Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

A very real fear of nuclear war drove Stanley Kubrick to create one of the greatest satirical films ever made - but it wasn’t always a comedy. Find out where the idea for 1964’s ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ came from, how a rival film almost ruined its chances of success, and which major role Peter Sellers had to drop out of mid-production. *CORRECTIONS: Merkins were originally worn by prostitutes to hide the effects of lice, disease, or to conceal shaved genitalia. Get an exclusive 15% discount on your first Saily data plans! Use code [wrong] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to to https://saily.com/wrong Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a satire for the ages that we simply cannot seem to escape. It's just endlessly relevant. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, tell us about what movie we're learning to love today.

• 2:20Lizzie Bassett?

  We are talking about Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. I can't do the voice, obviously, but I do love this movie so very, very much. I just, yeah, you said it, Chris. This movie gets funnier every time I see it, which is both great for entertainment value and terrible for the state of our world, because it gets more and more relevant every year that it exists.

• 2:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It seems there will always be a large circular table filled with incredibly inept, mostly men, ruining our lives and figuring out a way for them to survive. The image that comes to mind right now is like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos.

• 2:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Hanging out in the war room.

• 3:01Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, deciding how they're going to live through the AI apocalypse as we all are fed to the machines at the end of the day.

• 3:07Lizzie Bassett?

  They're thrilled about it, just as they are in Doctor Strangelove. Obviously, this is, I think, our third Stanley Kubrick movie.

• 3:14Chris Winterbauer?

  It is.

• 3:14Lizzie Bassett?

  That we are covering. It's a fun one. I don't think it's going to be quite as dark as some of the other ones, but this is, I think, my favorite Stanley Kubrick movie.

• 3:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Mine, too. I think for a lot of people it is.

• 3:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. It's maybe the most accessible, but also I just think, like, beginning to end, it is so entertaining, so funny.

• 3:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Great runtime, too. 95 minutes, in and out. Doesn't overstay its welcome. Just the world ends, and we're good. Spoilers at the end of the film.

• 3:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Let's get into it. So, Chris, when was the first time you saw Doctor Strangelove? Strange Love and also, how much does George C. Scott remind you of Tim Robinson?

• 3:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He is, we're all just trying to figure out who did this.

• 3:55Lizzie Bassett?

  My favorite thing is when he's talking about the B-52 bomber that's gonna basically end the world and he's like, can they pull it off?

• 4:01Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. He's so.

• 4:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Gets so excited.

• 4:04Chris Winterbauer?

  When he loses the plot of what he's supposed to be rooting for multiple times throughout the film, it's so good. I mean, Tim Robinson is doing a George, and even just his facial expressions as he's listening to things and watching things happen, is so Tim Robinson, or Tim Robinson is so George C. Scott in Doctor Strange Love. I saw this movie for the first time in middle school. I really didn't appreciate, I appreciated the broader humor. So obviously, Doctor Strange Love himself was very funny. I did not appreciate, for example, General Jack D. Ripper and Sterling Hayden's performance, which is, he never breaks. And that's what's so good about that role, as well as Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley.

• 4:43Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the funniest role in the movie to me, is the president, which the older I get, the funnier that part is.

• 4:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, he's so impotent and he's so funny when he calls the Russian premier.

• 4:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Dmitri, no, I'm sorry too, Dmitri.

• 4:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course I'd call you just to say hello, Dmitri. That's very good. So I've seen it probably five or six times now. Like you said, Lizzie, this movie gets funnier every time you watch it. It feels almost more modern now than it did the first time that I saw it, because I'm not hung up on the fact that it's black and white, for example. And there will always be a new apocalypse that we will stare down. And again, I love that through all of our human engineering, we have merely come up with myriad ways to destroy ourselves through all of these safeguards. So it's my favorite Kubrick film as well. It's so enjoyable.

• 5:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, same as you. I think I saw this when I was maybe, I don't know, probably late middle school, early high school. Again, I thought the zanier parts were funny, but didn't get it. Very similar experience. Then I think I got this on DVD in college and I just started watching it over and over again. I don't know how many times I've seen this movie, but it's a lot. And learning about it made me love it even more. So let's get into it. Our main sources today. Include but are not limited to Stanley Kubrick, A Biography by Vincent Labruto, Reconstructing Strange Love: Inside Stanley Kubrick's Nightmare Comedy by Mike Broderick, and Kubrick: An Odyssey by Robert Colker and Nathan Abrams. This is directed, written, and produced by Stanley Kubrick. This is his first time doing all three of those things, but of course, he did not write this alone.

• 6:18Lizzie Bassett?

  He shares the credit with Peter George and Terry Southern. The movie stars Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, as well as George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, James Earl Jones, Slim Pickens, and many more.

• 6:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Great Slim Pickens role.

• 6:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Dude, I, we're gonna get to Slim Pickens. He is an absolute treat. It was released by Columbia Pictures on January 29th, 1964, which was not the original plan. We will get to that later. This was the seventh film Kubrick directed and the first to be nominated for an Oscar. And the IMDb logline reads, "A mentally unstable American general orders a hydrogen bomb attack on the Soviet Union, triggering a path to global nuclear holocaust that a war room full of politicians and generals frantically tries to stop." Yeah, that's it.

• 7:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:02Lizzie Bassett?

  So let's start with old Stan Kubrick. Now, we're not gonna do a bunch of background on him because as I said, we have done two prior episodes. If you want more background, Chris did a great job on both The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, so go listen to those. He spent most of his life in England, but he actually grew up in the Bronx. He was born in 1928, which meant that he was very much coming of age during World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. He was one of those kids that was super duper smart, but did not do very well in school. His test scores proved that he was above average, but he cut a lot of classes and received a lot of U's, meaning unsatisfactory, in the areas of, and this is fun, personality, works and plays well with others,

• 7:44Lizzie Bassett?

  completes work, is generally careful, respects rights of others, and speaks clearly. So, U's across the board for those. In high school, he became a staff photographer for the school paper. And in 1945, when he was just 17 years old, he photographed a newsstand wreathed with newspapers and magazines announcing the death of President Roosevelt. Look Magazine bought that for $25. He dropped out of City College, started working for the magazine, and then traveled the country as a photojournalist for four years. In 1951, when he was 23 years old, he worked on two short films, both documentaries. And then his first feature was Fear and Desire in 1952. It was an independent, very earnest anti-war film about four soldiers whose plane crashes behind enemy lines.

