Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson and documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney don’t seem like the most natural pairing, at least at first. Gibney’s films, including the Oscar-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side” (which has produced an ugly dispute between Gibney and the film’s distributor) and the Oscar-nominated “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” essentially present old-school investigative journalism, filtered through a pop sensibility. Gibney himself has compared his research-intensive work to archaeology, and I doubt anyone has ever described Thompson’s work in those terms.

Without question one of the most influential journalists of the past 50 years, Thompson was both immensely talented and immensely undisciplined. His bookend masterpieces “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” permanently changed the relationship between the reporter, the self and the subject in American journalism. Even in his best work, Thompson walked a thin line between honesty and fatal self-indulgence, and over the last 30 years of his life he gradually slid into booze-hound, gun-crazed, paranoid self-caricature, closer to the Uncle Duke of “Doonesbury” than to the lacerating wit who ripped through the mendacious superficiality of American political and civic life.

Gibney’s immensely funny and sad new motion picture “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” — the “Dr.” was a mail-order divinity degree — is principally intended to rehabilitate Thompson and introduce his work to a new audience. The primary focus of Gibney’s mixture of interviews, archival footage and imaginative re-creation is the years from 1965 to 1975, when Thompson rose from obscurity to become a highly paid Rolling Stone correspondent and counterculture hero and wrote almost all his best stuff. Yet even at the end of his life, as Gibney reminds us, Uncle Duke had his moments of seeing through the charade and glimpsing the machinery grinding away beneath it.

In the fall of 2001, when the towers fell in Lower Manhattan, Thompson was writing an online sports column for ESPN. Of course he couldn’t be expected to stay on topic, and while his column published on Sept. 12 is full of inaccuracies — he estimated that more than 20,000 people were killed in the attacks — it has weathered better than most of the mystified, pseudo-patriotic drivel written in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Gibney has Johnny Depp, who appears throughout the film as a narrator cum Thompson impersonator, read excerpts in an early scene:

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives … It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

I think that stands among the most lucid and penetrating passages of Thompson’s entire career. If he had been able to write and think that clearly most of the time — possibly by staying off the Scotch and the coke for longer than a day at a time — he might not have ended up shooting himself at his Colorado home in February 2005. (Some 9/11 conspiracy theorists have contended that Thompson was working on an exposé about the World Trade Center attack and was murdered to hush him up. Thankfully, Gibney does not go there.)

It probably took someone as professional and level-headed as Gibney to get this movie made at all. He got full cooperation from Thompson’s widow, ex-wife and son and unearthed treasures from the author’s collection of audiotapes and home movies. We see early and late Thompson TV appearances, and interviews with Hells Angels, former presidents and candidates, political friends and foes, reporting colleagues and rivals. It’s an amazing all-star cast, from Jimmy Carter and George McGovern (perhaps the only two politicians to evade Thompson’s wrath) to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, unlikely drinking buddy Pat Buchanan, and “New Journalism” competitor Tom Wolfe.

There are snippets about Thompson’s unhappy early life in Kentucky and his semi-depraved later life in Rocky Mountain isolation (in a 2003 interview with Salon, he called himself “an elderly dope fiend living out in the wilderness”). But most of Gibney’s material is meant to celebrate the meteoric and unlikely rise of a logorrheic autodidact who made his own flaws and excesses part of every story he wrote and who loved America so passionately that he felt the need at every opportunity to “piss down the throats of these Nazis” who ran the place.

Between 1965 and 1975, Thompson published his breakthrough book “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs,” a mordantly funny and insightful work that nearly got him killed; a derisive article about the Haight-Ashbury that made the San Francisco neighborhood internationally famous; the article “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” with which the gonzo tradition was born; the mind-bending memoir-novel “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which probably did more to make drug abuse seem cool than anyone or anything else since Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and the Merry Pranksters (coincidentally or not, the subjects of an upcoming Alex Gibney film); and the epoch-making “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” a book that reshaped political journalism in its own image. As Gibney captures hilariously in the film, in 1970 Thompson also ran and nearly won a patently ridiculous “Freak Power” campaign for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colo., where he lived.

Especially in the ’70s and ’80s, Thompson spawned legions of journalistic imitators, and it was almost always a bad idea. (The same could be said about Stanley Booth’s book “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,” probably the best thing ever written about 1960s rock ‘n’ roll culture — and a massively terrible example for younger rock journalists.) Most of that emulation was a matter of run-on sentences and substance abuse, when what today’s journalism really needs is a fraction of Thompson’s unjaded ferocity and righteous anger. As Gibney has said, Raoul Duke’s spirit seems to live on largely among comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher, not among the so-called professionals.

I recently joined Alex Gibney for breakfast at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan, one of those media-centric whoremonger power lounges that would have fascinated and appalled Hunter Thompson, and where he might have needed “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers [and] laughers” just to start the day. We had none of those things, sad to tell, and I had to begin by quizzing Gibney a little about his teapot-tempest dispute with ThinkFilm, the distributor of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which recently prompted a front-page story in the New York Times. (Listen to the interview here.)

