The movie Terry Gilliam called a “long and tedious nightmare”
Director Terry Gilliam has a modest yet rich filmography, most notably for bringing the Monty Python series of films to life. Gilliam’s offbeat directorial efforts have seen him gain a cult following, and the British director has hitched a career on it. Gilliam has often resorted to co-writing the screenplay for his films in his other feature releases. However, the director came up against considerable bureaucracy and almost a brick wall while writing the script for adapting Hunter S Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to the big screen.
The film depicts two characters, played by Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, and their experiences and antics after consuming copious amounts of drugs. The pair set off to Las Vegas in a red Chevrolet Impala under the influence of mescaline and later ingested other drugs like LSD, cocaine, and whatever they could get their hands on. Several trashed hotel suites, and after a mess of attending events under the influence of substances, their trip finally comes down as they try to determine exactly what happened.
But the cult classic film perhaps wouldn’t have come about if it wasn’t for Gilliam’s persistence with Universal and forcing the Writers’ Guild to overturn a specific ruling pertaining to its script credits.
Talking about the process of writing the script, as mentioned in Film Scouts, Gilliam said, “It’s a rather long and tedious nightmare. This particular incarnation of this film was started with Alex Cox directing and writing the screenplay. John [Johnny Depp] and Benny [Benicio del Toro] came on board, and Alex fell overboard somehow. This was before my time. I don’t know the ugly details. But Leila sent me a script that Alex had written when he was directing it, which got me interested in the project. I had to read the book again to realize how much of the book was not in that script.”
He added: “I went out to LA, met John, Benicio, Leila and Hunter and decided, ‘Yes, let’s do this project.’”
Gilliam explained that the script was first re-written in eight days by him and Tony Grisoni and was adjudged to be “crap”, so they rewrote it again in another two days and were pretty happy with the draft by then. Speaking about that process, Gilliam said, “The book is so dense. There’s so much great stuff in it. There’s so much great stuff in it that whatever you do when you’re given enough time, you start realizing how much you left out of the book or out of the screenplay. It was very depressing when you realize that you’re not able to incorporate all of that book on screen. So we made some very definite decisions and went forward.”
However, the American Writers’ Guild had a ruling at the time that entailed writer-directors being deemed as “production executives”, which led to their being thrown under the bus of arbitration proceedings. The Writers’ Guild’s rules stated that writer-directors, along with their co-writers, should produce more than 50% of the script, and other writers involved produce 30%. The guild deemed Gilliam and Grisoni’s script didn’t check those boxes, so they ruled that the duo hadn’t written the script, and its credit went to Alex Cox. This was alarming to the cast and crew because they had been working on Gilliam and Grisoni’s script by then.
In the end, after procedures almost as messy as the shenanigans depicted in the film involving lawyers and Universal, the Writers’ Guild reversed its decision and decided to credit Gilliam and Grisoni as writers of the film’s script. The proceedings tainted and caused a lot of confusion when the film was released, but perhaps those unprecedented events were as crazy as the film itself.
