Duke agrees, but instead throws a grapefruit at Gonzo's head before running outside and locking Gonzo in the bathroom. He pleads with Duke to throw the machine into the water when the song " White Rabbit" peaks. When Duke returns he finds that Gonzo, high on LSD, has trashed the room, and is in the bathtub clothed, attempting to pull the tape player in with him as he wants to hear the song better. Back in the hotel room, Duke leaves Gonzo unattended, and tries his luck at Big Six.
After consuming more mescaline, as well as huffing diethyl ether, Duke and Gonzo arrive at the Bazooko Circus casino but leave shortly afterwards, the chaotic atmosphere frightening Gonzo. Duke becomes irrational and believes that they are in the middle of a battlefield, so he fires Lacerda and returns to the hotel. The next day, Duke arrives at the race and heads out with his photographer, Lacerda.
By the time they reach the strip, Duke is in the full throes of his trip and barely makes it through the hotel check-in, hallucinating that the clerk is a moray eel and that his fellow bar patrons are orgiastic lizards.
Trying to reach Vegas before the hitchhiker can go to the police, Gonzo gives Duke part of a sheet of Sunshine Acid, then informs him that there is little chance of making it before the drug kicks in. The hitchhiker flees on foot at their behavior. They bought excessive drugs for the trip, and rented a red Chevrolet Impala convertible. They pick up a young hitchhiker and explain their mission: Duke has been assigned by a magazine to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race in Las Vegas. Duke, under the influence of mescaline, complains of a swarm of giant bats, and inventories their drug stash. Gonzo's descent into mania was fundamentally rooted in Las Vegas, it was visuals and perceptions that were twisted more than the environment itself, and the film crucially gave us as many opportunities to voyeuristically gawp at the duo from the outside and consider how banal trips appear for those not on them, as it did to lock us in the minds of those afflicted.In 1971, Raoul Duke and Dr. There were no montages of flying around the galaxy on a unicorn, however aesthetically tempting that might be, the trips instead being characterised by - as they are in real life - corruptions of and in reality. Here, director of photography Nicola Pecorini avoided the common trap of going too surreal. If Depp's performance was one pillar on which the film would live or die, the other would be the cinematic quality of the chemical indulgences. It seems Thompson was all in too many of the costume elements and props used in the film actually belonged to him. Depp went through the author's notebook from the real-life trip Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was based on ("Not only is true, but there's more and it was worse," Depp said), drove around town in his infamous fireapple red Chevrolet Caprice convertible known as 'The Great Red Shark', and had Thompson shave his head in line with the writer's male pattern baldness. Thompson's mind-bending book.Ĭredit for the ramshackle operation also goes to Johnny Depp, who went above and beyond with his preparation, moving into the basement at Thompson's ranch in order to study his habits and mannerisms. Thompson’s daily routine was the height of dissolutionīut, in spite of the uneven production, last-minute script re-writes and a litany of quibbles from the studio, Gilliam managed to get off the ground what Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone had failed to before him, an unapologetic film adaptation of Hunter S.