Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a 1998 film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 novel Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke & Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo. Released on May 22, 1998 & earned about $10.6 million at U.S. box office. It has since become a cult classic.

Plot

Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp)Journalist Raoul Duke (Depp) & attorney Dr. Gonzo (del Toro) travel to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1971 to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race for a sports magazine, & enjoy a haphazardly-planned vacation. The vacation turns highly irresponsible & reckless as the two consume copious amounts of illegal drugs, commit various acts of fraud, & generally wreak havoc upon the citizens of Las Vegas. It is an account of Thompson & attorney Acosta's actual trip to Las Vegas around the same time period.

Cast
Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke
Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo
Tobey Maguire as the Hitchhiker
Ellen Barkin as the Waitress at North Star Cafe
Gary Busey as the Highway Patrolman
Christina Ricci as Lucy
Mark Harmon as the Magazine Reporter at Mint 400
Cameron Diaz as the Blonde TV Reporter
Katherine Helmond as the Desk Clerk at Mint Hotel
Michael Jeter as L. Ron Bumquist
Penn Jillette as the Carnie Talker
Craig Bierko as Lacerda
Lyle Lovett as the Road Person
Flea as the Musician
Laraine Newman as the Frog-Eyed Woman
Christopher Meloni as Sven, Clerk at Flamingo Hotel
Harry Dean Stanton as the Judge
Thompson also has a brief cameo in the film while Duke has a flashback to a San Francisco music club, The Matrix, where Thompson can be seen sitting at a table as Depp walks by narrating his inner monologue, "There I was ... Mother of God! There I am! Holy fuck!".

Production & history

Basis for characters
Dr. Gonzo is based on Thompson's friend Oscar Zeta Acosta, who disappeared sometime in 1974. Thompson changed Zeta Acosta's ethnic identity to "Samoan" to deflect suspicion from Zeta Acosta, who was in trouble with the L.A. Legal Bar. He was the "Chicano lawyer" notorious for his party binges.

Previous attempts
During the initial development to get the film made, Jack Nicholson & Marlon Brando were originally considered for the roles of Duke & Gonzo, & Nicholson was attached, but he & Brando both grew too old. Afterward, Dan Aykroyd & John Belushi were considered for the duo, but that fell apart when Belushi died. John Malkovich was later considered for the role of Duke, but he too grew too old. At one point John Cusack was almost cast, but then Hunter S. Thompson met Johnny Depp, & was convinced no one else could play him. Cusack had previously directed the play version of "Fear & Loathing", with his brother playing Duke.

Animator/filmmaker Ralph Bakshi tried to convince a girlfriend of Hunter S. Thompson to let him do "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" as an animated movie, done in the style of Ralph Steadman's illustrations for the book. Bakshi is quoted as saying: "Hunter had given the rights to a girlfriend of his. I spent three days with her trying to talk her into me animating it - she wanted to make a live action of it - I kept telling her that a live action would look like a bad cartoon but an animated version would be a great one. She had a tremendous disdain for animators because it wasn't considered the top of Hollywood. Hunter also could not make her change her mind. So she made the pic with Johnny Depp, & got the film I told her she would get - it would have been more real in a cartoon using Steadman's drawings."

Martin Scorsese & Oliver Stone each tried to get the film off the ground, but were unsuccessful & moved on.

Rhino Films began work on a film version as early as 1992. Head of Production & the film's producer Stephen Nemeth originally wanted Lee Tamahori to direct, but he wasn't available until after the January 1997 start date. Rhino appealed to Thompson for an extension on the movie rights but the author & his lawyers denied the extension. Under pressure, Rhino countered by green-lighting the film & hiring Alex Cox to direct within a few days. According to Nemeth, Cox could "do it for a price, could do it quickly, & could get this movie going in four months."

Cox started writing the screenplay with Tod Davies, a UCLA Thompson scholar. Johnny Depp & Benicio del Toro then committed to starring in the film. During pre-production, Cox & producer Laila Nabulsi had "creative differences" & she forced Rhino to choose between her & Cox. She had an arrangement with Thompson to produce the movie & the studio fired Cox & paid him $60,000 in script fees. Thompson's disapproval of the Cox/Davies script treatment is documented in the film Breakfast with Hunter, in which he rails against the writers for planning an animated portrayal of the "wave speech," which he considered "probably the finest thing [he'd] ever written."

