Talk:Hunter S. Thompson

Rum Diary release date

Every source I have checked says the release for The Rum Diary film has been pushed back to 2009. -Unsigned

WTC story

I've moved the following from the article (added by 87.232.100.225). It needs to be wikified and is WP:OR. Some of this information is probably reasonable to include in the article, but as it is, its not "encyclopedic":

Hunter Thompson was working on WTC collapse story before his mysterious sudden death, and he was warned that he'd be 'suicided'

This from The Toronto Globe and Mail February 26, 2005:

Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did. He'd been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: "They're gonna make it look like suicide," he said. "I know how these bastards think . . ."

Hunter S. Thompson ... was indeed working on such a story.

Now check out this February 25 Associated Press story about Thompson's death. Sounds a lot like a professional hit with a silencer:

"I was on the phone with him, he set the receiver down and he did it. I heard the clicking of the gun," Anita Thompson told the Aspen Daily News in Friday's editions.

She said her husband had asked her to come home from a health club so they could work on his weekly ESPN column...

Thompson said she heard a loud, muffled noise, but didn't know what had happened. "I was waiting for him to get back on the phone," she said.

(Her account to Rocky Mountain News reporter Jeff Kass is slightly different: "I did not hear any bang," she told Kass. She added that Thompson's son, who was in the house at the time, believed that a book had fallen when he heard the shot, according to Kass' report.)

Mack White sums up the questions well:

Thompson's family says he was not depressed, nor was he in enough to pain to kill himself. In fact, by all reports, he was quite happy. He was talking on the phone to his wife, getting ready to work on his column, when he decided it would be wise to kill himself, so that he could go out (we are told) while "still at the top of his form," even though this would mean not finishing his column or his expose on 9/11 (potentially the most important thing he would ever write) (?)...

RELATED: Hunter S. Thompson Suicide Story Changes;

This account says Thompson killed himself while sitting in a chair on his typewriter and yet the original account tells us that Thompson shot himself while talking to his wife on the phone in the kitchen. Why has the story changed andwhat is the significance of the word typed on the paper in light of the fact that Thompson said he would be 'suicided' before being able to release a major story on explosives bringing down the twin towers?

(John User:Jwy talk) 03:11, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

That was an admitted hoax debunked years ago. 69.249.55.6 (talk) 21:33, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

There is no proof, or sources of it being debunked anywhere. Provide some, or stop lying. Someone needs to include this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.162.195.229 (talk) 02:35, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

This WTC story is nonsense and has been debated here ad nauseum. It will remain out of the article. As I wrote and documented here previously, the entire basis of the "Toronto Globe theory" was fictitious phone call written as a dramatic introduction to an obituary. There was no phone call to Paul Williams by HST on this subject. Get the full text of the article (not just the first few paragraphs) and you will find this is true. This is a very old debate that was settled by vote of numerous contributors in 2007 it is no longer up for discussion. ahess247 (talk) 19:59, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Sports Correspondant.

I may be wrong but I was under the impression that most of his most notable articles and his most sucessful book came from Jobs as a sport Correspondant and I though it should be mentioned in the opening. does anyone else feel the same way?(Morcus (talk) 07:28, 13 February 2011 (UTC))

You are incorrect.ahess247 (talk) 19:58, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Needs

Article still needs a lot of work.

1) We're missing an entire section on HST's college lectures which introduced him and his work to new audiences in the 1970s through the 1990s. This need not be long, and can probably be documented using the Peter Whitmer book, and a few other sources. This is not an insignificant matter, as these lectures kept HST in the public eye during a period when he was generally publishing less new material.

2) The list of documentaries is overlong and reads as if promotional blurbs were used.

3) There's no list of published biographies and there have been something like a dozen, most published since HST's death. Their relative merits should be summarized. ahess247 (talk) 20:13, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

It's also missing a list of the actual, published works by HST. There's a whole lot of stuff other than the stuff he wrote, which is absurd, since the guy is probably one of the best writers of his era.--58.170.100.128 (talk) 09:05, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Medical issues

It says that when Thompson died/committed suicide, that he had numerous medical/health problems, but it doesn't say what. Just exactly what was he suffering from??? Thanks in advance to anybody that knows.