I don’t want to eat up too much of our time talking about your last film instead of your new one, but “Taxi to the Dark Side” has been in the news lately. So let’s review: You won the Oscar for best documentary, but then the film failed to return the dividends that everyone involved was hoping for. You ended up grossing less than $300,000, which I’m sure was a big disappointment. And now you’re in arbitration with ThinkFilm, trying to get the distribution rights back and also some payment for damages. You’re actually arguing that they mishandled the film to the point of fraud?

Well, I would divide it into two parts. I think they did a reasonable job up to the point we won the Oscar. And the whole strategy, which was a sensible strategy for a film about such a difficult and dark topic, was to win awards and capitalize on those awards, which give people permission to go see the film. But after we won the Oscar, nothing happened. In fact, the Web site was taken down and we didn’t know why. We were mystified, and then over time we learned that they hadn’t paid any of the vendors. They hadn’t paid the labs, so they couldn’t manufacture more prints. They hadn’t paid the Web site people, so the site was taken down. All the publicists didn’t get paid; one single mom was owed $100,000. Clearly, they weren’t putting anything in advertising. One week when the movie was playing in New York at the Quad Cinema, I looked in the New Yorker, New York magazine and Time Out. Never mind the fact that there weren’t any ads. There weren’t even any listings.

So the only way that you knew about the movie is if you happened to walk by the marquee, and generally speaking, that’s not a good strategy — to rely on foot traffic for advertising. Our view is that ThinkFilm didn’t disclose their financial condition to us, and they certainly didn’t disclose it to us as we’re coming in to Oscar time. I don’t want to get too much into the weeds with this, but [ThinkFilm president] Mark Urman was quoted saying how he tried extra hard to move the film to HBO at great cost to Think. How was it at great cost to them? HBO paid them a large sum of money in order to delay the DVD release, and ThinkFilm demanded that they be paid instantly. Like, they had to be wired the money within hours of signing the contract, probably so they could use it for another film.

So it was very disappointing. You know, I respect Mark’s taste in films, but he should have said to his financiers, “Look, you’re gonna have to pay all the people we owe all this money to.” It was embarrassing, because there were a lot of people who gave breaks to the film because they believed so strongly in the message. To see them get stiffed, that was a bitter pill to swallow. We are trying to compensate some of the vendors. It’s ThinkFilm that owes them money, and we’re trying to help them out. So the idea that we’re somehow being greedy is ridiculous. We’re looking for a businesslike relationship, and we don’t feel like we got it.

This whole affair seems like unfortunate testimony to the problems the whole independent film business is having right now. We’ve got an Oscar-winning independent filmmaker and a respected indie distributor, most likely with similar political and artistic visions of the world, at each other’s throats.

Well, Hunter Thompson put it in perspective. Let’s see if I can get this right. He said the entertainment business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where pimps and thieves run free and good men die like dogs. There was also, said Hunter, a negative side.

Yeah, let’s turn to Thompson and “Gonzo,” which you premiered at Sundance to a very strong response, and which opens in a whole bunch of cities on the Fourth of July. Is it a patriotic film?

Absolutely. We’re celebrating American independence.

For people who know your work, not just “Taxi to the Dark Side” but your hit film from a few years ago, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” this might seem like a departure. It’s lighter subject matter, at least in some ways.

Well, look, someone in Australia described “Enron” as a comedy that turns to farce and ends in horror. Because it was a story about fraud and illusion, it had a certain amount of laughs in it, even though it ends rather darkly. I think of “Gonzo” as a dark comedy. There’s certainly a lot of political content, but there are also a lot of laughs in there. I needed those, and Hunter — I think his great talent was to take this anger he had and to turn it into comedy. That was his weapon.

Yeah, it’s a dark comedy about somebody who was clearly a revolutionary writer and journalist and also somebody who wound up…

Blowing his brains out.

Yeah, a dysfunctional alcoholic, drug addict and suicide. What drew you to Thompson in the first place? Were you a fan?

I was a fan, but let’s say I wasn’t one of those people that read every semicolon. I read “Vegas.” I read “Campaign Trail.” And I read the reprint of “The Derby.” But I hadn’t dug into Thompson in a long time. I had read a lot of his later stuff and I was always amused by Garry Trudeau’s version in “Doonesbury.” I followed the exploits of the good doctor from time to time, but this movie gave me the opportunity to kind of dig in.

As Frank Rich pointed out in a piece not long after Hunter committed suicide — you remember that guy Jeff Gannon, the sometime male prostitute who was somehow, mysteriously, given a White House press badge? Whenever Scott McClellan or anyone else would get into trouble, Gannon would wave his hand and say, “I think it’s terrible. These people are running down this administration. They’re trying to do such good.” They were getting actors to pose as journalists, and at a time like that, you need somebody who’s going to ruthlessly start goring some sacred cows.

I definitely felt, when I watched the film, that Thompson provides an instructive example to today’s journalists. Maybe both a positive and a negative example.

A lot of positive and a lot of negative. You can’t really imitate Hunter. He was unique, but there were times when he got it dead-on. What was it Frank Mankiewicz [who directed George McGovern's 1972 campaign] said in the film? Hunter’s coverage of the ’72 campaign was the least factual, but most accurate coverage.