Pre-production
Rhino hired Terry Gilliam & were granted an extension from Thompson but only with the stipulation that the director made the movie. Rhino did not want to commit to Gilliam in case he didn't work out. Thompson remembers, "they just kept asking for more [time]. I got kind of agitated about it, because I thought they were trying to put off doing it. So I began to charge them more...I wanted to see the movie done, once it got started." The studio threatened to make the film with Cox & without Depp & del Toro. The two actors were upset when Nabulsi told them of Rhino's plans. Universal Pictures stepped in to distribute the film & Depp & Gilliam were paid $500,000 each but the director still did not have a firm deal in place. In retaliation, Depp & Gilliam locked Rhino out of the set during filming.

The decision was made to not use the Cox/Davies script which gave Gilliam only ten days to write another. The director enlisted the help of Tony Grisoni & they wrote the script at Gilliam's home in May 1997. Grisoni remembers, "I'd sit at the keyboard, & we'd talk & talk & I'd keep typing." One of the most important scenes from the book that Gilliam wanted to put in the film was the confrontation between Duke & Dr. Gonzo & the waitress of the North Star Coffee Lounge. The director said, "This is two guys who have gone beyond the pale, this is unforgivable - that scene, it's ugly. My approach, rather than to throw it out, was to make that scene the low point."

The lead actors undertook extraordinary preparations for their respective roles. Del Toro gained more than 45 pounds (18 kg) in nine weeks before filming began, & extensively researched Acosta's life. In the Spring of 1997, Depp moved into the basement of Thompson's Owl Farm home & lived there for four months, doing research for the role as well as studying Thompson's habits & mannerisms. The actor went through Thompson's original manuscript, mementos & notebooks that he kept during the actual trip. Depp remembers, "He saved it all. Not only is [the book] true, but there's more. & it was worse." Depp even traded his car for Thompson's red Chevrolet Impala convertible, known to fans as The Great Red Shark, & drove it around California during his preparation for the role. Many of the costumes that Depp wears in the film are genuine articles of clothing that Depp borrowed from Thompson, & the writer himself shaved Depp's head to match his own natural male pattern baldness. Other props, such as Duke's cigarette filter (a TarGard Permanent Filter System), Hawaiian shirts, hats, a patchwork jacket, a silver medallion (given to him by Oscar Acosta) & IDs, belonged to Thompson.

Initially, the studio wanted Gilliam to update the book for the 1990s which he considered, "and then I looked at the film & said, 'No, that's apologizing. I don't want to apologize for this thing. It is what it is.' It's an artifact. If it's an accurate representation of that book, which I thought was an accurate representation of a particular time & place & people."

Principal photography
According to Gilliam, there was no firm budget in place when filming started. Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini was hired based on an audition reel he sent Gilliam that made fun of the fact that he had only one eye (he lost the other to retinal cancer). According to Pecorini, the look of the film was influenced by the paintings of Robert Yarber that are "very hallucinatory: the paintings use all kinds of neon colors, & the light sources don't necessarily make sense." According to Gilliam, they used him as a guide "while mixing our palette of deeply disturbing fluorescent colors."

Shooting on location in Las Vegas began on August 3, 1997 & lasted 56 days. The production ran into problems when they wanted to shoot in a casino. They were only allowed to film between two & six in the morning, given only six tables to put extras around & insisted that the extras really gamble." Exterior shots of the Bazooko Casino were filmed in front of the Stardust hotel/casino with the interiors constructed with a Warner Brothers Hollywood soundstage. In order to get the period look of Vegas in the 1970s, Gilliam & Pecorini used rear-projection footage from the old television show, Vega$. According to the cinematographer, this footage heightened the film's "already otherworldly tone an extra notch."

For the desert scenes, Pecorini wanted a specific, undefined quality without a real horizon in order to convey the notion that the landscape never ended & to emphasize, "a certain kind of unreality outside the characters' car, because everything that matters to them is within the Red Shark."[17] With the scene where Duke hallucinates a lounge full of lizards, the production was supposed to have 25 animatronic reptiles but they only received seven or eight.[17] The production used motion-control techniques to make it look like they had a whole room of them & made multiple passes with the cameras outfitting the lizards with different costumes each time.

Gilliam felt that it was not a well-organized film & said, "Certain people didn't...I'm not going to name names but it was a strange film, like one leg was shorter than the other. There was all sorts of chaos." While Depp was on location in Los Angeles, he got a phone call from comedian Bill Murray who had played Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam. He warned Depp, "Be careful or you'll find yourself ten years from now still doing him...Make sure your next role is some drastically different guy."

