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GALUPO: One gonzo star is enough

By Scott Galupo (Contact) | Friday, July 4, 2008

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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.