Latest news with #HunterSThompson
Mail & Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mail & Guardian
Come now, spill the beans on Sol
Sol: My Friend and Adversary, Sol Kerzner by Peter Venison (J DoubleD Publicity, 2025) Sometimes it's better to take no action than to take the wrong action. Peter Venison should have rather used his retirement to improve his golf handicap or something. At the beginning of this biography, he confirms that the only reason he put pen to paper was that he had been searching for a Sol Kerzner biography at an Exclusive Books store and hadn't found any. Being the man of action that he portrays himself to be, Venison took on the task of waxing lyrical about one of South Africa's greatest sons. Sol Kerzner! The Sol Kerzner! Remember him? If you're a 1980s baby like me and whenever you asked your parents for soccer boots and they said, 'I just paid for your school fees, I don't have money for soccer boots … I can't buy everything, I am not Sol Kerzner!' Yes, that guy. Venison thought we needed to immortalise him with a half-cooked book that features half the writer's family emigrations and important promotions. It was a gonzo journalism-inspired idea. Put the writer at the centre of the story, push the subject to the edges and Hunter S Thompson has competition. The book is not entirely crap. It's just that if I had 20 years of working with a man whose name is synonymous with success, I'd like to think I would produce a book far more detailed than what a long-form magazine would have done. For example, Venison says he worked at the Lost Palace construction site circa 1975. Yet he has limited details of what transpired during construction, bar the fact that it was built at record speed. Yeah, am sure it was. We could have pulled a newspaper clipping to confirm that. But I am being unfair. Venison did tell a story no writer has managed to publish. The previous one who tried to was stopped by the courts after Kerzner got an interdict, literally the night before publication. There are exciting parts to the book, Kerzner's adult-rated rants to his staff being my favourite. He was not your typical Jewish boy. He swore. A lot. He drank like a fish and loved his ladies (according to the book he was married three times, but others say four times). But Sol was also super smart and had made accounting partner at a firm in Johannesburg by 29. His story is one of perseverance and determination to be rich. Seemingly nothing else. Sol was driven by the wish to live a good life. He hailed from Troyeville via Durban. Like any township boy narrative, he just wanted to make it so he can ball out. He wasn't trying to be a professor of anything. He wanted to get cash so he could pay for the private jet and the big houses. He was unmistakable to today's tenderpreuner. It wasn't that deep for him. It was all about the Benjys. The true difference, we're told, was that he wasn't willing to take shortcuts to get to his ultimate dream, that of being rich. He built his empire one hotel — sometimes two — at a time. He bent rules and influenced (and bribed a few apartheid government officials) to get his land approvals. He wasn't exactly a corporate governance advocate. In fact I think he was just following the corrupt ways of the Calvinist apartheid state. He was no angel and he didn't pretend that he was one. Anyway, for Venison to now write a book that gives us newspaper highlights such as the Matanzima bribery incident, without letting us into the inner conversations of that time, is weird. It's like, what was the use of Matanzima being second-in-command at Sun International if he isn't going to spill the beans? Sol is long gone … we can't arrest him now. Tell us the full thing, maan! Anyway, I enjoyed reading about a prominent South African business person who started a company that has gone to be internationally renowned and employed a shitlot of our people. God knows we need to get our people employed. Sun International is one of those local companies that punches above their weight, in the same vein as Shoprite, Bidvest, Sibanye-Stillwater, Sasol, Nandos, Aspen… Companies that are South African by birth but now live across the world. I would encourage anyone who likes the art of building an empire to read this one. For history aficionados, I would suggest you wait for the real biography. I am sure it's still coming.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Louisville had an impact on Hunter S. Thompson's life, especially these 4 spots
Twenty years ago this summer, the ashes of Louisville's most revered writer were fired out of a cannon at his Woody Creek, Colorado, home. Hunter S. Thompson had shot himself the preceding winter, abruptly ending a career that transformed generations of American writing and continues to influence culture today. The relationship between Thompson and Louisville — and Louisville and Thompson — is complicated. His life took him away from Louisville. His most well-known works have nothing to do with the city where he was born and raised. There are murals around town (remembering the way pop culture does: cigarette holder, floppy hat) but there isn't really a Hunter S. Thompson International Airport or boulevard (though, in 1996, a December day was declared Hunter S. Thompson Day by mayoral proclamation). But Louisville had a profound impact on Thompson. 