Yeah. At his best, he was able to do that. Highly personal commentary that captured the spirit of things better than objective reporting.

Sometimes even flying into fantasy is useful. Ed Muskie was a peculiar guy, and he had this kind of stone face that would occasionally erupt into rage, or in one famous incident, crying. Hunter’s way of dealing with that was not simply to say “Mr. Muskie, with his long, drawn-out face,” but was to imagine that somehow Ed Muskie was hooked on this strange Congolese hallucinogen called Ibogaine. He had all the hallmarks of Ibogaine addiction! Rage, a stone face, you know. They said he was deep into it. And then some people in the media picked it up and actually treated it as a story, and I think if you read it in the original, it’s pretty clear it’s a tall tale in the Mark Twain tradition.

As Hunter says in the movie, when somebody’s asking him about it, “Well, I didn’t say he was taking anything. I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he was taking something, and that was true. Of course, I started the rumor in Milwaukee.” So he was playing with all sorts of conventions and having a good time.

Yeah, it was almost like the Onion before its day. Newsweek or Time picked up the story and ran it as if it was for real. And suddenly Ed Muskie was a drug addict.

Right. “It’s trouble on the Congo for the senator from Maine!”

Your approach to storytelling, to documentary film, is closely based on hard-hitting investigative journalism. It’s really different from Thompson’s approach, which is highly personal and deliberately outrageous.

It is different, but it’s liberating to think about. And there are moments, I would argue, when my work exhibits, in a formal way, the playfulness of Hunter. In “Enron,” there is a moment when we’re talking about the enormous risks these guys were taking. And then we cut to this skydiver falling through space. Well, that’s not Ken Lay! That guy doesn’t work for Enron! We had fun with all these wacky Motocross and extreme-sports things that they were doing. We used bits from horror movies as a playful way of saying, of expressing, what is supposed to be expressed in monotone, third-person narration that dutifully explains the facts. Sometimes if you cut to a guy in the basement of some horror film, pulling these levers, that says more about what these loonies at Enron were saying or doing than describing the details of mark-to-market accounting.

In the Thompson film we also tried to have fun with the tall-tale thing, in a formal way. We found this audiotape of Hunter and [longtime sidekick] Oscar Acosta at a taco stand, where they ask this woman, “We’re looking for the American dream. We don’t know where it is.” And she says, “Well, I think it’s over by the psychiatrist’s office on State Street.” We have the original audiotape, which is fantastic. It was a great find. It’s published in the “Vegas” book verbatim, which I didn’t even realize. He was tripping, but that was true. But the way we filmed it was, we got some actors and we made it look like a home movie. At first, it plausibly could be. Then suddenly the scene opens up and you’re seeing the taco stand from three or four different angles — inside, outside — and it’s clearly a movie, it’s fiction.

Early on in the film, you see this photo of Hunter pointing a gun at a typewriter. We zoom in to his hand holding the gun, and then suddenly the hand becomes real and the gun shoots. It was a way of saying we’re going to have some fun, a little bit like Thompson did. I approach this stuff by playing with the form, but being straight about the facts.

Here’s one question that I come away with after seeing this film: How much of Thompson’s wild-man persona was an act, and how much was it real? You know, he writes about staying up all night in a San Francisco motel, doing crank and typing out the manuscript of “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.” How much is he kind of fronting and playing with that, and how much is he recording what really happened?

It’s hard to answer that. I mean, I think he was doing speed in tremendous amounts and going on these binges, but earlier on it was more of an act and less of the real McCoy. He kind of descended into his own character later in life. He was doing all the drugs and all the alcohol all the time, and it started to slow him down. Rather than pretending that he was always on speed, maybe he was on speed a lot of the time. He used to have this big pill bottle. Tim Crouse [Thompson's Rolling Stone reporting partner] talks about how he would gently say, like a father figure, “Don’t go for too many of those gray ones, Tim. Those are for people like me, not for you.”

So there’s no question that he was doing the drugs, but I think there was an act to it, too. He was creating a kind of action-hero figure for himself, and he was pretty serious about the writing. If you look at his output from ’65 to ’75, it’s extraordinary. Somebody who was high all the time just can’t crank it out like that.

You know, when I went back to Thompson’s work after seeing your film, I read “Campaign Trail” for a piece I was writing about this year’s campaign. And one thing that surprised me is that, on the one hand, he’s totally spoofing the traditions of campaign journalism and ridiculing his fellow reporters, and on the other hand, he’s capable of some remarkable feats of completely mainstream reporting.

Like at the Democratic convention.

Right, that’s played completely straight. And sometimes he’ll startle you with the things he pulls off. You remember the episode in 1968, when he somehow gets himself into the back seat of a limousine with Richard Nixon and they talk about football the whole way?

Sure, and that was a great credit to Hunter. Unlike a lot of the bloviators on TV today, Hunter was always interested in talking to people outside his tribe, to anybody really. So he pestered Pat Buchanan to get a ride with Nixon, he got in the limo, and for an hour he talks football with Nixon.

And as much as Thompson clearly hated Nixon, he gives him credit: Well, he did know a lot about football!