• 8:27Lizzie Bassett?

  He later said it was like, quote, "a child's drawing on a fridge."

• 8:32Chris Winterbauer?

  We all start somewhere.

• 8:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sure his start is an awful lot better than what I could do.

• 8:37Lizzie Bassett?

  So by the mid 1950s, he'd broken into the industry with his third feature, a movie called The Killing, which he had written and directed, which of course also stars Sterling Hayden. But he was just a little bit preoccupied because he was really, really worried that a nuclear bomb was going to blow up New York. This was not at all out of the realm of possibility at this time in history. It was the height of the Cold War and the federal government had actually just started simulating nuclear attacks in New York City and other major cities across the country. I didn't know about this, Chris. Did you know about this?

• 9:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Simulating in what sense?

• 9:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Like they would basically do air raid drills that you were legally required to take part in. You would be fined if you didn't take part in them. And then newspapers would actually publish like fake death tolls the next day. Totally fun, not at all stressful.

• 9:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And as we know now, Kubrick was a deeply paranoid person and he would refuse to fly later in his life. He would refuse to go in a car faster than 35 miles per hour. He would wear a helmet inside of cars.

• 9:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for him.

• 9:39Chris Winterbauer?

  He effectively didn't leave his house by the end of his life. So we can see the beginnings here.

• 9:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And those drills actually went on until the early 60s, which was around the time that he came up with a plan to flee with his family to Australia, although he never followed through with that. He does eventually obviously move to England. What he did do was read a ton of books about nuclear war, anywhere from 50 to 70, depending on the source. So again, maybe not helping the paranoia. One of those books is called On Thermoneuclear War. It introduces the idea of the doomsday machine and discusses different nuclear strategies, including the concept of deterrence. Chris, do you know basically what a doomsday machine is?

• 10:18Chris Winterbauer?

  As described in Dr. Strangelove?

• 10:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Just in general, because it turns out it's a real thing.

• 10:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, well, I would assume then that it is a device that is automatically triggered should a nation be attacked, which would doom the entire world in some way to nuclear winter annihilation.

• 10:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. In its simplest terms, I believe it is something capable of triggering Armageddon, basically, for the human race or for, I would imagine, like a large population. So Kubrick reads this book over and over again, and he makes his producing partner, James B. Harris, read it too. And by the way, it's almost 700 pages long, so it's not like a fun summer reading assignment. And because that's not enough, he reaches out to the author, who is an American physicist named Herman Kahn. They end up getting together and talking about it. Kubrick's wife, Christiane, said that after talking to Kahn, quote, "You would walk away very depressed, very convinced, we're going to fry any minute."

• 11:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Lizzie Bassett?

  But apparently, it was so grim that it started to sometimes drift into gallows humor. One biographer even described Kahn as sort of a dark stand-up comic. Another expert Kubrick reached out to was English journalist Alastair Buckin. He specialized in defense studies and was apparently known as one of the few Englishmen who can make himself at home in the Pentagon. Kubrick wanted Buckin to give him recommendations of fiction books about nuclear war. Now, right off the bat, Buckin understood what Kubrick was up to and told him it would be unwise for him to make a film about nuclear weapons.

• 11:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting. It feels like maybe Mandrake, you know, a little bit of, you have the British transplant in the story.

• 11:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Group captain Lionel Mandrake.

• 11:51Chris Winterbauer?

  This is an RAF uniform, sir. He's so funny.

• 11:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Kubrick wanted Buckin to give him recommendations of fiction books about nuclear war. Right off the bat, Buckin understood what Kubrick was up to and told him it would be unwise for him to make a film about nuclear weapons. He said it could mislead anxious people because he would not be able to describe precisely what precautions the United States or other nuclear powers take to guard against the danger of accident or false command.

• 12:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:19Lizzie Bassett?

  But he did give Kubrick a book list, and one of the titles was Two Hours to Doom by Peter Bryant, except it's not actually by Peter Bryant. That is a pen name. His real name was Peter George, and he had been a Royal Air Force navigator and British intelligence agent. His book, Two Hours to Doom, was known as Red Alert in the US, and it's about a rogue military officer who launches an unauthorized nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Basically, the officer is diagnosed with a terminal illness. He gets depressed. He orders a preemptive strike with B-52 bombers. He's the only one who knows the recall code, so he steals himself and his base to avoid anyone trying to stop him. In the end, the US and the Soviet Union have to work together to prevent disaster. So Kubrick immediately saw the potential for a movie adaptation,

• 13:02Lizzie Bassett?

  and he started writing with Harris pretty much right away.

• 13:05Chris Winterbauer?

  If I may, really quickly, Lizzie, there are a number of both terrifying and fascinating instances of, especially on the Russian side, actually, lower level, like base commanders, stopping what would be nuclear annihilation-triggering launches because their radar systems picked up, for example, a flock of geese or the moon was too close that day.

• 13:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 13:27Chris Winterbauer?

  The first season of Snafu with Ed Helms, which Lizzie and I know the producer on, is really, really fun in a scary way and goes through a number of these instances, if you guys are interested.

• 13:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's a very fun listen. So Kubrick and Harris initially called their project Operation Peacemaker. At this point, though, Chris, they were trying to write a serious drama, which makes sense. You read that book, it does not scream comedy. However, again, as they worked late into the nights over the next few weeks, they would get pretty punchy. Harris remembers one late-night session when they started asking themselves, quote, "What would happen in the war room if everybody's hungry and they want the guy from the deli to come in and a waiter with an apron takes the sandwich order?" We started to giggle about it and say, "Do you think this could be a comedy or satire? Do you think this is funny?" But of course, once they got some sleep, they both decided it was too risky and they should stick with their serious script, which had a new working title, Edge of Doom.

