GALUPO: One gonzo star is enough

On the campaign trail in 1972, Hunter S. Thompson, the pioneering narrative journalist, spent 1 1/2 hours in a limousine with his bete noire, President Nixon.

They talked football the entire time.

Decades later, Mr. Thompson met with John A. Walsh, a senior executive at ESPN, to discuss the possibility of Mr. Thompson contributing to a blog on the sports network’s Web site.

They talked politics the entire time.

The late Mr. Thompson sized up his subjects by observing them inside and outside their comfort zones. He also, more simply, liked to shoot the breeze (literally, too, one hastens to add).

On a very basic level, “that’s what made him a good reporter,” says the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” opens in select theaters today.

Nearly everything else about Mr. Thompson - his mash-up of reality and wild invention; his drug- and drink-fueled Kerouacian escapades; his use of himself as a narrative-framing device - constitutes a theory and practice of journalism so idiosyncratic as to defy imitation.

“His great talent was marrying this great reporting ability with a novelist’s flair for writing,” Mr. Gibney says.

Aspiring journalists: Don’t try this at work.

William McKeen, who chairs the University of Florida’s journalism department, says many students “are intoxicated by” Mr. Thompson; they worship him as journalism’s equivalent of Bob Dylan.

Yet Mr. McKeen, whose biography “Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson” comes out Monday, is quick to caution that “there was only one guy who could get away with that.”

That fact hasn’t stopped many would-be gonzos from trying.

Indeed, it’s the most dubious aspect of gonzo that has proved most alluring in our celebrity-sodden culture: the reporter who doubles as the star of his own reporting. The journalism that morphs into a kind of performance art.

The watch-me-dive world of the blogosphere and YouTube.com is tailor-made for such self-referentiality. Mr. Thompson looms large, too, over the work of pseudo-jovial attack dogs like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock (“Super-Size Me”), who have, to varying degrees, turned what was for Mr. Thompson a literary device into an increasingly tiresome stunt.

To the extent that he insinuated himself into his work, Mr. Gibney says it was because “he had this sense that he was a great antenna; he was using himself as a kind of tuning fork to understand the music around him.”

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