He describes these little details that Nixon clearly knew about the game, where certain pro players came from, and where they had gone to college. He was impressed.

Speaking of Pat Buchanan: He’s in your film, and you might not automatically think of him as one of Thompson’s friends. They were diametrically opposed, at least politically, but it’s clear that Buchanan respected and liked him.

No question. He loved Hunter. They used to battle it out late at night over a bottle of Wild Turkey.

I bet Buchanan could put it away, too.

I think he could. They would get hammered together and scream at each other about the Cold War. Buchanan’s a smart guy, and I think he really was amused by Hunter. He loved him. He also points out that while Hunter was of the left, if you want to put it that way, he leveled some of his hardest hits on liberals, people like Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie. He was a pomposity deflater. He went after everybody. Well, he was pretty gentle on George McGovern. Buchanan really liked the way Hunter captured how ridiculous the whole process is. People who are inside the process really do, at heart, understand what a ridiculous thing this political pageant is.

You’re right in saying that Thompson arguably had a lot more distaste for mainstream liberals than, in some cases, for right-wingers. He hated Hubert Humphrey so much. Many Democrats felt very wounded by that. You know, Humphrey was a civil rights leader in the Senate, a loyal party soldier. And you have Thompson writing that he was addicted to some exotic kind of speed.

Wallet, he called it. He said they should stuff Hubert Humphrey in a bottle and let him float out in the Pacific Ocean on the Japan Current.

Thompson never stipulated whether there was any truth to that one, but it probably belongs in the same category…

As the stuff he wrote about Muskie. Again, though, it kind of captured something. If you see Humphrey, he’s kind of artificially perky all the time.

I felt like we badly needed Hunter this year. I don’t know what he would have made out of Clinton vs. Obama, or exactly what outrageous lies he’d be spreading about John McCain. But they’d be merciless.

I agree, but we needed the early Hunter, not the late Hunter. A guy operating at the peak of his powers.

That’s right. Your movie is clearly an appreciation, but it’s not a hagiography. You depict the decline in his later years, and it’s not pretty. Was it the drinking and drugs finally catching up with him, or do you think those things were symptomatic of something else?

At the end of the day, the drinking really did him in. Whether it was the image that he had become obsessed with — everyone was counting on him to be this gonzo character — or whether he was afraid he was going to lose his muse if the drugs and drinking stopped, I’m not sure. Because I do think the drugs early on kind of loosened him up. You can see the writing change after the drugs start — in an interesting way, in a good way. But at the end of the day, he couldn’t kick the booze. It was destroying him. His health got worse and worse and worse, and he wasn’t ready for that. It wasn’t pretty at all.

I can come up with all these rationalizations for him. People are amused by you for keeping it up, for getting up at one o’clock in the afternoon or whatever with your tumbler of Chivas Regal and your little packet of cocaine. It is amusing, but living that life every day takes its toll.

One of the most upsetting things in your film is this moment when you see the wheels fall off for Thompson. It happens when he goes to Zaire to cover the Ali-Foreman fight in 1974. Such a delicious subject for Hunter Thompson, such a strange cultural event and enormous athletic event. The conflict between the wily veteran and the young giant, with an ending that shocked the world. A fight that itself became the subject of a great documentary.

“When We Were Kings.” Which we quote in the film.

And he never wrote anything about it, not a word. What the hell happened?

Well, I think he’d already become something else, you know. It was like when we hear athletes talk about themselves in the third person. Hunter had become more important than the story. He was clearly high as a kite, snorting coke the whole time. They had these huge duffle bags full of marijuana. While the fight was going on, he playfully emptied one into the pool and just watched the dope go through the drains while he was sipping his Scotch. So he was high, way high, and there was a mixture of narcissism and a growing disability, where he was just having too much fun not doing his work.

But I also think something weird happened there, and this is just a guess. But by all accounts, he loved Muhammad Ali, and he was a guy who wore his heart on his sleeve. He was thinking, you know, about all these people he had backed, all the noble losers who had lost. And coming into the fight. everybody said Foreman was just going to take Ali apart. Here was a guy who was so big, and so brutal. He had demolished Joe Frazier. So maybe Hunter decided that this is not going to be any kind of fight and so screw it.

And after the fight happened, it must have had a peculiar effect on his psyche. It’s like, once you stop believing, and then what you formerly believed in wins — it’s like being a Red Sox fan for 20 years and thinking, Oh, I’m so tired of this now. And then you start rooting for the Yankees, just so that they’ll win. Right? And then the Red Sox beat the Yankees? Well, you can’t take any pleasure in that anymore. It’s kind of debilitating. It shows a loss of faith, and I think Hunter had that. There was a moment when he just lost faith, and that was hard for him to reckon with.

So he got fucked up there. And then he didn’t recover from that, I think. Not only did he not file anything — I mean, zippo — but I think he had also undermined his own sense of commitment to the other side of the American psyche. To the sense of possibility, rather than the fear and loathing.

“Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” opens July 4 in New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle, Washington and Austin, Texas; July 11 in Cleveland, Detroit, Santa Cruz, Calif., Santa Fe, N.M., St. Louis, Columbus, Ohio and San Antonio, Texas; and July 18 in Bend, Ore., Chapel Hill, N.C., Charlotte, N.C., Durham, N.C., Eugene, Ore., Indianapolis, Kansas City, Madison, Wis., Nashville, New Haven, Conn., North Falmouth, Mass., and Dayton, Ohio, with more cities to follow.

So perhaps that explains why the Wall Street Journal’s flagship Twitter feed (as pointed out by Felix Salmon) jumped the gun this morning, reporting via a tweet practically dripping with glee that Sarbanes-Oxley had finally been vanquished!

BREAKING: Supreme Court strikes down Sarbanes-Oxley, the landmark anti-fraud law. Much more to come at http://wsj.com

Except, as the Journal and other publications soon reported, the court did no such thing. The court struck down a part of Sarbanes-Oxley that had to with the president’s power to fire members of the Public Company Oversight Accounting Board, the regulatory body set up by Sarbanes-Oxley to watch over the accounting firms that audit public companies.

Currently, members of the PCOAB can only be fired “for cause.” The court ruled that this violated the Constitution’s “separation of powers” principles. Now the president will be able to fire the overseers “at will.”

Critics of Sarbanes-Oxley had hoped that the court would use this flaw to throw out the entire law. But that’s not happening. The law stands. The proper tweet should have been “Supreme Court strikes down minor part of Sarbanes-Oxley; law remains in effect.”

Maybe it was an honest error — albeit retweeted around the world at near the speed of light. Or maybe it was an unintentional revelation of the deepest hopes and desires of the Wall Street Journal’s shell-shocked editorial core — the subconscious revealed in 140 characters or less. With just days to go before a new avalanche of financial sector regulation becomes law, the Journal saw one bright spot in the advancing gloom — Sarbanes-Oxley would be no more! And the paper (or a Twitter-feed monitoring intern) got a little excited. Hey, no worries, it’s happened to the best of us.

But the least the paper could do would be a follow-up, one-word tweet: Ooops! Any self-respecting blogger would have felt that much responsibility. But the Journal blithely tweeted forward, gradually approaching the truth, with nary a look back. Tut tut.

UPDATE: The man behind the mistaken tweet, Zach Seward, comes admirably clean in Felix Salmon’s comments.

The other thing they have in common, of course, is Alex Gibney, who has made movies about all those subjects, including the Oscar-winner “Taxi to the Dark Side,” the box-office breakthrough “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” which wasn’t a big hit but strikes me as a key work in understanding what Gibney is up to. He thrives on those oversize emotions mentioned above, channeling them into intentionally ambiguous pop documentaries that inhabit a nuanced middle ground between journalism and entertainment.

As he would be the first to admit, Gibney’s films depend on the work of old-school investigative journalists, those lumbering sauropods who take months or years to reach their destinations. His particular genius lies in taking their facts and figures, their reams of insider testimony, and spinning them into compelling on-screen yarns, loaded with archival news footage, goofy animations and special effects, dramatic re-creations and comic-relief moments. Yet if Gibney’s films are a long way from the purist cinema-vérité documentary tradition, they’re closer in spirit to old-fashioned muckraking than to the clown-prince pranksterism of Michael Moore. (Gibney’s voice can be heard in his films, both literally and figuratively, but he never appears as a character.)

Even by Gibney’s prolific standards, 2010 is shaping up as a bonanza, or perhaps an unmanageable pileup. When I met him recently at the New York offices of Magnolia Pictures, we were officially talking about his explosive, hilarious and eye-opening Abramoff film, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” which Magnolia releases in theaters this week. But Gibney also had — count ‘em — three other new movies premiering in the Tribeca Film Festival, at least if you count his section of the anthology documentary “Freakonomics,” adapted from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s bestselling books. (Other co-directors of that film are Seth Gordon, Eugene Jarecki, Morgan Spurlock and the “Jesus Camp” duo, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.)

Gibney also unveiled a sneak preview of his as-yet-untitled Eliot Spitzer documentary at Tribeca, along with “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” a film based on journalist and author Lawrence Wright’s solo theater piece about his quest to find the roots of Islamic terrorism. (That film will play on HBO, and perhaps also receive limited theatrical release. The commercial fate of the Spitzer film remains undecided.)

“Casino Jack” veritably revels in the rollicking, stranger-than-fiction details of the Abramoff scandal, in which a brilliant and charismatic lobbyist pimped out much of the United States Congress to big-money corporate clients, along the way defrauding Indian tribes, the territorial government of the Mariana Islands and other easy marks. Beyond that, though, Gibney is fascinated by the scandal’s larger implications — and it’s there that we begin to see the conceptual thread that ties his films together. Abramoff was no rogue out to enrich himself (although he did that too) but a committed right-wing ideologue who permanently changed the rules of the game in Washington. He embraced and embodied that old gag about the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules.

As always, Gibney was a cheerful, upbeat conversationalist in person. He’s a film buff who stays busy at festivals catching other people’s work, and in an interview context he delivers concise, on-message sound bites, not dark, philosophical jeremiads. Still, as I told him, I sense a pattern here, whether or not it’s entirely conscious: Gibney is documenting the not-so-slow and not-so-gradual demolition of the American dream, the interlinked vision of freedom, democracy and capitalism that has been so influential in the recent history of the world, and now seems to be in potentially terminal decay.

