THE MOVIE CAUSED ROBINSON TO BREAK HIS SOBRIETY THE DIRECTOR CAME OUT OF RETIREMENT TO MAKE THE FILMīruce Robinson, perhaps most well known for his 1987 semi-autobiographical film Withnail and I, hadn’t directed a film in 19 years before Depp convinced him to direct The Rum Diary. The Rum Diary grossed over $13 million, while Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made over $10 million and Where the Buffalo Roam made over $6 million. IT’S THE HIGHEST GROSSING MOVIE ADAPTATION OF A THOMPSON WORK IT’S THE THIRD TIME A VERSION OF THOMPSON HAS APPEARED IN A FILMīill Murray played a version of Thompson in the 1980 film Where the Buffalo Roam, which wasn’t specifically based on any of Thompson’s books. He played Thompson’s persona Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. IT’S THE SECOND TIME JOHNNY DEPP PLAYS A VERSION OF HUNTER THOMPSON Many details-including Thompson’s position at the San Juan Star-were true. THE BOOK AND MOVIE WERE SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL (STRESS THE “SEMI”) Thompson’s first novel, entitled Prince Jellyfish, still remains unpublished. The book wasn’t officially published until 1998. THOMPSON’S SECOND NOVELĪ then 22-year-old Thompson wrote The Rum Diary in 1959, but it was abandoned until Johnny Depp found it among Thompson’s papers decades later. 'There were naked people everywhere and we all had credit.Grab a bottle-or more-of your favorite booze and head down to the tropics with Hunter Thompson and Johnny Depp as we look at a few facts you may not have known about The Rum Diary. The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery & violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s.

It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.'

'I share a dark suspicion,' Kemp says, 'that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was his first novel and he told his friend, the author William Kennedy, that The Rum Diary would 'in a twisted way.do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises did for Paris.' In Paul Kemp, the novel's hero, there are echoes of the young Thompson, who was himself honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the 'ill-tempered wandering rabble' on staff at the San Juan Daily News at the time. The Rum Diary was begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S.

The rum diary by hunter s thompson