A look at Hunter Thompson’s foray into politics
Film offers an insider’s view of gonzo journalist’s 1970 campaign for sheriff in Aspen
An old film canister labeled “Hunter Thompson for Sheriff” turned up in artist Travis Fulton’s barn off Ute Avenue in Aspen three years ago, setting off a series of archival discoveries that have shed new light on the gonzo journalist’s influential 1970 campaign and led to the new documentary “Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb.”
The film, co- directed by Aspenites Ajax Phillips and Daniel Joseph Watkins, will be released to video- on- demand services on Oct. 23.
In all, the filmmakers found about seven hours of film footage shot during the campaign by Robert E. Fulton III. It had never been seen by the public — some of it never developed — and was spread between his archives in Aspen, New Jersey and Los Angeles.
“It’s been a treasure hunt,” Phillips said during a July 2019 editing session.
The revelatory footage — along with photographs by David Hiser and Bob Krueger — brings the viewer inside Thompson’s campaign headquarters at the Hotel Jerome, into the legendary debate between Thompson and incumbent Sheriff Carrol D. Whitmire, and out to Thompson’s Owl Farm as threats of violence against him mount. It vividly captures the Nixon era scene on the streets as Thompson leads a youthful, peaceful revolution to get young hippies and “freaks” to vote and take control of local government.
“It seems to me the way to cope with power is not to ignore it but to get it,” Thompson said in the film.
Inside the campaign
The film opens with a scene of young Aspenites pouring into the Isis Theatre in downtown Aspen for the 1970 Thompson-Whitmire debate. On stage, Whitmire claims not to understand what “freak power” is, while Thompson proudly brandishes the label.
“I am not at all embarrassed to be called a freak,” Thompson says. “To deviate from the style of government that I deplore today is not only wise but necessary.”
From there, “Freak Power” is off and running, moving at a breakneck pace through Election Night.
A quick- cut montage sets the local and national scene of 1970 — war in Vietnam, assassinations, President Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, political violence from the Weathermen, racial inequality and activism, student protesters killed at Kent State. It’s cut against the dawn of the drop- out ski bum era in Aspen, when hippies fled cities for the Roaring Fork Valley and clashed with the conservative tourism industry establishment epitomized by Whitmire.
Thompson, radicalized by the police brutality he witnessed and fell victim to while covering the Democratic National Convention in 1968, sought to try a new kind of politics and law enforcement here in his backyard, in the hopes of inspiring national change: a voter- driven revolution that could be duplicated elsewhere around the U. S.
“What we’re trying to do is to make the vote work, to bring people back into the government,” Thompson’s campaign manager Ed Bastian says in archival footage.
Police harassment of hippies and “land rape” by developers were local signals of troubling national trends, Thompson notes.
“I don’t think we can afford to ignore the national political realities any longer,” he says.
“Freak Power” offers a play- by- play of the campaign as it happens from Thompson, Bastian and “minister of information” Alex Sweetman, explaining the Freak Power philosophy and strategy. The film also shows the campaign’s fear and paranoia as the opposition begins to play dirty, death threats roll in, and the FBI starts spying on the Thompson campaign.
The film cogently explains Thompson’s flamboyant platform to change the name of Aspen to “Fat City,” sod the streets and ban traffic from downtown, control drug sales and forbid non- residents from hunting and fishing. But it also outlines the more serious and prescient reforms he pushed for, like disarming sheriff’s deputies and down- zoning construction to save the local landscape from development.
The film makes pointed use of footage from prominent Aspenites who criticize Thompson, Mayor
Eve Homeyer and the notorious anti- hippie restaurateur Guido Mayer. It also suggests that the population of Austrian and German immigrants who had helped found the ski resort here in the 1940s included former Nazis whose intolerance had pervaded local government and politics by 1970.
The issues at the center of the campaign, as captured in “Freak Power,” are shockingly relevant 50 years later. Scenes of voter suppression and post- Kent State protests are similar to those playing out today nationally during early voting and at Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The viewer is often reminded of how ahead of their time Thompson’s proposed solutions were, including police reform with oversight by an ombudsman, a “community policing” model that finally gained mainstream national traction this summer amid the nationwide protests over police brutality.
People scoff in the film at Thompson’s drug decriminalization platform, but viewers will notice some of those proposals have became reality in the 21st century as well.
The film will help solidify Thompson’s legacy as a serious and wise political thinker. The man at the center of “Freak Power” is not the drug- gobbling cartoonish character of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” but a cleareyed, committed and imaginative reformer ( with, of course, a genius sense of humor and flair for political theater, showcased as Thompson shaves his head so he can call Whitmire “my longhaired opponent”).
“Freak Power” races to its conclusion with a gripping tick- tock of the rising tensions and many scandals of the campaign’s final days, including the arrival of an undercover federal agent who attempts to infiltrate the Thompson campaign and the specter of dynamite bombings against the Freak Power faithful.
“Having worked on the campaign, the movie brings out a lot of stuff even I did not know about, especially that paranoia,” former Sheriff Bob
Braudis, a volunteer for Thompson in 1970 who went on to become a close friend and to implement many of Thompson’s ideas during his 24 years in office, said last week.
Among the most stunning things in “Freak Power,” Watkins and Phillips noted, is the realization that the iconoclast Hunter Thompson was actually the candidate playing by all the rules in this race, the one using the legal tools of democracy as intended.
“If bombing is the last resort, I’m not against it,” he says in the film. “The point is that we are not at that last resort. I don’t think we are anywhere near it.”
The film colorfully captures the heady scene inside the Hotel Jerome on election night, with costumed freaks expecting to usher in a new political era. It also depicts the heartbreak of young Aspen as Whitmire pulls away, winning by 500 votes.
“I made a mistake in thinking the town could handle an honest political campaign,” Thompson says in his concession, wrapped in an American flag and wearing a founding fathers’ wig, adding: “The American Dream really is ( expletive).”