So, Alex, we’re here to talk about “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” but you’ve got two other films that are either complete or almost complete. And then there’s “Freakonomics,” which you directed part of. I think you should write some kind of self-help book on how to get stuff done. Are you one of those people who’s incredibly organized?

Man, that would make everybody who knows me howl with laughter. I may be the world’s most disorganized person. But I do put in the hours. I should probably join Filmmakers Anonymous. Stop me before I say yes again!

You know, you could look at your films and describe them as miscellaneous. Generally you’re taking the work of journalists and adapting it for the screen. But when I look at them, I see a congressional corruption scandal, a major corporate scandal, a disgraced politician and a dead journalist who spent his life excoriating the stupidity and corruption he saw around him. Is there a pattern?

Maybe if you see it, you’ll let me know. [Laughter.] There are clearly certain things that interest me, and I seem to go there. But a pattern? I don’t know.

Well, if I were a graduate student trying to write a thesis about you, I might suggest that these are all aspects of the decline of America since 1980 — the legacy of the Reagan revolution and the triumph of conservatism in American politics.

Well, there’s a theme in that. I think that’s the big story. Now we’re seeing that the net result of the Reagan revolution was the Wall Street meltdown. Take away all the rules and regulations, and what do you get? Meltdown. So I think that’s a theme.

But the other thing that’s increasingly interesting for me is human behavior. What makes people do the strange things they do? How do good people go bad? How do people abuse power? Those are big things for me.

You’re showing your movie about Eliot Spitzer at Tribeca, but it has no title yet and we’ve all been asked not to write about it. So I take it you don’t think it’s ready to roll?

I’m taking my cue on the Spitzer film from what happened with “Casino Jack” at Sundance. We thought it was finished. But seeing it with an audience, who weren’t my friends or anything, you learn things about how it plays. So we made it a lot shorter, we took at some narration, we just shifted stuff around. I would say the Spitzer film is largely finished, and now we’ll see how people respond. We may make a few adjustments.

Your other new film is “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which — well, how would you describe it? Is it an adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s performance piece?

Yeah, in some ways it is. He did a one-man play called “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which is like “my summer vacation,” except in the Middle East. What intrigued me was that it was an everyman’s look at al-Qaida — why they attacked us, and why they came to be what they were. In making the film, we filmed the play, but then we enhanced it. The set of the play was Larry’s study, but it also included a TV screen. We made that TV screen significantly bigger on our set, and used it as a magic portal.

There’s a kind of time and space travel in the film, where we go to Cairo, to London. We also travel through space and time to the caves in Afghanistan, to Saudi Arabia, so that you can see and feel these places in addition to traveling on Larry’s personal journey, which is his play.

Getting back to “Casino Jack,” which is a movie about a scandal that was widely covered in the media when the story broke, five or six years ago. It seems as if you’re arguing that people may know Abramoff’s name, and maybe the general outlines of the story, but may not understand its importance.

In some ways, he assembled the tool kit that lobbyists are still using. Now, people will object to that: “Absolutely not! Jack Abramoff was one of a kind! He was completely outrageous.” Well, yes. He was outrageous, and he was way out of control. But he used the same tool kit everybody uses today: the rapacious use of not-for-profits to hide trips, to hide agendas, to hide money flows. The revolving door, where you get staffers from senators’ or congressmen’s offices and put them into your lobbying shops so you can influence votes, influence legislation. The use of entertainment and skyboxes — there are different rules now, but there are also ways to get around them. Biggest of all is the way you manage money to influence legislation, in a way that skirts the prohibitions on quid pro quo. It’s about going inside the kitchen in the world’s biggest restaurant and seeing how the sausage is made. Jack Abramoff was the master chef in the world’s biggest restaurant.

We wonder why Congress is dysfunctional, why they’re not doing the people’s bidding, why everyone seems to hate them. The reason is, the system is broken, because it’s all based on money. By looking at Jack’s story, you can see how that happened.

And Jack’s story — first of all, it’s hilarious and spectacular. It’s globe-girdling, there’s a murder in it, there are sweatshops in Saipan, dirty deals in Russia, arms whistling to the West Bank. But at its heart is the very stuff that is breaking our system of democracy.

This was the biggest congressional corruption scandal ever, at least at the time. But did the level of corruption that Abramoff represented become the new normal, in a sense? Because in the film you suggest that even more dramatic stuff has happened since his downfall.

The dispiriting thing is that Jack Abramoff, in the wake of the financial lobbying of the last few years, looks like a piker. I mean, he’s Podunk! The financial lobbyists, and the medical and pharmaceutical lobbyists, have taken what Abramoff did to a new level.

You mentioned the fact that the Abramoff story is highly entertaining, which it certainly is. And while it’s unlikely that your viewers will find him likable or sympathetic, let’s just say this: He makes one hell of a lead character.