• 14:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So in November of 1961, roughly a month into writing, Kubrick sent a letter to Peter George, again, the author of Red Alert, about the project. He then went on to buy the rights to the book, and he convinced George to come to New York and work on the script with him and Harris. By February, they had a solid draft of what was now being called The Delicate Balance of Terror, or DBOT.

• 14:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow, there's a mouthful.

• 14:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep. Well, less of a mouthful than Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

• 14:54Chris Winterbauer?

  If you include the subtitles. Yes, that's fair.

• 14:56Lizzie Bassett?

  And they had secured financing from Seven Arts Productions, who had just produced Kubrick's last movie, Lolita.

• 15:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:04Lizzie Bassett?

  But Kubrick just couldn't get the idea out of his head that maybe this isn't a serious movie at all. He worried that it was too risky to make it a comedy, that they wouldn't be able to sustain it for two hours, but despite the concerns, the story morphed from drama to satire. And by April, the transformation was complete. So Kubrick called up Harris to tell him he was making a comedy. Harris, at this point, had left the project to focus on directing, and he's basically just like, "What happened? You're gonna destroy your career. You know, I left you alone for 10 minutes and you're gonna ruin everything." Now, the move also did not sit well with Seven Arts Productions, who, again, had agreed to finance it. The exact date on this is unclear, but at some point in 1962, they dropped out, and Columbia Pictures stepped in.

• 15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 15:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Kubrick and George were undeterred, though, and they just kept writing, most notably adding in the character of Doctor Strangelove. By May of 1962, the project had a new title, Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Just five months later, in October, the Cold War came as close as it ever would to actual nuclear warfare with the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you're not familiar, for 13 days, the entire world watched and waited as the US and Soviet Union played basically a giant game of nuclear warhead chicken.

• 16:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:22Lizzie Bassett?

  And according to film critic Alex Walker, Kubrick was, quote, "deeply disturbed by both the prospect of nuclear annihilation and the way people accepted it fatalistically." Now, just three days before that standoff took place, the Saturday Evening Post released the first three installments of a novel called "Fail Safe," which, quote, "described what might happen if a communications breakdown should cause nuclear armed bombers to fly past their point of recall." Sound familiar, Chris?

• 16:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Peter George certainly thought so. And Kubrick worried what would happen if someone decided to turn that into a movie. Now, this was not the first time they were hearing about this book. In December of 1961, the writers behind "Fail Safe" had actually reached out to Kubrick and Harris, sharing an outline for their consideration to make it into a movie. Of course, at this point, though, Kubrick had not only read "Red Alert," but was working on adapting it. According to at least one source, they had actually just secured the rights to "Red Alert" when they received this outline for consideration. And also, keep in mind, "Red Alert" came out in 1958, so it does make sense that you would turn down "Fail Safe" when you have an existing project that is so similar plot-wise.

• 17:36Lizzie Bassett?

  So in January of 1962, shortly after receiving the samples from the "Fail Safe" author, Kubrick officially declined, but sent the writers a copy of "Red Alert" and his treatment for the movie adaptation. And he was deep into writing the adaptation at this point. No red flags were raised then, but by the spring, months before "Fail Safe" was even released, there were already some gossip columns reporting on the similarities between the two books. And now, in the fall of 1962, just as the script for "Dr. Strangelove" was starting to come together, the book was out and the similarities were there for everyone to see.

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• 18:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It was around this time that Kubrick decided to bring on another writer to help him punch up the script. That would be a man named Terry Southern, who was famous for writing wild satirical books. One of these books, called The Magic Christian, Peter Sellers had actually given to Kubrick when they were working together on Lolita. It's a satire of greed and corruption. The main character is a billionaire named Guy Grand, and to give you a sense of the tone, at one point, Guy stirs thousands of $100 bills into a vat of blood, urine, and feces, and then invites people to go get the free money.

• 19:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's like Mr. Beast, but back in the early 20th century. Sellers must have really loved the book, because have you seen the movie, Lizzie?

• 19:34Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 19:35Chris Winterbauer?

  So it stars Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.

• 19:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 19:39Chris Winterbauer?

  It came out, I want to say, late 60s. I don't think it was very good, but Sellers clearly really liked. I didn't know Sellers had given it to Kubrick. I just knew he was in the movie.

• 19:50Lizzie Bassett?

  It makes sense that he would like it. Terry Southern was a big fan of Kubrick. In fact, so much so that at home, he and his wife would jokingly refer to him as Big Stan Kubrick, as if they were close friends.

• 20:02Chris Winterbauer?

  That's how I feel when we talk about everyone on this podcast. Like, we know James Cameron.

• 20:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, but the old Jimmy C. This is also what I am afraid of, is what's about to happen, is that he was sitting at home when the phone rang and his wife said, "Hey, it's Big Stan Kubrick on the line from Old Smoke," meaning London. And he was like, "Yeah, right. Okay, whatever." She was not kidding, of course. That was actually Stanley Kubrick on the phone.

• 20:27Chris Winterbauer?

  That's great.

• 20:27Lizzie Bassett?

  James Cameron, if you ever want to call me, I will be scared, but I will pick up.

• 20:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 20:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Kubrick told him he was going to make a film about our failure to understand the dangers of nuclear war. He said he had thought of the story as a straightforward melodrama until this morning, when he woke up and realized that nuclear war was too outrageous, too fantastic, to be treated in any conventional manner. And he could only see it now as some kind of hideous joke. The timing is odd. I doubt he said he thought of it that morning, because he'd been working on it for months at that point, Terry, but whatever. Terry is colorful, to say the least.

• 20:59Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a great writer, too. We talk about him a little bit in Eyes Wide Shut because Kubrick briefly hired him to try to help him crack Tram Novelle. And again, Southern's pitch to him was, let's do Doctor Strangelove. Let's turn this into a sex comedy. And Kubrick was like, this is far too serious to be turned into a comedy, even though nuclear war wasn't.

