It's been a while since I visited Hunter Thompson Land in the column, what with the Doc being dead and all, but things are afoot so this week we'll sneak back for a peek.

Before that, however, there's a gig next week that you might like to note down.

I have, over the past few weeks, given a bit of stick to the REAL Tauranga Festival, but it's hard to be unhappy with the two bands that they have coming to Tauranga next Thursday, October 13.

The Phoenix Foundation and The Thomas Oliver Band are two of Wellington's finest, the former a purveyor of quirky pop tunes and much more, the latter a tough modern blues band.

They're down on The Strand as part of the festival with local boys Nine Mile Stone playing support, and tickets cost $30. Let's hope the weather hangs in there this time around.

But, as I opened by saying, this week we're plunging back into the strange and wonderful world of the late Dr Hunter S Thompson, fearless commentator on the search for the American dream, drug fiend extraordinaire, and a man who wielded his pen like a giant scalpel to expose hypocrisy and greedheads.

Well the good Doctor's been dead for six years now but, after over a decade of wrangling, his one and only novel, a book he wrote as a very young man on his first journalistic assignment in Puerto Rico, which was finally published in 1998, The Rum Diaries, is set to hit the big screen.

To say that the film has something of a troubled production history is like saying that Hunter Thompson enjoyed the occasional drink.
It was first optioned in 2000 and Johnny Depp and Nick Nolte were signed to star. That attempt never got beyond the development stage.

In 2002 it was set up again, this time with Benicio Del Toro and Josh Hartnett starring. Once again it never got beyond development.

It is possible that Hunter himself was not the easiest person to deal with. He certainly seems to have had little patience for the manoeuvrings of Hollywood.

There is, for instance, a famous letter that did the rounds after he sent it to the woman heading the production team in 2001:
'Okay, you lazy b****, I'm getting tired of this waterhead f*** around that you're doing with The Rum Diary… Nobody needs to hear any more of that Gibberish about yr. New Mercedes and yr. Ski Trips... all you are is a goddamn Bystander, jabbering like some half bright Kid with no focus except on yr. own tits... I'd much rather deal with a Live a****** than a dead worm with No Light in his Eyes... I'm in the mood to chop yr. f****** hands off. RSVP. Hunter.”

Sounds pretty typical of the Doc to me, but it might not have been what a Hollywood producer expected.

But things with the film were revitalised in 2007 when Johnny Depp's production company took over things. Depp, in what – if the film is good – will be considered a moment of left-field genius, hired Enlishman Bruce Robinson to write and direct. I say left-field, and I mean it. Robinson has not directed a film for seventeen years and the last one he did direct was a complete flop.

But Bruce Robinson has one thing on his CV that stands as a guiding light to cinephiles: he wrote and directed Withnail and I. Now if you don't know that film, don't worry, it wasn't a success at the box office either. But with the subsequent rise of VHS and then DVD it became possibly the highest-regarded English cult comedy of all time.

It is a story of two out of work actors who drink a lot, go on holiday by mistake, and utter more outrageously quotable lines than two unemployed wasters have any right to. Like Hunter, Bruce Robinson felt excessively burned by Hollywood and turned his back on the movies.

But now he's back, along with Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Aaron Eckhart, Giovanni Ribisi and Richard Jenkins and The Rum Diaries will hit cinemas in America at the end of this month. It should be a blast.