My version of The Godfather would open with a voice in the darkness saying, “I don’t believe in America. The American Dream is a once-beguiling fairy tale; show’s over, y’all.” But The Dream is still real to many people, and the violence that powerful private interests have done to it in the last century pains them like a kidney punch.
Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson was one of the wounded, and so is Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Darkside), the far more straight-laced director of the entertaining documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. They share a proprietary sense of outrage over abuses of power they’ve witnessed in their times. For them, America’s Nixons, Enrons and Bush-Cheneys have desecrated the church, the front lawn. For all their passionate trouble-making, there’s no denying that Gibney and the late Thompson, two white males who came up through America’s hallowed institutions (Thompson through the U.S. Air Force; Gibney through Yale), are insiders.
When I went to interview Gibney about Gonzo, I remembered the film’s procession of leathery right-wingers and elites, former Thompson nemeses, who have warm, friendly things to say about “Dr. Gonzo” now that he’s dead, now that his caricature as a gun-toting drughead has endured beyond his politics. I wondered if, in the end, being inside got the hole dug any better than chucking rocks from outside.
The New York Observer reports that Oscar winning filmmaker Alex Gibney is working on a documentary about Eliot Spitzer, the New York governor who was forced to resign after his predilection for semi-pricey hookers was revealed last month. Gibney is collaborating with Peter Elkind, who wrote the book that inspired Gibney’s Enron doc The Smartest Guys in the Room, to produce a book and a movie simultaneously. Is the public really really so hungry for more information about this story, after so many weeks of exhaustive cable news coverage and loosely-related hooker tie ins across the infotainment spectrum? Is there anything left to say that wasn’t summed up by the New York Magazine cover at right?
