This week The Rum Diary turns 15. Johnny Depp’s long-gestating Hunter S. Thompson adaptation arrived in cinemas on October 28, 2011 with a Puerto Rico shoot and one of the strangest backstories in modern movie trivia. It opened to mixed reviews and grossed just $30.1 million against its $45 — but the road to the screen is far wilder than that number suggests.
The novel waited almost four decades
Hunter S. Thompson wrote The Rum Diary in 1961, but it was not published until 1998. That long wait meant the story reached readers only a few years before the first film plans surfaced in 2000.
The first film attempt stalled before cameras
In 2000, the independent production companies Shooting Gallery and SPi Films sought to adapt the novel. Johnny Depp was signed to star and to serve as executive producer, and Nick Nolte was also signed to star alongside Depp. The project did not move past the development stage. Thompson was so frustrated that he fired off an obscenity-laden letter calling the process a “waterhead fuckaround”.
A second cast came and went
In 2002, a new producer sought the project, and Benicio del Toro and Josh Hartnett were signed to star in a second incarnation. That version also did not move past the development stage, leaving the adaptation stalled for the second time.
Graham King put the pieces together
In 2007, producer Graham King acquired all rights to the novel and sought to film the adaptation under Warner Independent Pictures. Johnny Depp, who had starred in the 1998 film adaptation of Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with del Toro, was cast as the freelance journalist Paul Kemp. Bruce Robinson joined to write the screenplay and to direct. In 2009, Depp’s production company Infinitum Nihil took on the project with the financial backing of King and his production company GK Films. Principal photography began in Puerto Rico on March 25, 2009, and composer Christopher Young signed on to compose the soundtrack.
Chenault was almost someone else
Several actresses including Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley reportedly expressed interest in the role of Chenault. Some “had reservations regarding the nudity the role calls for”. Amber Heard was cast in the role.
Robinson drank through his writer’s block
Bruce Robinson had been sober for six-and-a-half years before he started writing the screenplay for The Rum Diary. He found himself suffering from writer’s block. He started drinking a bottle of wine a day until he finished the script — and then he quit drinking again.
Depp saw Kemp as a younger Raoul Duke
About playing Paul Kemp, Depp compared and related it to his previous role in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He said: “The way I approached it was that the character of Paul Kemp is Raoul Duke as he was learning to speak. It was like playing the same character, only 15 years before. This guy’s got something; there’s an energy burning underneath it, it’s just ready to pop up, shoot out.”
The film landed with mixed reviews
The Rum Diary was released by FilmDistrict on October 28, 2011. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 52% based on 166 reviews, with an average rating of 5.7/10; Metacritic gives it a score of 56 out of 100 based on 37 critics. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a “C” on an A+ to F scale. Wyatt Williams, writing for Creative Loafing, argued that “the movie version amounts to Thompson’s whole vision of journalism, glossed and made plain by Hollywood.”
Which detail from The Rum Diary’s long journey is your favourite? Tell us the fact you’ll be saving for your next movie-night debate.
Facts from Wikipedia: The Rum Diary (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Film images from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
