I enjoyed this journey and if you didn’t catch the movie Terry Gilliam directed, you should give it a try ASAP! It is truly great adaptation which directly reflects everything you read crazy, nonsense, complex, destructive, drug induced , dark, absurd to the big screen. Mr. Gilliam is the master of surrealism on big screen.

Bat Country", from the album City of Evil of the band Avenged Sevenfold, is based on the novel, with the title coming from what Raoul Duke says to Dr. Gonzo after seeing huge bats and flying manta rays in his hallucinations, "We can't stop here. This is bat country." The song’s music video exemplifies that, referencing numerous scenes from the film. HST: Well.. I was looking for a cab to get across the main terminal … it was about a mile away… and Sandy Berger… appeared in his car … he was one of the people who had broken down earlier . . . Ed: What were Caddell’s statistical explanations for McGovern’s defeat? Why did he think McGovern lost?HST: Every hotel in the country, it looked like. And I think on the last day of the campaign, one of the CBS cameramen put them all in a huge bag. He was going to take them to one mailbox in Washington and dump them all in there… Then they were going to film the behavior of the postman when he opened the box and found 5000 hotel keys… it must have weighed 200 pounds… that was the kind of twisted humor that prevailed on the Zoo Plane. Once Lucy is gone, the men take adrenochrome, a drug notorious for its intense high. The next morning, they attend the conference, keynoted by Dr. E.R. Bloomquist. Duke spends most of the conference privately noting inaccuracies in information the supposed "experts" are parlaying. Eventually, Duke and his attorney become frustrated and leave, stopping briefly at the bar, where they lie to a Georgia police officer about ‘dope fiends’ committing violent crimes in Los Angeles. HST: Yeah, right. I think I’d like to get up there at night, all alone – with a head full of mescaline, just roll around in the sky like a big Condor…

HST: Yeah – the US Senate from Colorado. But I might end up running against Gary Hart in the primary. That would be interesting … I might not run as a Democrat, or I might not run at all. It’s a grueling, rotten ordeal to go through.Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

Hunter was a theatre. He was a roving kind of theatre. He was not just a writer … he was an actor. He was creating his own subject matter. When I was very fired up about the censorships and deletions I wrote a ' review and I'm wondering if I was more prescient than I realised? It has been deleted as has the book and it now goes nowhere. HST: Right. There were states… where he compared Humphrey’s margin or his loss – whatever the figures were in ’68 – to the number of new voters coming into the electorate this time around… and there were an incredible number of states where Pat’s figures showed that even if McGovern could get at least half of them, he’d carry something like 12 states with this Youth Vote. HST: It has to do with two words: Eagleton and competence. The Eagleton Affair was so damaging to McGovern’s image – not as a humane, decent, kind, conservative man who wanted to end the war – but as a person who couldn’t get those things done even though he wanted to. He was perceived, then, as a dingbat – not as a flaming radical – a lot of people seem to think that was one of the images that hurt him. But according to Pat, that “radical image” didn’t really hurt him at all…. The same conclusion appeared in a Washington Post survey that David Broder and Haynes Johnson did…. They agreed that the Eagleton Affair was almost immeasurably damaging. . .. and according to Gary Hart, it was so damagsing as to be fatal. Gary understood this as early as mid-September; so did Frank – they all knew it. Ed: One last question about this trip from Long Beach to Sioux Falls: Why was this second plane called the Zoo Plane and how widespread was the use of dangerous narcotics in the campaign and on this particular trip?There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.… The final result was embarrassing, but what the hell? I blew that one, along with a lot of other people who should have known better, and since I haven’t changed anything else in the mass of first-draft screeds that I wrote during the campaign, I can’t find any excuse for changing my final prediction. Any re-writing now would cheat the basic concept of the book, which – in addition to the publisher’s desperate idea that it might sell enough copies to cover the fantastic expense bills I ran up in the course of those 12 frantic months – was to lash the whole thing together and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening. Duke, Raoul (November 11, 1973). "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Part I". Rolling Stone. Vol.95. pp.37–48. a b c d e f g h i j k Ebner, Mark (January 1998). "Fear and Bleating in Las Vegas: Hunter Thompson Goes Hollywood". Premiere. pp.33–34 . Retrieved June 13, 2023. In the book The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson refers to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as "a failed experiment in the gonzo journalism" he practiced, which was based on William Faulkner's idea that "the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this". [1] Thompson's style blended the techniques of fictional story-telling and journalism.

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...HST: Yeah. I don’t want to go into it. … I would have bet dead even coming out of the convention … I was optimistic. HST: Well … I’m not sure, but I doubt that McGovern himself could have won with any kind of campaign, even without the Eagleton incident.