*Taken from Cinema Blend.

There are a number of movies that I will never forget watching for the first time, and Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is most definitely one of those titles. It was the summer before my senior year in high school and I was living in a dorm while taking classes at Boston University. One night I ventured down to the common room just as some of my friends were starting up a DVD and I watched as a cherry red convertible sped through the California desert driven by what appeared to be funhouse mirror versions of Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. I was immediately caught up in the chaos of it all, from the strange yet poetic narration to the characters’ epic drug usage. When Raoul Duke began hallucinating giant reptiles in the hotel bar I finally turned to one of the people watching the movie with me and said, “What movie is this?” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” he replied.

From that point on I became a touch obsessed with the works of Hunter S. Thompson. His writing was unlike anything I had ever seen before and I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I would pick up his books and anthologies every moment I could and would try and squeeze in just one more chapter/article before I had to leave for school or go to bed. Similar to the way that Thompson would type out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms as a way to learn more about the authors’ styles, I would find myself authoring short vignettes mimicking Thompson’s tongue. It was the gonzo perspective that got me truly interested in journalism and I can say without a single doubt that if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t be working here at Cinema Blend.

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