• 21:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, nuclear war is hilarious to him. But Terry Southern, obviously, was in. In November, he flew to England to help Kubrick revamp the dialogue. And over the next few weeks, they had daily writing sessions that were apparently, quote, fueled by copious amounts of marijuana.

• 21:30Chris Winterbauer?

  You can feel it in a good way in the final product.

• 21:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah. By winter of 1962, casting was then in full swing. So we've got Peter Sellers, who would play Doctor Strangelove, group captain Lionel Mandrake, and President Merkin Muffley in the final product.

• 21:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Sorry, can you explain both what a Merkin and Muffley refer to, in case the audience doesn't know, Lizzie?

• 21:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, a Merkin is a pubic wig, I believe is the technical term for it. I don't understand the use of it. Like, I understand the use of it for films, if you're trying to cover something. I don't understand the, like, personal use of it. If you do, write to me and let me know. And then Muffley, I don't know. I mean, I know what a muff is.

• 22:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I believe it's a double pubic reference in the president's name that they're going for.

• 22:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, to lady parts, certainly. Although I think Merkins can be for men as well.

• 22:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Merkins can be for men as well, yeah.

• 22:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Everyone gets a Merkin. So he joined the cast in December. But interestingly, Chris, he was not Kubrick's first choice, even though they had worked together on Lolita.

• 22:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 22:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Most of what we saw in research, they had a very good working relationship. I think both of them, as we know, could be difficult. But I don't think this was an issue of them not liking each other. Still, earlier that year, when the script was still serious, and as it became a comedy, Kubrick had several other actors in mind. The list included Paul Newman, Orson Welles.

• 22:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 22:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Noel Coward.

• 22:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 22:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Burt Lancaster.

• 22:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Paul Newman and Burt Lancaster, I have a hard time.

• 23:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't make sense. I wonder if those were for the more serious version.

• 23:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Burt Lancaster as Turgitson, for example, or Ripper could be very good.

• 23:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Friedrich March, Lee J. Cobb, Lee J. Cobb, I could, but again, Turgitson more.

• 23:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Lizzie Bassett?

  And comedians like Ted Flicker or Shelley Berman. So why did he end up with Sellers? Surprisingly, it's because Columbia told him he had to cast him.

• 23:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 23:27Lizzie Bassett?

  And I do wonder if this was actually why he may have started exploring other actors was that he was pissed that they were sort of coming down and telling him what he had to do. The reason that they said he had to cast him was because they seemed to equate much of Lolita's success with Sellers' performance as Claire Quilty.

• 23:46Chris Winterbauer?

  That's what I was wondering is that Lolita was an adaptation that nobody wanted to touch, right? It was-

• 23:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, they thought it was an unadaptable novel, one of my favorite books of all time, by the way.

• 23:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it requires so much interiority, right? The book is obviously written from Humbert Humbert's perspective. And like, how do you translate that?

• 24:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's an unreliable narrator. And on top of that, it is a pedophile.

• 24:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And obviously, that movie, I don't think it was a runaway hit, but it was financially successful.

• 24:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting that they equated the success to Sellers, though.

• 24:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 24:15Lizzie Bassett?

  And in it, as Claire Quilty, he does wear a bunch of different disguises. He also had played multiple characters in The Mouse That Roared and famously played tons of characters on The Goon Show, which is sort of where he started to first ascend to stardom. He was a decently big star at this point and had just been cast in The Pink Panther. So I do wonder if they smelled money on the horizon. Now, Southern says that Kubrick was pissed and told him, quote, "What we have is a film by Fiat, film by frenzy."

• 24:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree with you. I think it's just because they told him what to do.

• 24:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Now Sellers also apparently was not super down to do this. This is what makes me think that like, I don't think they had a bad working relationship, but we know Stanley Kubrick is exhausting.

• 24:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:59Lizzie Bassett?

  And reportedly, he did take some convincing from Kubrick himself until he finally signed on. And Chris, initially, he agreed to play four parts.

• 25:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Remember that number? Because how many parts does he actually play, Chris?

• 25:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Three.

• 25:13Lizzie Bassett?

  According to Southern, again, financing was almost 100% based on the idea that Sellers would play four roles.

• 25:19Chris Winterbauer?

  We're doing The Clumps. Nutty Professor. That's what we're going for.

• 25:23Lizzie Bassett?

  We're doing Medea Takes Nuclear War.

• 25:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I'd watch it.

• 25:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I would watch it, too. Oh, Tyler Perry, make that. George C. Scott was also cast in December, and Scott had gotten a start in the late 50s onstage at the New York Shakespeare Festival. This factoid I love. Apparently, his Richard III was the angriest anyone had ever played that role, according to one critic.

• 25:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Scott is always the angriest option on everything, which is why I feel like everything culminates with Patton for that specific reason.

• 25:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 25:54Chris Winterbauer?

  The angriest general of all time. There's a really good movie he was in that I really liked called Anatomy of a Murder, the Otto Preminger film.

• 26:02Lizzie Bassett?

  So that's actually his first Oscar nomination. It was in 1959.

• 26:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's fantastic.

• 26:06Lizzie Bassett?

  That was him sort of starting to break into film, but by no means was he like a household name after that, even though he had an Oscar nomination.

• 26:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:15Lizzie Bassett?

  And he continued to work onstage, too. It was actually a performance as Shylock in the Central Park production of The Merchant of Venice that caught Kubrick's eye. I would have loved to have seen these productions. As you might imagine, though, Scott had a reputation for being pretty volatile. Again, please see The Angriest Richard III Ever. Apparently, he got into a lot of bar fights, so Kubrick decided he'd earn his respect by challenging him to a series of chess games.

• 26:41Chris Winterbauer?

  That's what I say, yeah, because Kubrick's infamous park chess player, chess master of New York.

