One of my favorite movies of all time is Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The writing credits are Stanley Kubrick (who directed the movie) and Terry Southern and Peter George, based on George’s novel “Red Alert.” Satire may be the most difficult genre to nail and Strangelove is pitch perfect. Plus, it stars Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, both fantastic performers (Sellers, of course, plays three roles in the film).
Then as a teenager, I somehow managed to see the movie Candy (1968), another satire which starred a mind-boggling array of stars including Marlin Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, John Huston, Walther Matthau, Charles Aznavour, and Ringo Starr. That was based on a novel by Terry Southern.
And so I became a fan of Mr. Southern, who blazed an amazing trail through the 60s and 70s, like Forrest Gump in a way because he happens to cross paths with a vast array of ‘names,’ and yet unlike Gump in that Southern was a flat-out writing genius. He received writing for or did uncredited work on numerous movies beyond Strangelove including Casino Royale (1967), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1969), The Magic Christian (1969), and even worked on “Saturday Night Live” in 1980 and 1981.
Southern wrote novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays, and lectured on screenwriting at numerous universities. In fact, he was en route to lecture at Columbia University when he collapsed in 1995, dying four days later on October 29th. Wikipedia does a good job providing an overview of Southern’s life here.
The other night, I read an interview with Southern, just a few months before his death, in the book “Backstory 3 edited by Patrick McGilligan. I was hoping I could include it as part of this blog’s “How They Write A Script” thread, however Southern doesn’t get into his process at all. What he does do in the interview is provide one jaw-dropping historical anecdote after another. And so I thought I’d start a series featuring some Terry Southern stories about his screenwriting career. Here’s the first entry — of course, about Dr. Strangelove.
What was the status of the Dr. Strangelove script before Stanley Kubrick decided to hire you in the fall of 1962?
When Kubrick and Peter George first began to do the script, they were trying to stick to the melodram in George’s book, Red Alert [published under the pseudonym "Peter Bryant"]. There was an outline. They didn’t go into a treatment but went straight into a script. They had a few pages and in fact had started shooting, but in a very tentative way. Kubrick realized that it was not going to work. You can’t do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or boy-meets-girl way. You have to do it in some way that reflects your awareness that it is important and serious. It has to be a totally different treatment, and black humor is the way to go. That was Kubrick’s decision.
When you first got together with Kubrick, did you start changing the tone of the script right away?
Yeah, after the first day, at our first meeting, he told me what the situatoin was. All those things that I’ve told you were his very words. “It’s too important to be treated in the conventional way. It’s unique! The end of the world is surely a unique thing, so forget about the ordinary treatment of the subject and go for something like a horror film.” He decided to use humor. The flavor that attracted him in my movel The Magic Christian could be effective in this new approach. He would talk about the mechanics of making it totally credible and convincing in terms of the fail-safe aspect and then how to make that funny. And the way to make it funny, because the situation is absurd, is by dealing with it in terms of the dialogue and characters.
I’m curious about the day-to-day working relationship with Kubrick as you wrote the film from the preproduction period through the actual shooting.
Well, after my first day in Lond when he told me what he had in mind, I got settled into a hotel room not far from where he lived in Kensington. That night, I wrote the first scene, and then he picked me up at four-thirty the next morning in a limo. The limo was a big Rolls or Bentley. We rode in the back seat with the light on. There was this desk that folded down. It was very much like a train compartment. It was totally dark outside. If it got light, we would pull the shades down. He would read the script pages; then we woud rewrite them and prepare them for shooting when we got to the studio, which was about an hour-and-a-half drive depending on the fog.
Peter Sellers was going to play all four parts originally, including the Texan bombadier. I understand you coached Sellers on his accent.
