie, because, as far as I know, they are all still down there at Universal as I write this, probably grunting and wrestling and threatening one another with pitchforks in the great tradition of the cinematic arts.

Only time will tell if Thompson ever got his stomping on this project; he never got it while I was watching though God knows he earned it. And whether or not the words he and Murray laid down that night end the movie, they are going to have to end this story, because their deadline is later than mine.

When I finally left the hotel room that evening, Thompson was playing the tape yet again--and for days, parts of it were still ringing in my head, along with a vision of Murray sitting at his desk under a huge stuffed bat, smoking and drinking and banging at the typewriter while his hoarse voice-over filled the room with words that bore the unmistakable crack and swoop of Hunter S. Thompson:

Well, I guess if I had to swear one way or another, I'd say he wasn't insane--he just had strange rhythms. It's hard to say that he got what he deserved, because he never really got anything, at least not in this story, and right now this story is all we have. He went away to look for his dream and it took about a year to find out he was missing, took another year to realize he wasn't coming back and now I guess he's dead. He was crazier than 15 loons. I guess that's why he never got off the boat. It's sad. What's really sad is that it never got weird enough for me. I moved to the country...then I learned that Nixon had been eaten by white cannibals on an island near Tijuana--I mean, you hear a lot of savage and unnatural things about people these days. They're both gone now, but 1 don't think I'm going to believe that until I can gnaw on both their skulls with my very own teeth.... Fuck those people...if they're still out there, I'm going to find them...you hear me, Lazlo?...I'm going to find them and I'm going to gnaw on their skulls with my very own teeth. Because it still hasn't gotten weird enough for me.

"Thompson ran for sheriff on the promise that if elected, he'd allow his deputies to eat mescaline."

"Thompson put Linson and Kaye in a taxi and said, 'See that these two don't die in Colorado.' "