There is another film, which is still called “Casino Jack.” I think they’re going to change the title. It’s a fictional version of this story, in which Kevin Spacey plays Jack Abramoff. I’ve seen the film, and Kevin Spacey is very good in it. But he’s no Jack Abramoff. [Laughter.]

Jack Abramoff is one of a kind. As Neal Volz, a former staffer for congressman Bob Ney who later worked for Jack, says, “Jack could talk a dog off a meat truck.” He was that persuasive. He was the ultimate salesman, but he was also a man of great imagination. He was a film buff, who saw his own life as an action film or a spy thriller. As a result, he imagined himself into situations that, you know, make for pretty good moviegoing.

Suddenly, we’re in Angola, in Africa, where Jack is holding a sort of right-wing Woodstock [in June 1985], shooting machine guns with a bloodthirsty character named Jonas Savimbi and a guy named Adolfo Calero, who used to run the Contras in Nicaragua. And they’re all holding hands after a lot of machine-gun shooting and singing a version of “Kumbaya” with this guy Lew Lehrman, who later ran for governor in New York state, and who gave George Washington’s bowl to Jonas Savimbi, this bloodthirsty dictator. You can’t make this stuff up!

Yeah, I literally couldn’t believe that entire sequence. It’s so amazing. It seems impossible, totally fictional. Was it difficult to find documentation of that event?

It sure was. We got lucky or we were good, one of the two. We tracked down a cameraman who had been there, and he still had 10 hours of footage. We also got Jack’s film, which was amazing. Jack was a film producer. He produced “Red Scorpion,” with Dolph Lundgren [released in 1989], and “Red Scorpion 2.” I think the Angola affair — it taught Jack that it wasn’t a big enough deal. That was his documentary version, and he was always going to make an action film. So he reinvents Savimbi into Red Scorpion, and has Dolph Lundgren as the action hero, shooting up everybody and performing weightlifting tricks. And that’s what Jack was as a young man, a weightlifter. So Dolph Lundgren is standing in for Jack.

I have a fun thing at the beginning of the film. There’s this thing that Jack said to somebody, which we transposed into an e-mail: “Documentary? You don’t want to make a documentary. Nobody watches documentaries. You want to make an action film.”

So to some extent, this film is an action film. That’s what I told Jack: “It’s an action film, man. People are going to be entertained.” I think it’s also a comedy, at least in parts. But unfortunately it’s a comedy in which the joke’s on us.

So you’ve had contact with Abramoff. What was that like?

Very interesting. I visited him in prison, and found him to be a very engaging character, very funny, good storyteller. He loves to quote movies.

Did he know who you were?

He did. I think — no, I know — that there was great reluctance to meeting with me. It wasn’t like I had a big record as a movement conservative, which was something we joked about. We agreed on one thing: I didn’t see him as a bad apple. I saw him as spectacular evidence of a rotten barrel.

He was at the center of things, not on the periphery. Everybody else was trying to make him the scapegoat: “Oh, we got rid of Jack Abramoff. Everything’s fine!” I told him, and I firmly believe, that he was at the center. He was doing stuff to the extreme, yes, over the top. But he was doing the same stuff everybody else was doing.

Well, you make a pretty strong case that Abramoff wasn’t in it for the money, or not entirely. He had an ideological motivation. He actually believed he was doing the right thing.

Right. I think he was a zealot. Unlike his partner, Mike Scanlon, who was in it for the money, Jack Abramoff was a zealot. He believed in the principles of the Reagan revolution. He was very anti-Soviet, but he also wanted to do what Grover Norquist has suggested: make government so small you can drown it in the bathtub. Denude it of its resources. Destroy the government, in effect.

Do you see any parallels between Abramoff and Eliot Spitzer? Here are these two brilliant, headstrong guys from opposite sides of the political spectrum, who appeared to be very idealistic, driven by ideology, but who allowed themselves to become corrupted.

I don’t know that Eliot was corrupted by his ideology, but I think he’s a character who did something that was wildly unexpected. If there is a parallel, it’s hubris. I think Jack became so entranced with his outsize reputation that he began to believe his own press releases. And I think Eliot Spitzer — he started seeing prostitutes at the moment of his greatest political influence. He was on his way to being governor, overwhelmingly popular among both Republicans and Democrats. And at that very moment, at the top of his game, he began to see prostitutes. Dudley Do-Right did wrong.

Of the two of them, maybe Spitzer was the real hypocrite. You can call Abramoff a lot of things, but not that.

I don’t think you could really accuse Jack of being a hypocrite. Jack was corrupt, and I don’t think you can say that Eliot Spitzer was corrupt. But he was hypocritical, there’s no doubt about that. Look, he had increased penalties for johns in New York, and he had prosecuted escort services. Now, I have rather politically incorrect liberal views about whether prostitution should be legal. [Laughter.] But the fact was that it was illegal, and he was the governor of New York, who had convinced people to elect him because he was Mr. Clean. So, yes, he was a hypocrite. And Jack wasn’t.

