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In the south of France, film industry people still chase the American Dream that so fascinated Thompson when he wrote Fear And Loathing in 1971. Thompson explored the subject with his head spinning wildly out of control, thanks to a vicious cocktail of booze and drugs that induced waves of paranoia, weirdness and vomiting. It's all in the film.
Cannes is where a perverted version of the American Dream -- sex, stimulants, excessive behavior, money, power and babes prowling the beaches in string bikini bottoms with tanned breasts perked up by silicone surgery -- still survives. At least on those beaches. At least on the movie screens where reality takes a hit and the Dream comes true for 90 minutes.
"I don't know, but I think it will play well," says Fear And Loathing director Terry Gilliam, the former Monty Pythoner. He has parlayed his own artistic talent and general weirdness into a filmmaking career that includes Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys.
I interviewed Gilliam at a Beverly Hills Hotel just as he finally finished the film in a compressed post-production hell that defied logic.
"There has been a mad rush to finish. It's been unreal, chaos," he says. "But we've actually made a film in record time, from beginning to end in a year. I think it's a film, anyway.
"Now I just want to see what will happen for the black-tie (gala)," Gilliam muses hopefully. "The last time I was at Cannes with the black-ties, it was for Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life, and we had projectile vomiting there then too. And we have vomiting in this one. So the circle is complete.
"I'm just curious about the reaction. I'm just waiting to see what kind of ripples or waves it makes. I think, if I'm going to be disappointed, it's because it doesn't make any waves, that people are not outraged, that people are not angry, that people don't deal with the thing. That will be my failure!"
Hunter S. Thompson's success is that his hands-on, head-twisted, self-indulgent, confessional style of participatory journalism transformed him into a legend, the inspiration for the Uncle Duke character in the Doonesbury comic strip.
In the movie, he is played with all-consuming fervor by Johnny Depp, who spent four months living with the Duke at his Colorado hideout to, in Depp's words, "steal his soul."
Thompson is portrayed in Fear And Loathing as he portrays himself in the book: A manic reporter who displaces the events he is supposed to cover and delves into his own excessive escapism techniques, only to surface with lacerating observations on the moral bankruptcy of the nation.
"My interest in Hunter S. Thompson is that I think he is an American icon and an incredible genius writer," says Fear And Loathing film producer Laila Nabulsi, who has worked with Hunter S. Thompson since she met him in John Belushi's dressing room on the Saturday Night Live set in New York. "He is a true original.
"I think he wrote a book -- Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas specifically -- that is a seminal book of that time," Nabulsi says. "It kind of put the final nail in the coffin of the '60s and he created gonzo journalism. He is an original thinker and that captivates me. He represents a kind of American tradition of the outlaw and also the journalist whose sword is the pen. His heart is in the right place. He has always tried to go for justice."
Thompson and his equally drug-addled friend, outlaw lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, set off for Vegas in 1971 on assignment from a magazine to cover an off-road motorcycle race called the Mint 400.
"We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers," Thompson recounted in the book.
"Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. But the only thing that worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge."
The film is faithful to the book, including the narration, which reminds people that Thompson, despite his depravity, had cogent things to say about the Nixon-era America he so despised, so mistrusted and so ridiculed in his book.
"I think it's relevant," Gilliam says of Thompson's saga, especially in the '90s, "because we are lacking in that. There is a great void out there and I think that void needs something like Fear And Loathing and that kind of behavior in it.
"I don't think that people think now. I think they're all happy with the goodies the corporations have given us. The corporations have given us wonderful things.
"But I think there is a sense of a lack of focus. It doesn't mean this film is going to provide any focus, but at least it shows there was a time when these (material) things didn't matter, when people were intense about what was going on in society. This film is really about what was going on in society.
"This film is really about what you do when things are going bad and you can't do anything about it. It's a terrible hymn to impotence.
"But it's people alive. It's excessive behavior. I just think it's needed in a world with PC-ness (political correctness) floating out there. Everyone is so cautious, everyone is so concerned about saying something that might offend."
Society sucks in the '90s, Gilliam continues. "Now the most trivial, silly things become the things of importance. It's like people are avoiding real things now, real responsibilities, real decisions, adult decisions. My fear is, as society becomes more and more infantilized and Disneyfied, everything will be reduced to a lower and lower level, a dumber level. Hunter S. Thompson might be a fraud, a total fraud. But I don't care, he wrote a good book!"
As a film, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas might offend everybody.
Gilliam can only hope 26 years after the book was published, 16 years since Nabulsi and Thompson
first dreamed up the film project.
"I hope the time isn't too late. Even if you start by dropping a little seed -- a little evil seed like this film -- into society, something might happen. Something!"
THE FEAR AND LOATHING FILE
THE BOOK: Gonzo journalism run amok: First published by Random House in 1972 after appearing in Rolling Stone magazine, spread over two issues in November 1971.
THE CHARACTERS: Hunter S. Thompson, the author, is still alive at 61 and miraculously, given his consumption of illegal substances, reported to be as sharp and smart as ever. Raoul Duke's sidekick on the adventure was lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, known as Dr. Gonzo in the book. Not seen or heard from since the 1970s, presumed dead.
THE FILM: After 17 scripts, Monty Python's Terry Gilliam finally co-authored the shooting script and directed the $17.5-million movie. Makes its debut at Cannes. Opens in theatres across North America May 22 to do battle with the brute force of Godzilla.