'No matter how well-known Hunter Thompson became, I think it always mattered what the people in Louisville thought, because that was kind of his first audience,' said William McKeen, a Boston University journalism professor and the author of 'Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson.' Here are some of the Louisville locations that were influential to the writer's life: Thompson did not write about Louisville often. But one of the few things he did write about Louisville — the 1970 Scanlan's Magazine article 'The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved' — would change his life and give birth to a form of journalism that still influences writers today. "The article he did for Scanlan's on the Kentucky Derby, that ends up becoming maybe the most important turning point of his career — because it's the invention of Gonzo journalism," said Peter Richardson, a former San Francisco State University professor and the author of "Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo." Gonzo journalism inserts the writer directly into the story — often not just as an observer, but as a protagonist. It also lends itself to hyperbole and, especially in Thompson's case, blending fact and fiction. Simultaneously, Thompson's story had very little and very much to do with the Kentucky Derby. Thompson starts off the first foray into Gonzo by recounting how he lied to a Texan he met at the bar in Louisville's airport, telling him he's a Playboy photographer. When the giddy Texan asks if he's there to take photos of 'nekkid horses,' Thompson tells him he's in town to cover race riots. Much of the story focuses on Ralph Steadman, a British illustrator sent by Scanlan's to draw art for Thompson's magazine article, and who was visiting the United States for the first time. Between consistently warning Steadman about the physical danger he was in — of being shot by the hotel clerk for being British, of being killed over offensive caricatures, of the riot that didn't exist — Thompson is hyper-focused on finding the perfect face for Steadman to draw to illustrate the story. 'I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry — a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture,' Thompson wrote. '… The face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.' The morning after the race, with what appears to be a crippling hangover, Thompson catches his reflection in the mirror — 'a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature' — and realizes it was his face they were searching for all along. 'One of the reasons that piece is so endearing is because it uses a device he had just discovered earlier that year in another article, and that is that whatever he wrote at that point suddenly became an article about trying to write an article — about Hunter Thompson trying to write an article,' said McKeen, the Boston University professor. 'And the device he used a lot was to use a companion. And in the case of the Kentucky Derby piece, it was the perfect companion: Ralph Steadman.' At the time, Richardson said, Thompson thought the story would be a failure. He had pitched covering the Derby to an editor in the middle of the night after a friend suggested he write about the Derby because he was a Kentuckian. Steadman was linked with Thompson by chance, because he happened to be in the U.S. and was available. 'It's amazing how close we came to not having Gonzo journalism, at all,' Richardson said. Thompson was not always gonzo. In the early 1960s, while writing for other mainstream outlets in the Caribbean and South America, Thompson filed a number of freelance articles for The Courier Journal back in his hometown. Unlike his later gonzo offerings, his earlier writings did not look particularly out of place on the pages of The Courier Journal. While in Puerto Rico in 1960 — an experience that would later be immortalized in his novel 'The Rum Diaries' and a Johnny Depp movie of the same name — he wrote a handful of CJ articles about politics and life on the island. 'Hunter S. Thompson works on The Star in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We have run stories by him in the past,' reads a brief bio tagged onto the end of a June 1960 Courier Journal profile Thompson wrote about a young Louisvillian who was, at the time, living in a small village outside of San Juan after graduating from Yale. (In reality, Thompson had been turned down for a job at The Star. In a letter to The Star's editor weeks later, Thompson claimed he never told The Courier Journal he worked for The Star. Meanwhile, the subject of the story, a good friend of Thompson's from Louisville, later claimed the quotes Thompson used were "totally fabricated.") In May of that year, Thompson wrote an analysis-heavy story comparing Puerto Rico's gubernatorial candidates for The Courier Journal. Later, in 1962, Thompson was in South America, largely writing for the Dow Jones-owned National Observer. However, in June of that year, he wrote a travel story for the CJ titled 'Beer Boat Blues,' where he recounted a trip on a barge carrying beer up Colombia's Magdalene River. Writing in the first-person, there are hints of Thompson's voice emerging, but it's still not there yet. 