Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Art Linson's Where the Buffalo Roam and Bruce Robinson's forthcoming The Rum Diary all feature lead characters based on the late Hunter S Thompson. Now the original gonzo reporter looks set to get a fresh turn on the big screen after one of his final written works was optioned by Hollywood. And this time he has a sidekick.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Prisoner of Denver will be based on a Vanity Fair article from June 2004, which was co-written by Thompson and the magazine's contributing editor Mark Seal, a long-term fan who grabbed a late opportunity to work with his idol. The piece highlighted the plight of 21-year-old Lisl Auman, a Colorado woman who was convicted of murder despite being handcuffed in the back of a police car when one of her arresting officers was shot and killed by an accomplice. Thompson became involved in the case through his Fourth Amendment Foundation, an organisation the writer helped set up to assist victims in defending themselves against unwarranted search and seizure.

Auman, who served seven years in jail before her conviction was overturned by the Colorado supreme court in 2005, began writing to Thompson while behind bars. Her new pen-pal enlisted celebrity friends such as Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson, Benicio del Toro and Woody Harrelson to help bring her case to public attention. Thompson committed suicide in February 2005, just a month before Auman's release.

Seal was contacted by Thompson after writing a piece about Aspen in Colorado. He soon found himself entering his hero's gonzo world of skinheads, speed freaks and angry cops. "My first day I was in a female correctional institution, saying a line I had been waiting my entire life to say: 'Hunter Thompson sent me,'" Seal told the Hollywood Reporter. "He made being a reporter glamorous and exciting in the 1970s. It was one of the best experiences in my whole journalistic career, and it was one of the best causes of his life."

The paper reports that the Motion Picture Corporation of America has picked up the rights to Prisoner of Denver. The plan is to commission a writer to develop a story centred on Thompson and Seal as a sort of "gonzo Woodward and Bernstein". No casting has yet been announced.

Depp played a version of Thompson named Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and will also appear as Thompson substitute Paul Kemp in The Rum Diary, based on the writer's experiences at a Puerto Rican sports newspaper in the late 50s. Bill Murray played Thompson in 1980's Where the Buffalo Roam.