• 26:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I just love the thought process, though, of like, this man gets into bar brawls a lot, he's volatile, he's a little crazy, I am going to challenge him to chess.

• 26:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, that's right.

• 26:57Lizzie Bassett?

  And you know what? Kubrick absolutely pummeled him.

• 26:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course.

• 26:59Lizzie Bassett?

  According to Tracy Reed, who played Miss Scott, George C. Scott would spend hours hunched over the board, planning, and then Kubrick would swing by, make his move in seconds, and still win almost every time. That humbled Scott, who thought of himself as a chess master, and it kind of made him possible to take direction from Kubrick, sort of.

• 27:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 27:19Lizzie Bassett?

  So at the same production of The Merchant of Venice, Kubrick also was impressed by James Earl Jones in the role of the Prince of Monaco. He was also sort of a military-adjacent character in that, so it served as a good litmus test for the Lieutenant Zog role that he ends up playing in Doctor Strangelove. Just, you can tell that velvet voice, he's also very handsome.

• 27:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He's very young, very handsome. I'd actually forgotten that he was in this, and then I was, oh, that's James Earl Jones. And George C. Scott, he was a Marine, I believe, too. He was ex-military.

• 27:47Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a lot of former military people in this. To be fair, if you think about the timing of this, it would make sense that most of the men would have served.

• 27:54Chris Winterbauer?

  During World War II.

• 27:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. According to Jones, Kubrick, quote, "wanted a bomber crew to be made of all the ethnics, the Jewish guy, the black guy, the Irish guy, the Canadian guy, and so on."

• 28:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. That, those ethnic Canadians.

• 28:10Lizzie Bassett?

  In the 60s? Sure.

• 28:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's about time we got our representation.

• 28:17Lizzie Bassett?

  James Earl Jones also said the original screenplay featured a scene where Zog questions the legitimacy of the attack as a loyalty test. Kubrick cut the scene and Jones was disappointed. In 1963, Kubrick convinced Sterling Hayden to basically come out of retirement to play Jack D. Ripper, aka, I think we can all agree, RFK Jr.

• 28:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Also Alex Jones, "The water's making the frogs gay," and "Our precious bodily fluids."

• 28:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. He'd become known in the 50s for a string of high-profile westerns and film noirs like John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, but he had not done much in the previous four years before this. And back in 1956, as we said, he had starred in Kubrick's The Killing, so they knew each other. And he would, of course, go on after this to have many more iconic roles, including one we've already covered. What is it, Chris?

• 29:03Chris Winterbauer?

  McCluskey in The Godfather.

• 29:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I love him in that. But like Sellers, Hayden was also not Kubrick's first choice. Before Hayden, he had apparently offered the role to, he's singing in the rain, Gene Kelly.

• 29:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Really?

• 29:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 29:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, if he played it straight, like Hayden does, maybe?

• 29:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe he had a totally different idea for the character.

• 29:33Chris Winterbauer?

  How big was Gene Kelly? Like physically?

• 29:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think he's that big, and Sterling Hayden is huge. Sterling Hayden is like 6'4".

• 29:40Chris Winterbauer?

  When Sterling Hayden's sitting on the couch and his arms are stretched out and he looks like he could bear hug Peter Sellers to death in that, and the way he can just handle the machine, the, you know, 50 caliber machine gun or whatever that is.

• 29:51Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he was a giant man.

• 29:52Chris Winterbauer?

  He was huge. And that's one of the best parts of the character, I think, is the physicality of that character as he is talking about his withholding his precious essence from women. It's so good.

• 30:02Lizzie Bassett?

  By the way, Gene Kelly was only 5'8", so I don't think that would have worked as well.

• 30:07Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 30:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Finally, let's talk about the only woman in this entire film. Obviously, this movie does not pass the Bechdel test. This one female role is Miss Scott, played by Tracy Reed, whose father is director Sir Carol Reed. And apparently, in their initial meeting, Kubrick asked her to put on a bikini, which she would be wearing in the film. And he apparently told her her body wasn't too bad, so she could have the job. Thanks, Stan. You put on a bikini.

• 30:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Is she also the model in the Playboy?

• 30:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. He actually wanted to stage that fake Playboy photo shoot for the film. She would not take her clothes off. She'd actually kept her suit on and laid down, so her chest is covered. And then she covers her butt with a copy of Foreign Affairs. Yes.

• 30:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Funny joke.

• 30:51Lizzie Bassett?

  So Kubrick had initially imagined shooting the film in New York, but ultimately decided to set up shop in England at Shepperton Studios. Production designer Ken Adam got to work building the sets. Kubrick had chosen Adam because of the work he did for the first James Bond movie, Doctor No. The biggest set, of course, in the movie is the war room. Adam's initial design was an amphitheater with a second level that had a glassed-in control room. Now Kubrick apparently loved Adam's initial sketches so much that Adam wondered why everyone had told him Kubrick was hard to work with. So he went ahead and put his designers to work on drawings and models to design and build the set. But after four or five weeks went by, Kubrick came back to him and said, "Ken, I've been thinking about that war room.

• 31:36Lizzie Bassett?

  You put it on two levels. What am I gonna do with 70 extras on the upper level? I think you have to rethink your concept."

• 31:42Chris Winterbauer?

  There it is.

• 31:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Adam was not thrilled. He had to go for a walk, calm down, but then he got right back to work on redesigning it. The final set measured 130 feet long by 100 feet wide and 35 feet high. The table alone was 22 feet in diameter, and at Kubrick's request, it was covered in green baize. It's actually the material that's usually on pool tables and poker tables, because he wanted to give the actors the feeling they were seated at a massive poker table, gambling with the future of the world.

• 32:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 32:11Lizzie Bassett?

  10 miles of electric cables were needed to light up the big board.

• 32:15Chris Winterbauer?

  He's gonna see the big board.

• 32:17Lizzie Bassett?

  The big board depicting all the nuclear bombers. And it took 150 tradesmen to build this set.

• 32:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 32:24Lizzie Bassett?