“Casino Jack and the United States of Money” opens May 7 in New York, Los Angeles and Washington; May 14 in Chicago, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Santa Cruz, Calif., and Seattle; May 21 in Atlanta, Boston, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, Palm Springs, Calif., Philadelphia, Sacramento, Tucson, Ariz., and Austin, Texas; May 28 in Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Dallas, Kansas City, Miami, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, San Antonio and Santa Fe, N.M.; and June 4 in Houston and Waterville, Maine, with more cities to follow.

In this Webisode, Gibney explores the elaborate money shuffle through which Abramoff channeled money from supposedly legitimate lobbying clients (like Indian tribes) through Republican PACs and Big Pharma front groups, who in turn wrote industry-friendly legislation that was passed intact by the GOP-led Congress. I’ll have an interview with Gibney and more coverage of the film next week. “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” opens May 7 in major cities, but you’ll only find this clip here (at least until the DVD comes out).

Me, I blame the combination of runaway baseball salaries, the “talented and gifted” movement in schools, and the tyranny of SAT scores. I’m only half-joking. Once free agency drove even an average third baseman’s pay into the seven-figure range formerly reserved for tycoons who owned major industries or medium-size Midwestern states, practically everybody with SAT scores over 1,400 figured they deserved to earn as much as Aramis Ramirez.

The differences being that quality third basemen are a lot rarer than Ivy League MBAs, and are publicly and relentlessly evaluated. Steroids or no steroids, one bad season and they’re replaced by a 22-year-old from the Dominican Republic. That’s one of the things keeping us fans hanging on.

Not so in the corporate world. As recently as 2008, the geniuses running Wall Street investment banks bankrupted their companies and came perilously close to collapsing the world financial system. And what happened? A few CEOs departed via “golden parachute,” but most executives stayed shamelessly in place, profited from multibillion-dollar TARP bailouts and then began awarding each other obscene bonuses almost before the smoke cleared.

Meanwhile, a substantial part of a generation’s retirement savings vanished into thin air. Had the Bush administration succeeded in “privatizing” Social Security back in 2005, the damage could not have been worse.

Over time, American institutions appear to be growing steadily less accountable. Hayes cites the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, which strikes me as a red herring. Yes, the bishops averted their eyes, placing the putative well-being of the church above children. Yes, ecclesiastical lectures on sexual sin are a bit harder to take. But the church has been hierarchical, secretive and self-protective since forever. Moreover, as recent developments in Ireland and Germany show, the problem is international.

More to the point, “look at CEO pay,” Hayes urges. “In 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the ratio of average CEO pay to average wage was about 35 to 1. By 2007 it was 275 to 1.” In comparison, the ratio remains approximately 20 to 1 in most European countries; roughly 11 to 1 in Japan. Yet people complain about labor unions.

Hayes cites Nell Minow, an expert in corporate governance nicknamed “The CEO Killer” by Fortune magazine, to the effect that all many executives know how to do is “manipulate the levers of governance and devise ingenious methods of guaranteeing themselves windfalls regardless of their company’s performance.” The unvarying defense of the latest Wall Street bonuses, of course, is that the talented and gifted recipients might otherwise change teams. Why, perish the thought.

Only recently, reporters have begun catching up with the bankruptcy examiner’s report on the failure of Lehman Brothers investment bank, the precipitating event in the 2008 financial crisis. According to law professor and former white-collar prosecutor Peter J. Henning, writing in the New York Times’ DealBook blog, the 2,000-page document “discusses some accounting gimmicks that are eerily reminiscent of how Enron tried to prop up its balance sheet back in 2001 before it collapsed.”

And for which, it will be recalled, a number of Enron executives went to prison. The details can be dauntingly complex. But what they amounted to were a series of short-term accounting tricks designed to make the bank’s financial health appear robust as it “teetered on the brink of ruin.”

The examiner’s report calls CEO Richard Fuld “grossly negligent” at minimum, and reserves even harsher terms for Lehman’s accounting firm, Ernst & Young. Remember when accounting was a respectable profession? No more. They’re buccaneers today.

The basic gimmick was called a “Repo 105,” moving bad real estate-based assets off the books by using them as collateral for short-term loans just long enough to file quarterly reports, then unwinding the deals as quickly as overnight.

It’s as if your brother-in-law assumed your debts and deeded you his assets overnight so you could qualify for a bank loan, then took them back. Except Lehman was doing it to the tune of $50 billion a pop. You and your brother-in-law would go to prison for that, and so should somebody at Lehman Brothers. Hopefully, somebody with a brilliant academic record and impeccable social credentials, so the rest of them start paying attention.

© 2010, Gene Lyons. Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

As the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” told me in our conversation in a Park City restaurant, the Abramoff case was not an isolated instance of criminality, but a symptom of a much larger disease. As in his earlier films, Gibney dramatizes the work of America’s best investigative journalists, and directly attacks the “bad apple” hypothesis that’s repeatedly employed to explain away disturbing tales of corruption and malfeasance, from Enron to Abu Ghraib to Abramoff.

Magnolia Pictures will release “Casino Jack” in theaters this spring. For now, here’s Alex Gibney on the outlandish Abramoff tale and its rogue’s gallery of supporting players — from Tom DeLay to Grover Norquist to George W. Bush — why it definitely still resonates in the Obama era, and what it means for our imperiled republic.