After this, the two continue their drug binge across Vegas, before eventually waking up in a destroyed hotel room. Duke drives Gonzo to the airport, and then boards a plane to Denver. [9] The "wave speech" [ edit ] Alger was a 19th-century author who typically wrote rags to riches stories; in Vegas, his relevance is about greed as a distinctively American quality. In fact, Duke eventually finds the “main nerve” of the American Dream in the Circus-Circus casino. The owner, who dreamt of running away to join the circus as a child, now has his own circus, and a licence to steal. He, it is said, is the model for the American Dream. If this seems cynical, so it should. HST: He told me when I stopped in Denver on the way to the Super Bowl that he’d sensed it as early as September, but when I asked him when he knew, he thought for a minute and then said, “Well, I guess… it was around October 1st…” According to Pat Caddell’s polls they had known – when I say “they,” I mean the McGovern top command – had known what kind of damage the Eagleton thing had done and how terminal it was ever since September. Pat said they spent a month just wringing their hands and tearing their hair trying to figure out how to overcome the Eagleton disaster. Hunter was a theatre. He was a roving kind of theatre. He was not just a writer … he was an actor. He was creating his own subject matter. Just why the American electorate gave the present administration such an overwhelming mandate in November remains something of a mystery to me. I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. I believed that any reasonable Democrat would defeat President Nixon. I now think that no one could have defeated him in 1972.”– Sen. George McGovern, speaking at Oxford University two months after the election.

Holden, Stephen (May 22, 1998). " 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas': The Attitude Is Missing". The New York Times . Retrieved June 13, 2023. It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... One of the things Thompson wanted America to do better was fulfil the promise of the 1960s. Some of the novel’s most trenchant criticisms are levelled at counter-cultural gurus like Timothy Leary who, it seems to Duke, set up new regimes of authoritarianism to replace the old. One of the novel’s most famous passages reveals its bitter nostalgia: A graphic novel adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, adapted by Canadian artist Troy Little, was released in October 2015. [25] In interviews, Little said "We decided right off the bat not to go the Steadman route, or be too influenced by the movie either, and draw Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. So we wanted to make it its own unique thing... For me, capturing the manic energy and spirit of the book, and staying true to the feel of Fear and Loathing was my big goal." [26] Other references [ edit ]Stubbs, Philip. "The conflict over Fear and Loathing's script credit". gilliamdreams.com . Retrieved February 17, 2017.

Thompson, Hunter S. (1989). Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: a savage journey to the heart of the American dream. Internet Archive. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-679-72419-3. Ed: If you were to run for senate in Colorado what kind of a campaign would you conduct? Would you run as a Democrat?The next day, they attend the drug convention, where they observe a comically out of touch presentation by a police "drug expert". Greatest Movies of All Time". Empire. Archived from the original on January 6, 2009 . Retrieved September 29, 2009. HST: It was essentially an anti-Nixon vote. I don’t think McGovern would have been a bad President. He’s a better senator. But I don’t think that the kind of standard-brand Democrat that he came to be – or that he actually was all along, and finally came out and admitted he was toward the end, more by his actions than by what he said – I’m not sure that kind of person is ever going to win a presidential campaign again. What was once the natural kind of constituency for that kind of person – the Stevenson constituency, the traditional liberal – has lost faith, I think, in everything that Liberalism was supposed to stand for. Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it. And the fact is people like Nixon – candidates like Nixon – have a running start which gives them a tremendous advantage. HST: Well … I’m not sure, but I doubt that McGovern himself could have won with any kind of campaign, even without the Eagleton incident. Hunter, Stephen (May 22, 1998). "Thompson's Worst Trip". The Washington Post . Retrieved May 18, 2023.

HST: I don’t know. That’s the kind of language Mankiewicz used all through the campaign when he got confused and started treading water. McGovern said that “half of the Nixon vote, given the chance, would have gone even further to the right!” I suspect that’s really one of the roots of the thinking of at least half of the ranking staff people in McGovern’s campaign, even now…. The Hart/Caddell theory was a less ominous view of the potential of the electorate. Both Gary and Pat were convinced that McGovern could have won. That was the question I asked almost every one of. the staff people I talked to at any length. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . HST: Here’s a question you probably won’t like, but it’s something that’s kind of haunted me ever since it happened: What in the hell possessed you to offer the vice presidency to Humphrey in public? Did you think he would take it or if he did take it it would really help? The decision was made to not use the Cox/Davies script, which gave Gilliam only ten days to write another. [16] Gilliam has stated in an interview "When we were writing the script, we really tried not to invent anything. We sort of cannibalized the book." [9] The director enlisted the help of Tony Grisoni and they wrote the script at Gilliam's home in May 1997. Grisoni remembers, "I'd sit at the keyboard, and we'd talk and talk and I'd keep typing." [16] One of the most important scenes from the book that Gilliam wanted to put in the film was the confrontation between Duke and Dr. Gonzo and 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." [17]

He called it a failed experiment because he originally intended to record every detail of the Las Vegas trip as it happened, and then publish the raw, unedited notes; however, he revised it during the spring and summer of 1971. For example, the novel describes Duke attending the motorcycle race and the narcotics convention in a few days' time; the actual events occurred a month apart. [21] Later, he wrote, "I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism". [1] The "wave speech" is an important passage at the end of the eighth chapter that captures the hippie zeitgeist and its end. Thompson often cited this passage during interviews, choosing it when asked to read aloud from the novel: [6] HST: I haven’t thought about it. But it would naturally have to involve a drastic change of some kind… Maybe just an atavistic endeavor, but there’s no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around. HST: Coffee is a drug… yes, there were drugs being used… booze is a drug… many drugs…. They’re all around us these days.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Thompson's most famous work and is known as Fear and Loathing for short; however, he later used the phrase "Fear and Loathing" in the titles of other books, essays, and magazine articles. Duke, Raoul (November 11, 1973). "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Part I". Rolling Stone. Vol.95. pp.37–48. The conference only serves to demonstrate how out of touch law enforcement is. The second half of the book follows much the same trajectory as the first, with the pair compounding their felonies of (statutory) rape, fraud and larceny. HST: Yeah, I think you either have to have a very strong decisive person at the top or else a really brilliant staff command. And he didn’t have either one, actually. But he did have the troops in the field…

However, this job is repeatedly obstructed by their constant use of a variety of recreational drugs, including LSD, ether, cocaine, alcohol, mescaline, and cannabis. HST: Every hotel in the country, it looked like. And I think on the last day of the campaign, one of the CBS cameramen put them all in a huge bag. He was going to take them to one mailbox in Washington and dump them all in there… Then they were going to film the behavior of the postman when he opened the box and found 5000 hotel keys… it must have weighed 200 pounds… that was the kind of twisted humor that prevailed on the Zoo Plane. Ed: So the public perceived McGovern to be the bad guy, when in fact it was really Eagleton. And McGovern never recovered from that change in his image. Ed: If you were to run for senate in Colorado and win, would you then consider running for the presidency itself? As a reading experience, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a wild torpedo ride through some of the strangest scenes in American fact, or American fiction. Or whatever bizarre hybrid of fact and fiction this book represents.