  In April of 1963, The New York Times visited and said, quote, "One enters Mr. Kubrick's war room as one enters a mosque. Felt overshoes must be donned to prevent scuffing 13,000 square feet of jet black lichenite floor glittering like an eight ball caught in the rain." Not just for visitors, by the way, the actors were not allowed to walk on it in their shoes unless they were performing. Now, of course, the other big set piece is the interior of the B-52 bomber. Adams and art director Peter Merton really had their work cut out for them because Kubrick wanted the inside of the plane to be totally realistic.

• 32:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Lizzie Bassett?

  What do you think the problems with that might be, Chris?

• 33:01Chris Winterbauer?

  How do you move a camera around inside that tight a space? Or, or the secrecy around a B-52 bomber and they don't know how to design it?

• 33:10Lizzie Bassett?

  There you go. There's no internet. You can't look this up. They're not, you know, posting pictures of what the inside of their airplanes look like. They can't go to the military for help because they're making a comedy about them, essentially.

• 33:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I could see Kubrick, though, expressing the importance of this to the milit- just being like, you don't understand this film. Like, it's so important. Like, what I'm doing is more important than what you're doing. It reminds me of, Nathan Fielder just went on CNN and responded to the FAA, like, basically saying they weren't going to take his advice. And he just goes, "They're dumb. They're dumb." And I can see Kubrick having the same response to the military.

• 33:42Lizzie Bassett?

  There's definitely some similarities there.

• 33:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 33:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, I'm gonna show you the one picture that they did have.

• 33:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 33:46Lizzie Bassett?

  And see if you feel like you could build a set based off of this.

• 33:50Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I haven't seen it yet. The answer is no, but let's take a look. I could build that two-foot-by-two-foot corner.

• 33:58Lizzie Bassett?

  That corner, yeah.

• 33:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let me rephrase. I could not. I could tell you if somebody else did a good job.

• 34:02Lizzie Bassett?

  There you go.

• 34:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, no, maybe we can post on Instagram. You're effectively seeing one-third of the cockpit.

• 34:08Lizzie Bassett?

  If that, yeah. It's obstructed, too. There's a pilot in the way of it. Now, Merton said that photo was their starting point, and then, basically, they just invented everything else based on that. They spent hours and hours on the switches and lights alone. They did have another important resource, though, which was technical flight magazines.

• 34:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 34:28Lizzie Bassett?

  So they were reading those and, basically, just getting all the information that they could to try and copy the interior of a B-52.

• 34:35Chris Winterbauer?

  What a great practice run for 2001.

• 34:38Lizzie Bassett?

  True, but still, there were details that they had to truly make up, most notably, the CRM 114. That's the fail-safe device. They did their best, and apparently it was pretty good, because according to Adam, quote, "During the shooting, we invited some Air Force personnel to visit the set. They went white when they saw the CRM, so it must have been pretty close."

• 34:59Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the equivalent of Turgentson, like, scooping up all of his folders and papers.

• 35:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Chris Winterbauer?

  "Don't let them in here. Don't let them see."

• 35:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, actually, the next day, Kubrick sent Adam an MO saying that, quote, "He hopes he got all his research from legal sources. Otherwise, I and he could be in serious trouble with a possible investigation by the FBI."

• 35:18Chris Winterbauer?

  These commie Hollywood liberals need to get thrown in the slammer.

• 35:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope, they made it up. For the exterior plane shots, they used models, but the background footage was real. The director of photography was Gilbert Taylor. Little fun fact, he had shot the creepy foot-focused opening sequence for Lolita.

• 35:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, wow.

• 35:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Quentin Tarantino's favorite part of that movie. Anyway, over the course of three weeks, Taylor and a camera crew flew more than 28,000 miles over the Arctic Circle, getting the shots they needed to replicate the mountains and tundra of the USSR, which presumably they could not fly over because war.

• 35:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 35:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Taylor remembered, quote, "The plane used to freeze up at night. If you touched it with your finger, you would burn your finger. That's how cold it was. One night, they wouldn't give us any heating for the airplane at all, and we had to leave our cameras there. When we opened the cameras, the film was just like dust. It just flaked away."

• 36:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no.

• 36:08Lizzie Bassett?

  His wife was apparently also on board, and she remembers that when they were flying from Greenland to Iceland, they accidentally crossed a secret US military base. She said, quote, "Suddenly, two American fighters came up on either side of us and waggled their wings and told us to go down. We couldn't see anywhere to land. It was just an ice fjord. And so the pilot, he came down and said, 'Everybody lie on the floor, because I will have no brakes.' It took an awful long time before we stopped. We were very close to the edge of the fjord."

• 36:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 36:38Lizzie Bassett?

  The Americans confronted them. They saw "Doctor Strangelove" written on the side of the plane. They thought it was carrying a team of Russian spies, and they had to all tumble out of the plane and be like, "It's a movie. It's a movie."

• 36:49Chris Winterbauer?

  These commie trucks look pretty convincing. Where do you think they got them? Army surplus store?

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• 37:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It was around the same time in December of 1962 that the situation with Fail-safe was also building towards a confrontation. Peter George told Kubrick he wanted to sue the writers. And Columbia, as part of their due diligence to protect their interests, set out to conduct an objective study of the underlying work. At the same time, George and Kubrick learned that a former United Artists producer, who had started his own production house, ECA, had agreed to purchase the rights to Fail-safe, and he was going to make it into a movie. Just a few weeks later, in January of 1963, with Fail-safe lurking in the back of old Stan Kubrick's mind, production of Dr. Strangelove kicked off at Shepperton Studios. At this point, there were plans for an August release date.

• 38:22Lizzie Bassett?

  For many of the actors, it was a rough start. Sterling Hayden said that his first day was, quote, "the worst day of my life", and that he was pouring sweat and took 48 takes to get one of his scenes right.

• 38:34Chris Winterbauer?

  There we go. There's old easy time Stan. Forty-eight's not even that bad for-

• 38:40Lizzie Bassett?

