“Gimme Shelter,” the movie that the Maysles brothers made about the Stones, was released one year after Altamont; the second half of the movie is dedicated to the concert. Hunter’s murder ends up providing a sort of climax, but his name is never said out loud in the course of the film. What’s more, although the Rolling Stone report on Altamont made it clear that Hunter was running from the Angels, “Gimme Shelter” implies that Hunter was the real threat. Toward the end of the movie, the footage of Altamont stops abruptly, and the film cuts to Jagger and David Maysles sitting in an editing suite. Maysles replays the footage that was just shown and slows it down to isolate and point out Hunter’s gun, set against the white crocheted dress of Hunter’s girlfriend, Patti Bredehoft. We are treated to a closeup of Jagger, looking sad. The film cuts back to footage of Altamont, where we see Hunter lying on a stretcher, dead. An unidentified bystander says that Hunter “pulled out a gun.” “The Hells Angels took away the gun. One of them has it now; he showed it to me,” he says. Four months before the movie opened the Cannes Film Festival, Passaro was acquitted of Hunter’s murder.
“Altamont—it could only happen to the Stones,” Keith Richards said to the Rolling Stone reporter Robert Greenfield, in 1971. Years later, in his memoir, “Life,” Richards emphasized the Grateful Dead’s role in planning the concert and blamed “the boneheaded, hard-nosed San Francisco council” for nixing the plan to play at Golden Gate Park. “In the film you can see Meredith Hunter waving a pistol and you can see the stabbing,” Richards writes. “He had a pale lime green suit on and a hat. He was foaming at the mouth too; he was as nuts as the rest.” Hunter was not foaming at the mouth, unless Richards got a view nobody else reported. But Richards was echoing the story told by “Gimme Shelter,” which is that Altamont happened not to Hunter or his family but to the Stones. Altamont is where Hunter lost his life. “Gimme Shelter” is where he lost his story.