Luv Doc Recommends: SXSW Film Regional Premiere of 'Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson'

There used to be a time when everyone you met in Austin was either a musician or fucking one. That’s still pretty much the case, but increasingly those sullen, tattooed, artsy types who work on the assembly line at the sandwich shop are aspiring filmmakers. Sounds glitzy on the surface, but if you’ve ever spent any quality time on a film set you know it has about the same sex appeal as a day at the DMV. Seriously. Filmmaking is tedious work, and regardless of what Quentin Tarantino would have you think, most filmmakers rarely end up in coke-fueled penthouse orgies with the Budweiser Swim Team - unless it’s actually written into the script. Nonetheless, the proliferation in aspiring filmmakers has some definite upside. For instance, your filmmaker friends won’t be nagging you to come to their 1am Monday night gig at Bourbon Rocks. At most they might occasionally ask you to click a YouTube link – probably of some video they made with a crack junkie cameraman and a microphone that was strapped to the back of a Yorkshire terrier. Ugly yes, but at least you know the YouTube is going to end in 10 minutes or less – unlike your buddy’s band at Bourbon Rocks, who will invariably launch into a half hour noise jazz reworking of “Cortez the Killer” that will clear the room quicker than a canister of pepper spray. You can also pretty much bet that your filmmaker friend won’t be bringing home a posse of illiterate, tooth-grinding meth-heads to play Grand Theft Auto at three in the morning. He might, however, stay up all night drinking iced coffee and animating titles for his no-budget zombie/slasher flick. OK, so that’s not exactly Habitat for Humanity level work on the karmic payback scale, but at least he’s not practicing chest thumping bass solos into the wee hours of the morning or pile-driving his hairdresser girlfriend into the headboard on the other side of your shared wall. This is not to say that filmmakers can’t occasionally be annoying. Really, with exception of a few translucent-skinned film geeks, no one really wants to engage in exhaustive discussions about Kurosawa or Herzog or Wenders at a cocktail party unless it’s in the context of a hilarious anecdote involving a priest and a rabbi, a farmer and his daughter, or a bar patron with a duck on his shoulder. Ditto for F-stop settings, lighting techniques, and composite editing. You don’t see musicians at cocktail parties talking about alternate tunings, improvisation techniques, or intonation adjustments. F that S. They’re standing on the roof stoned out of their gourds screaming crazy shit like, “I am a golden god!” Smash cut to panties hitting the floor. There is a lesson to be learned here, probably. Maybe it’s that boring musicians are pretty much doomed from the get-go, but boring filmmakers can at least partially redeem themselves by choosing interesting subjects. This Saturday at 7:30 at the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar, the SXSW Film Festival will put that theory to the test by hosting the regional premiere of Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Regardless of his conversational prowess, Gibney knows how to make a good film. He earned an Oscar nomination for one of his previous documentaries, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gonzo is not the first documentary about Thompson nor will it be the last, but it’s safe to say that the subject matter should make this bird fly even if it’s a turkey.