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Hunter S. Thompson Documentaries
by Brian Duff - FILMINK, March 2007

With his ambitious troika of documentaries - Breakfast With Hunter, When I Die and Free Lisl: Fear & Loathing In Denver - director Wayne Ewing somehow succeeds in shedding even further light on the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Despite his hermetic home life in rural Colorado, Thompson was on near constant display during his later years, mostly due to the 1998 film dramatization of the seminal Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. The film brought him enormous celebrity until his death in 2005, and could easily have rendered weaker docks mere footnotes. But through an unflinching eye and with a light editing touch, Ewing manages to add to the Thompson pantheon, rather than simply cataloguing it.

Free Lisl follows Hunter and friends as they take up bombastic democratic arms against an unfairly applied, overzealous law, and crafts Thompson as a humble elder statesman. Less angelic is the Thompson on display in Breakfast With Hunter, an unfocused, if more interesting film. In it he is toasted by writers George Plimpton and P.J. O'Rourke as well as actors Johnny Depp and John Cusack. Even celebrity preening does little to curtail either his ugly virtriol or infectious mischievousness, both on vivid display as Thompson boozes and rambles, and exhibits great affection and anger toward friend and foe alike. While nowhere near as important as Free Lisl or as energetic as Breakfast, When I die is a documentary worth consideration for its subject matter alone. It tracks the construction - and later use - of a fifty-metre cannon in the shape of the two thumbed gonzo fist, built for the express purpose of firing the writer's earthly remains into the sky; the logistics and legality of which form the crux of the movie. Suffice it to say that the cannon does indeed fire: a fitting cap to Thompson's life and Ewing's film, all of which are available for purchase at www.hunterthompsonfilms.com.

Filmmaker's Bio
Wayne Ewing has produced and directed over thirty documentaries for American television networks. His first twenty-two films were broadcast as a part of the series Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. The Emmy nominated Blood's of 'Nam followed on PBS as a part of the Frontline series. Also for Frontline, Ewing produced and directed A Journey To Russia during the last days of the Brezhnev era.

Ewing made several one-hour documentaries for NBC News, directing Women in Prison with Maria Shriver as correspondent and then producing and directing Gangs, Cops, & Drugs and The New Hollywood with Tom Brokaw as correspondent.

In 1992, the feature film director Barry Levinson asked Ewing to design the visual style of the dramatic series Homicide:Life On The Streets. Ewing's handheld cinematography and innovative editing scheme brought a style of reality to drama that television critics have credited with changing the look of American dramatic television in the 1990's.

Wayne Ewing graduated from Yale College and The University of Texas Graduate School of Communications. He lives somewhere near Aspen, Colorado in an unfortified compound.

"Free Lisl" Trailer, purchse Free Lisl at HunterThompsonFilms.com

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