  For Stanley Kubrick? No, that's nothing.

• 38:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 38:43Lizzie Bassett?

  I think this was more Sterling Hayden was really nervous.

• 38:46Chris Winterbauer?

  He had not acted in a while, as you mentioned. That makes a lot of sense.

• 38:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, what a leap of faith. He doesn't get to wink. He has to play it completely straight. He is humorless, which is what makes him so funny.

• 38:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And apparently Stanley Kubrick actually was pretty gentle with him. Hayden said that he was touched when Kubrick told him, quote, "I know you can't help what's going on, and you know I can't help you. But the terror in your eyes, on your face, may just be the quality that we want in this jackass general, Jack Ripper. If it is not, come back in another couple of months, and we'll do it all over again." Yeah. What a surprise.

• 39:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and I do think Kubrick, there were some actors he famously got along with, and then there were others he famously didn't. So

• 39:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not inconsistent with that.

• 39:31Lizzie Bassett?

  No. And Hayden was not the only one who was struggling. Scott and Kubrick were at odds with how Turgidson should be portrayed as well. Kubrick really wanted an exaggerated performance from George C. Scott, but George C. Scott thought Kubrick was asking him to overact, and he was not happy about it. So Kubrick did what any good director would do. Chris, he tricked him.

• 39:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I was just like, pulled out the chessboard, challenged him.

• 39:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Just did a little trickeroo. He said, okay, you know what? Totally fine, George. We're gonna do two takes of every scene, and one take is gonna be the straight take, but I'm just gonna have you do an over the top exaggerated take. Just get it out of the way. Not a big deal. Totally not gonna use it. He used every single wild take, if you will, in the final cut.

• 40:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And his eyes are bugging out, and he's chewing gum with the force of a thousand suns.

• 40:20Lizzie Bassett?

  George C. Scott apparently was not happy, but it's so good. It's so good. I mean, Kubrick obviously was right. Sellers, meanwhile, was doing a pretty good job of juggling his roles. And at this point, remember, he had one, two, three, four. He was not just group captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove, but also, Chris, who was the fourth character that he was playing?

• 40:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe he was also Major T.J. King Kong as well, the pilot of the B-52 bomber.

• 40:50Lizzie Bassett?

  That is correct. Captain Mandrake seemed to be a natural fit for Sellers. He'd been in the service himself. Obviously, he's British. Not as a fighter, but as an entertainer for the troops. He said, I used to impersonate anybody and anything I could find, mainly officers. I wonder if they loved that.

• 41:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Lizzie Bassett?

  As President Muffley, he had the entire crew laughing so hard they cried because for the first couple of days, he decided to play the character, I believe, as though he had a cold. He was coughing and had an inhaler. Everyone agreed it was hilarious, but they had him pivot to a more serious take because Kubrick felt the president, quote, "should be the one man that understands the consequences of his actions, the one serious point in the film." And yet, he's, I think, one of the funniest parts of it.

• 41:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He's so in over his head and deadpan and still trying to adhere to decorum. It's and you do need that in contrast with the more exaggerated performances around him.

• 41:42Lizzie Bassett?

  It also sounds like after working with Sellers on Lolita, Kubrick really understood the importance of letting him loose on set to improvise. He would always film him with at least three cameras to make sure he captured every single moment from as many angles as possible. Sellers also improvised most of the monologue where the president has to tell the Soviet leader that the US has accidentally launched nukes, which is one of my favorite parts in the whole thing.

• 42:04Chris Winterbauer?

  And I feel like you can feel it, like you can feel Sellers is just feeling his way, imagining every response, right? And he gives such color and personality to Dmitri.

• 42:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Now Dmitri.

• 42:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Dmitri, he's so good in that scene.

• 42:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Now I'm sorry too Dmitri. Yes, I'm sorry. Well, you know, the bomb Dmitri.

• 42:24Chris Winterbauer?

  As if they're neighbors dealing with a dog that keeps running over the fence.

• 42:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Other times, he would basically just mess up his lines in a way that Kubrick decided was funnier than the original script. For example, when he's on the couch in Ripper's office, he's supposed to say that he has a thing in his leg, but he says he has a string in my leg.

• 42:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Lizzie Bassett?

  See, I've got a string in my leg, and Kubrick opted to keep that take instead. Sellers had a particularly good time with strange love. In fact, he came up with his rogue hand. He actually took the glove from Kubrick, apparently, who was wearing it to carry around big lights on set. According to Sellers, the character was 50/50 in terms of creating between him and Kubrick. But here is Peter Sellers on the Steve Allen Show explaining more.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Sandler's idea was to have a black glove so that his hand was sort of injured in some nuclear experiment. And then I got it further by thinking that the hand was a Nazi while the rest of him had made the compromise if he could live in America. But this hand here, you see, was still and used to keep going like this.

• 43:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Mein Herr! Excuse me, Mr. President.

• 43:25Lizzie Bassett?

  So funny. I love the way he describes that. The rest of him had made the compromise.

• 43:31Chris Winterbauer?

  The Nazi hand just killed me as a kid, and I don't even think I understood the context of Operation Paperclip, which this is riffing on, which was the US program to bring, I think, over 1,000 German scientists and engineers, a lot of them confirmed Nazi party members, to the United States and integrate them into the US. And they were responsible for a lot of rocket technology and even the development of the US space program, which obviously that was a controversial program, integrating.

• 44:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Former Nazis into US life and this riffs on it in such a funny way.