While making the movie, it was Gilliam's intention that it should feel like a drug trip from beginning to end. He said in an interview, "We start out at full speed & it's WOOOO! The drug kicks in & you're on speed! Whoah! You get the buzz - it's crazy, it's outrageous, the carpet's moving & everybody's laughing & having a great time. But then, ever so slowly, the walls start closing in & it's like you're never going to get out of this fucking place. It's an ugly nightmare & there's no escape."

To convey the effects of the various drugs, Gilliam & Pecorini assembled a list of "phases" that detailed the "cinematic qualities" of each drug consumed. For ether, Pecorini said they used a "loose depth of field; everything becomes non-defined"; for adrenochrome, "everything gets narrow & claustrophobic, move closer with lens"; mescaline was simulated by having "colors melt into each other, flares with no sources, play with color temperatures"; for amyl nitrite, the "perception of light gets very uneven, light levels increase & decrease during the shots"; & for LSD, "everything extremely wide, hallucinations via morphs, shapes, colors, & sound."

Writers credit dispute with WGA
When the film approached release, Gilliam learned that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) would not allow Cox & Davies to be removed from the credits even though none of their material was used in the production of the film. According to WGA rules, Gilliam & Grisoni had to prove that they wrote 60% of their script. The director said, "But there have been at least five previous attempts at adapting the book, & they all come from the book. They all use the same scenes." Gilliam remarked in an interview, "The end result was we didn't exist. As a director, I was automatically deemed a 'production executive' by the guild & , by definition, discriminated against. But for Tony to go without any credit would be really unfair." David Kanter, agent for Cox & Davies, argued, "About 60 percent of the decisions they made on what stays in from the book are in the film - as well as their attitude of wide-eyed anarchy." According to the audio commentary by Gilliam on the Criterion Collection DVD, during the period where it appeared that only Cox & Davies would be credited for the screenplay, the movie was to begin with a short scene in which it is explained that no matter what is said in the credits, no writers were involved in the making of the movie. When this changed in early May 1998 after the WGA revised its decision & gave credit to Gilliam & Grisoni first & Cox & Davies second, the short was not needed. Angered over having to share credit, Gilliam publicly burned his WGA card at a May 22 book signing on Broadway.

Soundtrack
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (Music from the Motion Picture)

Soundtrack by Various artists
Released May 19, 1998
Recorded N/A
Genre Rock
Length 61:00
Label Geffen
Professional reviews
All Music Guide link

The soundtrack contains songs used in the film with clips of the movie before each song. So considering this each song starts about 30 seconds later than it would normally. The soundtrack contains the music of that time with one exception being the Dead Kennedys rendition of "Viva Las Vegas". The Rolling Stones song "Jumping Jack Flash" is heard at the conclusion of the film as Thompson drives out of Las Vegas.

Gilliam could not pay $300,000 (half of the soundtrack budget) for the rights to "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, which plays a prominent role in the book.

Track listing
Big Brother & the Holding Company - "Combination of the Two"
Brewer & Shipley - "One Toke Over the Line"
Tom Jones - "She's a Lady"
The Yardbirds - "For Your Love"
Jefferson Airplane - "White Rabbit"
Tomoyasu Hotei & Ray Cooper - "A Drug Score - Part 1 (Acid Spill)"
The Youngbloods - "Get Together"
Three Dog Night - "Mama Told Me Not to Come"
Bob Dylan - "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"
Booker T. & the MG's - "Time Is Tight"
Perry Como - "Magic Moments"
Tomoyasu Hotei & Ray Cooper - "A Drug Score - Part 2 (Adenochrome, The Devil's Dance)"
Debbie Reynolds - "Tammy"
Tomoyasu Hotei & Ray Cooper - "A Drug Score - Part 3 (Flashbacks)"
Buffalo Springfield - "Expecting to Fly"
Dead Kennedys - "Viva Las Vegas"

Reaction
The film underwent preview test screenings - a process that Gilliam does not enjoy. "I always get very tense in those (test screenings), because I'm ready to fight. I know the pressure from the studio is, 'somebody didn't like that, change it!'" The filmmaker said that it was important to him that Thompson like the movie & recalls the writer's reaction at a screening, "Hunter watched it for the first time at the premiere & he was making all this fucking noise! Apparently it all came flooding back to him, he was reliving the whole trip! He was yelling out & jumping on his seat like it was a roller coaster, ducking & diving, shouting 'SHIT! LOOK OUT! GODDAMN BATS!' That was fantastic – if he thought we'd captured it, then we must have done it!" Thompson himself stated, "Yeah, I liked it. It's not my show, but I appreciated it. Depp did a hell of a job. His narration is what really held the film together, I think. If you hadn't had that, it would have just been a series of wild scenes."