'I came up here on a tug. It was a wonderful trip: free ride, free beer, nice tan, plenty of rest — and now, retribution, I am here in Barranca Bermeja, an oil town, hot and stinking in the very middle of nowhere,' he wrote. Not all of Thompson's pitches to the CJ landed. In December 1959, Thompson wrote to the paper's editor pitching a story about "Louisville Expatriates in New York," including the Yale grad he later wrote about in Puerto Rico. The pitch never resulted in a story. Later, Thompson wrote a friend saying he had stopped pitching The Courier Journal after they turned down a story on Big Sur, California. To McKeen, the Boston University professor, there were two huge influences on a young Thompson's life in Louisville: the library and the expanses of forest near his childhood home known as Cherokee Park. McKeen spent time speaking to Thompson's friends for his book. 'A lot of them would say 'we'd go out, and we'd raise hell, we'd throw rocks at other kids, and we'd do this, and we'd do that — and then we'd go into the library, and we didn't say a word. We just sat there and read,'' he said. That love of books stuck with Thompson. Even as Thompson embarked on his 'career as a juvenile delinquent' as a teenager, McKeen said, he would come home and stay up all night reading. Thompson's mother was also an LFPL librarian. Just a couple blocks away from his Ransdell Avenue childhood home in the Highlands, Cherokee Park was a favorite stomping ground for Thompson throughout his adolescence. According to McKeen's book, Thompson called Cherokee Park 'beautifully wild and uncivilized: no buildings, no taxis, no traffic lights — just a sprawling and lonely woods.' It was also the site of an incident that would alter the course of his life. Thompson was no stranger to delinquency — from stealing booze to destroying a mailbox and drunkenly carousing with friends as a teen. But at 17, he would finally face real consequences. One night in May 1955, Thompson and two friends came across two couples making out in a car in Cherokee Park. The trio approached the car, and according to Courier Journal reporting at the time, one of the three allegedly had a gun. They robbed the couples of $8. It didn't take police long to find the trio. Thompson's colleague's — including one who was the son of a prominent attorney — got off light. But Thompson was sentenced to 60 days in jail, after which he was to go into the U.S. Air Force. As a result of his actions that night, Thompson never graduated from high school and never went to college. "He was kind of the mascot for a lot of the rich kids. So he palled around with them," McKeen said. "And then he went to jail, he went to the Air Force — and they want to Yale and all these other schools." Josh Wood is an investigative reporter. We have run stories by him in the past. He can be reached at jwood@ or on X at @JWoodJourno. This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Hunter S. Thompson growing up in Louisville sites to know
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Internet is Pointing Out This Massive Flaw in Johnny Depp's #MeToo 'Crash Test Dummy' Argument
Johnny Depp would like you to know that he's not staging a comeback — mostly because, as he told The Sunday Times on Saturday, 'I didn't go anywhere.' He's been busy directing films, painting skeletons, sipping red wine under a Hunter S. Thompson poster in Soho, and, more recently, positioning himself as a victim of cancel culture and, somehow, the #MeToo movement. 'I was like a crash test dummy for MeToo,' he told the paper. 'It was before Harvey Weinstein.' The quote came buried under layers of aesthetic melancholy and disdain for modern Hollywood, but it didn't take long for the internet to call out what many saw as the core problem with Depp's narrative: it simply doesn't hold up. More from SheKnows Does Amber Heard Have a Partner? Inside Her Dating Life After Welcoming Twins Let's break this down. Depp's ex-wife, Amber Heard, accused him of abuse in 2016 — a year before The New York Times published its Pulitzer-winning exposé on Weinstein, the catalyst most historians of the movement consider its public launch. But even setting aside that timeline, Depp's assertion doesn't square with his own story. In court, he claimed that Heard weaponized her accusations to gain #MeToo relevance. If she was, as he argued during the 2022 Virginia trial, 'seeking fame,' how could Depp simultaneously have been the movement's unknowing test subject? This is what people online have latched onto in the wake of his new interview. As one X user wrote, 'Weird how during the trial, he claimed that Amber wanted MeToo fame… and now it's that he was a pre-test crash dummy. Cannot keep his narrative straight even now, just says whatever he needs to so he can victimize himself.' The victim claim also rings false to many who observed Depp's life during and after the trials. Yes, he lost his Fantastic Beasts role in 2020. But even in the thick of it, Depp was still starring in movies (Minamata, Jeanne du Barry), fronting Dior campaigns, playing guitar with his band Hollywood Vampires, and being awarded lifetime achievement prizes in Spain. In 2025 alone, he's directed a new film, Modi, acted alongside Penélope Cruz in Day Drinker, and booked five different projects — all filmed in Spain, which also happens to be where Heard now lives. Some fans have even raised concerns about the frequency of Depp's appearances in her adopted country, calling it, quote, 'extremely creepy.' Meanwhile, Heard — who moved to Madrid in 2023 to focus on raising her daughter — has largely stayed out of the public eye. She was awarded $2 million in her countersuit against Depp's attorney, but endured widespread harassment online and in person, with Depp's fans reportedly camping outside courtrooms and screaming threats. This context has not been forgotten. Reddit commenters have responded to Depp's latest claims with blunt disbelief: 'Can this man just go away please,' one wrote. 