Hunter S.’s cannon send-off cost $2.5 mill, a bill footed by Johnny Depp. Before the event, The Independent paused to ponder:

One wonders what the man would have written had he been sent by Rolling Stone to cover such a send- off for a dead writer whose most compelling work had been completed more than 30 years earlier.

Dude, ouch.

This theme — what would Hunter have said and written? — is carried through to a second article, filed after the event:

Over an afternoon beer at the Hotel Jerome in Aspen with The Independent and the actor Bill Murray several hours before the memorial blast-off, [long-time collaborator and illustrator Ralph] Steadman said his friend, who once affectionately referred to him in print as a “scum-sucking foreign geek” might have looked on with a “smirk or a grin”. “I think he would have liked it,” he said.

Murray, who played Thompson in the 1980 film Where the Buffalo Roam almost 20 years before Depp repeated the part in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, said: “This was like his life. It’s gonzo. He wrote about this and it’s happening. It was what he predicted.” Murray said one of the lessons of Fear and Loathing was that however chaotic and crazy one might anticipate a huge event being, things normally worked out.

Hunter S.’s noncelebrity fans were not so sanguine. The reporter says “[t]here was plenty of speculation … that had Thompson himself been covering the event he would started off by drinking a quart of Wild Turkey bourbon and swallowing a pocketful of pills. (‘Holy Jesus! Did they really just fire my ass out of a cannon? Damn you Johnny Depp, I was just bullshittin’ about the explosives. I really wanted an urn.’)”

RELATED: Unfortunately, Steadman’s fine remembrance of Thompson, published shortly after his death in February, is no longer available online. So here, from the archives, is Tom Wolfe’s (also fine) appreciation.
Update: The Steadman article can be found here (thanks to Dave Lull for the link).