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas debuted at the Cannes Film Festival & Gilliam said, "I'm curious about the reaction...If I'm going to be disappointed, it's because it doesn't make any waves, that people are not outraged."

Critical reaction to the film was mostly negative. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "Even the most precise cinematic realizations of Mr. Thompson's images (and of Ralph Steadman's cartoon drawings for the book) don't begin to match the surreal ferocity of the author's language." Stephen Hunter, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote, "It tells no story at all. Little episodes of no particular import come & go...But the movie is too grotesque to be entered emotionally." Mike Clark, of USA Today, found the film, "simply unwatchable." In The Guardian, Gaby Wood wrote, "After a while, though, the ups & downs don't come frequently enough even for the audience, & there's an element of the tedium usually found in someone else's druggy experiences." Michael O'Sullivan gave the film one of its rare positive reviews in the Washington Post. "What elevates the tale from being a mere drug chronicle is the same thing that lifted the book into the realm of literature. It's the sense that Gilliam, like Thompson, is always totally in command of the medium, while abandoning himself utterly to unpredictable forces beyond his control."

Gilliam wanted to provoke strong reactions to his film as he said in an interview, "I want it to be seen as one of the great movies of all time, & one of the most hated movies of all time."

Awards
The Cannes Film Festival nominated director Terry Gilliam for a Golden Palm.
Johnny Depp won a Golden Aries under the category of "Best Foreign Actor" from the Russian Guild of Film Critics.
Sources

Differences from the novel
In the opening scene of the book, it is stated that Duke & Dr. Gonzo had a tape of "Sympathy for the Devil" that they played over & over again as loud as possible "as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio". In the film they just listen to the radio, & the Rolling Stones song is nowhere to be heard. This was because of the high royalty price, see above. However they do listen to the radio in the book until Dr. Gonzo starts singing along to "One Toke Over the Line".

The coconut-smashing scene toward the end of the film was not originally in the book. Thompson wrote the scene for the novel & then omitted it.

In the movie Duke states that his blood is too thick for Nevada, in the book Duke states that his blood is too thick for California.

At the Mint 400 pit, a refreshment stand is seen with a sign that reads "Coffee & Dough Nuts". In the book, on the sign at the stand, coffee is spelled with a "k" & in all capital letters (KOFFEE & DOUGH NUTS).

The adrenachrome scene & the DA's drug conference scene are in reverse order in the movie than in the book.

During the check-in scene in the lobby at the Mint Hotel, a man in a white suit can be heard speaking on a pay phone saying: "They chopped her head off right there in the parking lot. Drilling her full of holes, probably looking for the pineal gland." In the book Dr. Gonzo says this to a man in the bar at the district attorneys' drug convention (presumably to perturb the man as he's obviously making up the story). This scene was actually filmed for the movie & was added to the DVD as a deleted scene.

The ending of the film is different from the novel. The book tells of Duke getting on a plane & flying to Denver. After landing he wanders into a drug store & buys a box of amyls, uses it in front of the clerk, & curses at two Marines. The only thing from the ending that stayed in the film is the last paragraph, which Depp narrates.

Also in the book, Duke & Gonzo spend a great deal of time searching for the American Dream only to end up being led to a burnt down psychiatric office. This scene was completely omitted from the film.

DVD
By the time Fear & Loathing was released as a Criterion Collection DVD in 2003, Thompson showed his approval of the Gilliam version by recording a full-length audio commentary for the movie & participating in several DVD special features.

On an audio commentary track in the Criterion edition of the DVD, Gilliam expresses great pride in the film & says it was one of the few times where he did not have to fight extensively with the studio during the filming. Gilliam chalks this up to the fact that many of the studio executives read Thompson's book in their youth & understood it could not be made into a conventional Hollywood film. However, he does express frustration with the advertising campaign used during its initial release, which he says tried to sell it as wacky comedy.