The financing of the film was based almost 100 percent on the notion that Sellers would play multiple roles. About a week before shooting, he sent us a telegram saying he could not play a Texan, because he said it was one accent he was never able to do. Kubrick asked me to make a tape of a typical Texan accent. When Sellers arrived on the set, he plugged into his Swiss tape recorder with huge, monster earphones, and listened to the tape I made. He looked ridiculous, but he mastered the accent in about ten minutes. Then Sellers sprained his ankle and couldn’t make the moves going up and down the ladder in the bomb bay. So he was out of that part. The doctor told him he couldn’t do it. Then it was a questoin of replacing him. Stanley had set such store by Seller’s acting that he felt he couldn’t replace him with just another actor. He wanted an authentic John Wayne. That part had been written with Wayne as the model.
Did Kubrick ever try to get Wayne to play the role?
Wayne was approached, and dismissed it immediately. Stanley hadn’t been in the States for some time, so he didn’t know anythig about television programs. He wanted to know if I knew of any suitable actors on TV. I said there was this very authentic, big guy who played on Bonanza, named Dan Blocker. Big Hoss. Without seeing him, Kubrick sent off a script to his agent. Kubrick got an immediate reply: “It is too pinko for Mr. Blocker.” Stanley then remembered Slim Pickens from One-Eyed Jack (1961), which he had almost directed for Marlon Brando, until Brando acted in such a weird way that he forced Stanley out.
When Pickens was hired and came to London, wasn’t that the first time he had ever been out of the States?
Yes, in fact it was the firs time he had ever been anywhere outside the rodeo circuit as a clown or the backlots of Hollywood. Stanley was very concerned about Slim being in London for the first time and asked me to greet him. I got some Wild Turkey from the production office and went down to the soundstage. It was only ten in the morning, so I asked Slim if it was too early for a drink. He said, “It’s never too early to drink.” So I poured out some Wild Turkery in a glass and asked him if he had gotten settled in his room. “Hell, it doesn’t take much to make me happy. Just a pair of loose shoes, a tight pussy, and a warm place to shit.” One of Kubrick’s assistants, a very public-school type, couldn’t believe his ears, but went “Ho, ho, ho” anyway.
Finally, I took slim over to the set where we were shooting. I left him alone for a few minutes to talk to Stanley. While we were standing there talking, Stanley went, “Look, there’s James Earl Jones on a collision course with Slim. Better go over and introduce them.” James Earl Jones knew that Pickens had just worked with Brando. Jones was impressed and asked Pickens about the experience of working with Brando. “Well, I worked with Marlon Brando for six months, and in that time, I never saw him do one thing that wasn’t all man and all white.” Slim didn’t even realize was he was saying. I glanced at James Earl Jones, and he didn’t crack a smile. Slim replacing Sellers worked out well because, unbeknownst to me at the time, the actor that was playing the copilot [Jack Creley] was taller and stockier than Sellers. Whereas Slim was about the same size [as the copilot] and more convincingly fulfilled the intention of this larger-than-life Texan.
What was Columbia’s reaction to this subversive black comedy that the studio had helped to finance?
Columbia was embarrassed by the picture and tried to get people to see Carl Foreman’s The Victors instead. At the time we thought were going to be totally wiped out. People would call up the box office and be told there were no seats for Stranglelove and asked if they would like to see The Victors instead. Gradually, the buzz along the rialto built word of mouth in our favor.
Wasn’t there some falling-out between Kubrick and yourself over screen credits following the film’s release?
Stanley’s obsession with the auteur syndrome — that his films are by Stanley Kubrick — overrides any other credit at all. Not just writing but anything. He’s like Chaplin in that regard. That’s the reason why he rarely uses original music in his films. [Since I had] written this great best-seller, Candy, which was number one on the New York Times best-seller list for something like twenty-one weeks, my reputation eclipsed Stanley’s; so I got total credit for all the Strangelove success in Life, the New York Time, and other publications. The credit I was getting was just so overwhelming and one sided that naturally Stanley was freaking out. He took out an ad in Variety saying I was only one of the three writers on the film, the other two being Peter, George, and himself. He just lashed out. But it was like an overnight thing. I wrote a letter to the New York Times explaining that there was no mystery involved, and that I was brought in to just help with the screenplay.
For more on Terry Southern, a New York Times article (4/3/2003) about the New York Public Library acquiring Southern’s literary archives. The original NY Times review of Dr. Strangelove and his obituary here.