'You won one of your lawsuits in the most heinous and retrograde way possible. Why do you still have to paint yourself as some wronged victim??' And yet, that's the through-line of Depp's narrative — a story shaped less by consistency than by a persistent desire to cast himself as misunderstood, unfairly judged, and deeply wronged. Even as his Dior ads air, his artwork sells for millions, and Hollywood producers line up to toast him, he insists on seeing his career as a cautionary tale. Which, to be fair, it might be. Just not in the way he of SheKnows 23 Age-Gap Couples Who Met When One of Them Was Still a Child Everything to Know About Leonardo DiCaprio's 27-Year-Old GF Vittoria Ceretti A Look Back at Prince William's Sexiest Photos in Celebration of the Future King
Washington Post
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
When the creators of the Hunter S. Thompson musical finally visited his estate
As the creative force behind 'The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,' Joe Iconis had been dreaming up the gonzo journalist's living room for the better part of two decades when he ventured to Colorado this past April and stepped foot in his cabin. Still inhabited by Thompson's widow, Anita, the home was in many ways exactly as the idiosyncratic author left it when he took his own life there in February 2005 at age 67. Stacks of books Thompson intended to read were seemingly left untouched. Masks of Richard M. Nixon, Thompson's self-declared nemesis, were hanging on the walls. The family's peacocks still roamed the space. Taped to the fridge, a note in Thompson's handwriting read, 'Never call 911. Never. This means you. HST.' 'To walk into the actual room was like nothing I have ever, ever experienced,' Iconis recalls. 'It felt like I was walking into my own script.' After premiering at San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse in 2023, the bonkers biomusical is back for a production at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, that runs through July 13. Featuring music and lyrics by 'Be More Chill' composer Iconis and a book co-written by Iconis and Gregory S. Moss, the show was penned without the rights to any of Thompson's works (as its purposely cumbersome title indicates). But with that trip to Thompson's Owl Farm estate, and the blessing of Anita and others in nearby Aspen who knew the renegade writer, 'The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical' suddenly became spiritually — if not legally — authorized. 'It speaks volumes of Joe as a composer and a writer that he was forbidden from using any of Hunter's actual writings but he found Hunter's voice, and folks who knew him feel like it did,' says George Salazar, who plays attorney and activist Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta in the musical. 'That is also what Hunter's writing was all about. It read chaotic, but there was deep intention and passion and purpose behind all of it.' Commissioned in 2008 by La Jolla to pen a musical based on Thompson's life, Iconis spent years writing the show under the assumption that a financier would inevitably materialize with the money to secure the necessary rights. But around 2016, Iconis says, the Thompson estate made it clear that such clearance was out of the show's price range. That meant Iconis had to excise any excerpts from Thompson's writing and all references to events only documented in his books, including 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' and 'Hell's Angels.' What Iconis could do, however, was depict the widely reported details of Thompson's life and conduct his own research. 'It was really scary,' Iconis says. 'But the amazing thing was that it forced me to not be able to use his language as a crutch. It forced me to actually get to the heart of everything I was trying to say at every single moment and have the word choices be 100 percent intentional.' Thus Iconis embarked on a years-long quest to evoke Thompson from afar. But when Iconis and his cast traveled to Aspen to perform songs from the show at Wheeler Opera House, Anita extended an invitation for the musical's entire traveling party — more than a dozen actors and other collaborators — to visit Owl Farm. It was an invitation Iconis accepted with trepidation. Anita, he understood, was concerned that the show would depict her late husband as a drug-crazed caricature and lose sight of his transcendence on the page. Was it worth opening up this unabashedly unlicensed endeavor to such scrutiny? 'For the life of the development of the show, I had never spoken to anyone directly connected with Hunter,' Iconis says. 'I didn't want anyone saying to me, 'Hunter would never do that.' And then the bigger part of it, really, was I didn't want anyone who knew him or who was associated with him to tell me that they hated it.' A pair of videos filmed during the visit capture Anita's approval. The first one — filmed after a young girl staying at Owl Farm suggested that Iconis play Thompson's piano — shows the composer tapping the keys to the show's rousing finale, 'Kaboom,' while his cast sings along. In the second, an emotional Anita subsequently gifts Iconis a necklace adorned with Thompson's gonzo fist emblem. 