For most people when they think of
Hunter S Thompson they think of Johnny Depp from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
For some they think of his wild, gonzo journalist ways. But I bet very
few think of him as a crusader for justice.
And yet that’s just what he was in
his final case – which is now becoming a movie. Prisoner of Denver was
a Vanity Fair article written by Thompson with that magazine’s
contributing editor Mark Seal, and the rights to it have been picked up
by the Motion Picture Corporation of America. The article was part of
Thompson’s crusade to free a woman he thought had been shafted by the
law.
Says
The Hollywood Reporter:
Prisoner” focused on the
injustice and abuse of Colorado’s legal system that saw 21-year-old Lisl
Auman charged with murder when the crime occurred while she was in the
back of a patrol car, already in police custody. She was handed a life
sentence with no possibility of parole.
While
behind bars, she began a correspondence with Thompson. His unrelenting
grass-roots activism — which included enlisting celebrity pals
including Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, Benicio Del Toro and Woody
Harrelson — and the Vanity Fair piece helped overturn Auman’s sentence
in 2005.
Thompson
killed himself before the sentence was overturned, so he never saw the
end of the road.
The producers are going to writers
right now, and they’re looking for a movie that’s a cross between Fear and
Loathing and
All the
President’s Men. The Reporter raises an interesting
question: could Depp come back for a third go-round as Thompson (see the
upcoming Rum
Diaries for
number two) as well as playing himself? This would be a fitting project
for Thompson’s good friend to take on, even if Depp’s a little young to
play the gonzo journalist in his later years.