The Rum Diary: A Screenplay

by Bruce Robinson, Johnny Depp (Introduction)

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHNNY DEPP





A screenplay based on the novel by Hunter S. Thompson





It's 1960. In a highrise hotel not far from the beaches of San Juan, a man is recovering from an animal of a hangover.





Paul Kemp is an alcoholic journalist who's barely seen better days, arriving at the only job he can get: writing horoscopes for failing rag The Daily Star. His fellow hacks are mostly crazy drunks on the verge of quitting, so Kemp fits in perfectly.





But when he meets the impossibly gorgeous Chenault and her flashy boyfriend Sanderson, Kemp finds himself in way over his head - party to shady business deals, in hair-raising car chases with enraged Puerto Ricans, experimenting with a hitherto unknown hallucinogen - and finally discovers a mad, desperate devotion to the truth.





Bruce Robinson brings Hunter S. Thompson's novel to the big screen with all the brilliance, wild humour and fierce energy associated with the acclaimed writer and director of Withnail & I and The Killing Fields.

Genres: Film

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 25, 2011

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Bruce Robinson is an English director, screenwriter, novelist and actor. He is arguably most famous for writing and directing the cult classic Withnail and I (1986), a film with comic and tragic elements set in London in the 1960s, which drew on his experiences as 'a chronic alcoholic and resting actor, living in squalor' in Camden Town. He is married to Sophie Windham, children's author and illustrator, and has contributed to some of her books. A book of interviews with Robinson, edited by Alistair Owen, is published as Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson

Reviews

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's only so much that can be done with The Rum Diary. Depp's devotion notwithstanding, you can see why HST left it in a box in the attic for decades. It's a pretty thin story that wouldn't be movie material with any other backers - albeit saved from cliché and routine by the setting of Puerto Rico 1960, and the careening combination of irresponsibility & righteousness that's novel and invigorating when you've not read Thompson for a while.

The film (which I saw a couple of years ago) was more exciting than the original book as I remember it; big, striking, often noisy scenes were a good way to get some oomph out of this juvenilia, and it made sense to amalgamate the two lead characters - both representing Thompson - into one. The greatest failing of the visuals, as the photos here confirm, was not looking quite right for the period setting. These look like C21st people dressed for a vintage house party, who've made some of their costumes from everyday contemporary clothes; everyone's hair looks pretty much modern, Amber Heard's highlights and probably-bottle tan particularly so. At least there was usually enough happening to distract from wardrobe's shortcomings.

Whilst we're picking faults, the book is chock full of typos, the sort you get when subediting is delegated to a computer spellchecker: foul/fowl, it's/its etc: Random House of all places should pay human beings who are good at spelling to check this stuff over.

The joy of a Bruce Robinson screenplay is the wit and style in scene descriptions. In the second half many of these are channelling the flippantly rough viewpoint of protagonist Kemp (HST's Mary Sue). The opening description can't match Withnail,but it's still got style:
... the airwaves are soiled with a hit called 'Volare'... [nearly a page later, the plane] punches into frame close enough to smell the exhaust. I don't know how it happened, but somehow the plane and song get into an audio-visual sync, our hearts borne aloft in aeronautical joy.
[Ah, he knows how something annoying can become magical under precisely the right conditions. How to make you feel and see something with words, and where one form has its limits and things are best expressed in another.)
Inevitably, with dry understatement, on meeting Kemp:
- the misuse of alcohol can't be ruled out

And plenty of other gems
-Lotterman's shallow sigh is a study in minimalistic fury.
- EXT. GARBAGE DUMP...Trucks dump their load and gulls celebrate their arrival. (I can see it, why had I never thought that word before? It's perfect, of course they do.)

Hilarious scenes included the descriptions of the rubbish thrown into Sala's car and gradually removed by him and Kemp, and the two men taking the then-unknown LSD.

Often I just love the tone, and the way the authorial voice breaks unexpectedly into immersive sensory description and dry wit. These casual POV switches give these bits the feeling of an effortless raconteur writing the whole thing off the top of his head ... I don't know if it'll make sense to others or if this is the written equivalent of Colonel Blimp sighing over yet another character played by Deborah Kerr...
-in comes a man who doesn't need to knock. He's Spanish-American and that'll do for now.
- I could tell you about the blood and the dust and the feathers but it'll read like half-assed Hemingway. All I know is it'll take thousands of feet of film to get this right.
-Yellow light from the wireless. A pointer scans channels for a station. But it's all Spanish trash or Connie Francis so she wins it.
-It can't be stressed enough that without this sinister rhapsody nothing can be envisaged. The double bass is resonant with malign promise.

The ending shapes 'HST:the prequel':
p.226 Kemp: ...that is my promise, and it will be a voice made of ink and rage
p.254 VO: 'to live my life like I want to,' he said, 'is the least I can do'. and that had worked for him. And when it was over, he knew it was over and required no explanation. An astute balancing act that could somehow please fans of both Hollywood schmaltz who'd stumbled in accidentally, and the angry young things who worship the man.

I liked this more than The Rum Diary the novel, or the film itself.
Rather than constantly being shown two actors / characters who were supposed to be hot, but who do nothing for me, I had Robinson's prose.
(Oh, and I worked out more of the mystery as to why I've never fancied Depp. When looking at him, I always had the sense of its being as impossible and puzzling to fancy this man as it would a member of one's own family, something to do with the general face shape and hair colour, presumably; we're not *all that* ... If anybody was thinking like the drunken girl at a university party who once bounded up to me and asked, 'Have you got a brother? Because I think he'd be really good looking,' I'll likewise have to disappoint you.
But it's not just that, I realised, it's Depp's profile and especially nose - by which I don't mean anything more than an actual nose - if it had been more imposing and characterful, I might have after all.

I was glad when the characters' Fiat 500 finally bit the dust so I could get Lush's '500 (Shake Baby Shake)' out of my head. I don't think that was on the OST.

It must take some generosity of spirit, IMO, to write and direct a film based on the work of a man who blanked you for hours on end during your only meeting - despite others having considered you kindred spirits. (As with a number of things, that gives the impression that Robinson was the nicer person in the room... though of course he wouldn't be as entertaining as he is if he were a saint.)


----

The first-page blurb in here says Bruce Robinson hopes to publish his book about Jack the Ripper in 2013... Then it was going to be April 2015 and now the title's just changed (presumably due to a book with a similar title released last autumn) and it's ambiguously either May or September. I can't remember when I last, or ever, awaited a new book with the eagerness I see on hundreds of other Goodreads pages, let alone one on a subject I wouldn't be teribly bothered about from another author. 'They All Love Jack'... I hoped that meant he was after all making it more of a book about Ripperology and a memoir of falling into that rabbithole, (what this fan most wanted to read) then I saw it was the title of a song by his preferred suspect, so it still sounds quite trad after all. But the writing itself should make up for any doubts.

[Catarina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Funny and captivating, a good quick weekend read.