'Thank you,' she says, 'for keeping Hunter's spirit alive in such a beautiful way.' And Anita was far from the only person who knew Thompson to lend her expertise. Salazar and Jason SweetTooth Williams, the actor who plays illustrator Ralph Steadman in the show, both picked the brain of DJ Watkins, an Aspen art dealer and documentarian well versed in Thompson's story. Grabbing drinks at J-Bar, Thompson's longtime watering hole of choice, the cast struck up conversations with other folks who relayed their Thompson tales. 'It made it so much more real,' Williams says. 'Suddenly we weren't playing at something. Now, we're getting a chance to become something that we've actually experienced.' When the concert arrived, Iconis still wondered how Anita would perceive numbers highlighting the less-flattering aspects of Thompson's chaotic life. But after the show, she gifted him a bouquet of six-feet-tall peacock feathers, which he still has in his home. In an email to The Washington Post, Anita pushed back against a song that depicts Thompson as an absentee father but expressed overarching admiration for the cast and creative team. 'I'm sure Hunter would love the fact that such talented artists performers have devoted a part of their life to celebrating his extraordinary legacy,' she wrote. 'I just love the cast of the musical for using their talent and energy to celebrate a beautiful unique important American writer, whose work is relevant and helps readers understand this crazy world we live in 2025.' Asked about the musical remaining 'unauthorized,' she added: 'It appears that being required to use [Iconis's] words is what makes the musical a success.' (The executor of Thompson's literary estate did not respond to requests for comment.) Iconis subsequently tweaked the script to include details from the visit. A line in which Thompson marvels at the beauty that surrounds Owl Farm — 'The mountains look like waves to me, just slow moving' — was uttered by Anita. After Anita cut up grapefruits for her guests, Iconis added a line in which Thompson's son mentions her doing just that. In a mixed review, Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar praised Iconis's 'propulsive and occasionally catchy' score but critiqued the show's cradle-to-grave ambition. Although Iconis, a 2019 Tony nominee for 'Be More Chill,' hopes the musical has a future beyond its Signature run — perhaps on Broadway — the Aspen experience already marked a culmination of sorts for his journey into Thompson's headspace. 'For the actual human beings who knew that guy to like what we're doing, and feel like it accurately represents him?' Iconis says. 'F--- everything else.' Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. Dates: Through July 13. Prices: $47-$112.
New York Times
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
American Mythmakers, Revisited: Hunter S. Thompson and John Wilkes Booth
Two shows on stages just outside Washington, 'The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical' and 'John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!,' create a diptych of American mythmaking: One character sees the country crumbling and aims to shake it awake, the other sees it in betrayal of its founding principles and tries to burn it down. The writer Hunter S. Thompson had little regard for professional deadlines, but in 'The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,' running through July 13 at the Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., he faces one he can't ignore. With a bottle of Wild Turkey in one hand and a .45 in the other, the bathrobe-clad gonzo journalist — staring at a typewriter that has just landed with a thud onto the stage — neutrally informs the audience: 'It's February 20th, 2005. The day I die.' Then the self-proclaimed 'major figure in American history,' played with feral charisma by Eric William Morris, manically attempts to commit his life, and the life of these disunited states, to the page. Created by Joe Iconis (music, lyrics, book) and Gregory S. Moss (book), and directed with anarchic propulsion by Christopher Ashley, the show is a frenzied, frothing act of theatrical resurrection. Morris is accompanied by a nine-member ensemble that functions as a Greek chorus of demons, muses and collaborators, ferrying us from Thompson's Louisville boyhood to his professional dust-ups with the Hells Angels and drug-fueled detours through the underside of the American dream. His Colorado home, Owl Farm, serves as both writing bunker and memory palace. Crammed with gewgaws, it looks like the kind of place that would make people rethink their ideas about souvenirs. Subtlety was never Thompson's forte, and this bio-musical wisely avoids making it an organizing principle. Iconis's propulsive score is peppered with protest anthems, beat-poet swagger and a recurring rock 'n' roll hymn to outsiders and misfits. 'All hail Hunter S. Thompson,' the ensemble chants. 'Hail to the freak.' Too much exposition? Too little? That depends on your familiarity with Thompson, a philandering husband and neglectful father who ran for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., cherished his constitutional right to own guns and nursed a near-cellular antipathy toward Nixon (played here by a reptilian George Abud). Though the show splendidly commits to unfiltered, maximalist expression, quieter moments also resonate, including when a young Hunter (Giovanny Diaz De Leon) reads a copy of 'The Great Gatsby' and resolves to one day write into existence a more democratic country. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