• 44:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Sellers also found inspiration for Dr. Strangelove's voice from an unlikely source on the set, Chris. The Strangelove scenes were some of the last that Sellers shot, and he'd spent at that point months on set with a very talented press photographer, Arthur Fellig, better known professionally as Ouija. Ouija and Kubrick knew each other from Kubrick's early days as a photographer, but Ouija had a very unusual voice. And here is Peter Sellers, again on the Steve Allen Show, explaining.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  I was stuck, you see, because I didn't want to do just a sort of a normal sort of English broken German accent thing. So on the set was a little photographer from New York, a very cute little fellow called Ouija. You must have heard of him. And he had a little voice like this, used to walk around the set talking like this most of the time. And say, I'm looking for a girl with a beautiful body and a sick mind. And I got an idea. I was really stuck with this. And I thought, you know, Ouija used to get all this stuff, everything. He used to have great big enlargers lenses on the front of the camera and a cloth over his head. And he'd just get ready to do it. And Stanley would say, not now, Ouija. He'd say, okay, and move it all away, you see. I thought,

• 45:17Speaker 03

  if I put a German accent on top of that, you see, Viner suddenly got this thing, you know, there that's going up here and send that stuff. And so I got into Dr. Strangelove. So really, it's Ouija. I don't know if he knows it, but it's Ouija. Well, he does now.

• 45:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And the women would have to be selected for their sexual characteristics.

• 45:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 45:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, it's great.

• 45:38Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so funny. By the way, I think at some point Sellers actually is on tape talking to or interviewing Ouija, and it is exactly as he does the voice. But while Muffly, Mandrake, and Strangelove were coming along beautifully, Major King Kong was proving to be tricky, seems mostly because of the Texas accent. Apparently Sellers, who was British, was worried that his wasn't convincing enough, but he thought Terry Southern did a pretty good one. So he had Terry record himself, and he'd wander around with a headset listening to the tape. According to Southern, Kubrick had some concerns that he was stressing himself out way too much, but also according to Southern and a different source, he mastered the accent in about 10 minutes. So who knows if that's really what the hangup was?

• 46:16Chris Winterbauer?

  I have a theory that the Southern accent, because it's actually closer to a British accent than a flattened American accent, that's what makes it maybe more difficult to slip between.

• 46:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it could be for sure. About a month into shooting, in February of 1963, Kubrick learned that Fail Safe the Movie was slated to come out in the summer, too.

• 46:37Lizzie Bassett?

  So would this have been that bad? I don't know. On the one hand, Fail Safe is a drama. It's not a comedy at all.

• 46:43Chris Winterbauer?

  The only thing I would say is, could it turn audiences off to the concept entirely?

• 46:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I think the answer is yes, because let me read you the IMDb logline for Fail Safe. "A technical malfunction sends American bombers to Moscow to deliver a nuclear attack. Can all-out war be averted?" So it's literally the mirror image of this. It's just, it's serious.

• 47:05Chris Winterbauer?

  The non-comedic version, exactly. So it could suck the air out of the room before it gets there.

• 47:12Lizzie Bassett?

  It was directed by Sidney Lumet, and it starred Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, and Fritz Weaver. I mean, arguably, this has more star power than Doctor Strangelove.

• 47:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Certainly more American star power.

• 47:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, for sure. And clearly Kubrick thought that this would be pretty bad, because he and Peter George filed a suit to stop the production of the film. While Fail Safe had a big director and big stars, what it didn't have was a major studio financing their defense. And the studio behind it, ECA, crumbled. It had to sell off its future productions to other studios. Now, in a surprising move, Columbia actually acquired Fail Safe in that fire sale. Variety tried to explain the strange turn of events by saying, quote, "Facts behind Columbia's decision to take over the film it originally tried to prevent being made are not clear. But as one wag put it yesterday, if Columbia doesn't get the public in to laugh at the bomb, now it has a chance to see if they'll go for it as a melodrama."

• 48:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Makes sense, I guess. It's a little weird.

• 48:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's just about now they can control the timing of both.

• 48:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, totally.

• 48:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And so it's a distressed asset. My guess is it wasn't that expensive for them to pick up. It gives them a second bite at the apple if one succeeds and they can control all of the marketing around both films to try to make sure they don't step on each other.

• 48:28Lizzie Bassett?

  All very good points, and they all end up being exactly what happens. In April of 1963, Columbia officially agreed to, one, release Doctor Strangelove first and then Fail Safe at least six months later, two, not show any rushes or clips of Fail Safe to the press within 30 days of releasing Doctor Strangelove, and three, not announce anything about the Fail Safe settlement without Kubrick's approval. As Harris put it, quote, "A deal was worked out because they were both at Columbia, which absolutely fucked Fail Safe."

• 48:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Makes sense.

• 49:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sure that that was extremely frustrating. At the same time, it does sound like it is awfully similar to the source material, and they knew that this movie was happening when they put Fail Safe into production. So, I don't know.

• 49:12Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, it was a dual film battle, and Fail Safe lost. That's what happens.

• 49:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Fail Safe was no longer a threat, and the lawsuit had given the film some publicity, but back on set, there'd been an accident.

• 49:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh oh.

• 49:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, the official statement was that while playing his fourth role of Major King Kong, Peter Sellers had broken his ankle.

• 49:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Ooh.

• 49:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I believe he shot characters in the order of Group Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, Doctor Strangelove, and I think last was King Kong.

• 49:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Makes sense, too, if you think about the sets, right? Mandrake limited to the base, both Muffley and Strangelove in the war room.

• 49:49Lizzie Bassett?

  And then you go to the B-52.

• 49:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 49:51Lizzie Bassett?

  But Shane Rimmer, aka Captain Owens, remembers it a little differently than just a broken ankle. He says they were mid-shoot with Sellers in the cockpit, which was suspended, when he and Kubrick got into an awful row that ended in Sellers falling from the cockpit 15 feet to the floor. However, Chris, the plot thickens because there is yet another version of this story. Here is Sellers secretary Hattie Proudfoot from the BBC documentary The Peter Sellers Story.

• 50:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Is it just Sellers taking a hammer to his own ankle to get out of playing the fourth role?

• 50:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, hold that thought.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Mark, you, that wasn't a very happy film, really, in the end, was it? He got fed up with playing all these different parts. And, I mean, rumor has it, or Bert will agree with me, I think that he actually sort of pretended he'd had an accident, so he didn't have to do the last-

• 50:41Speaker 05

  Step down the car into a, mm, falling, falling on the bomb, you know.

• 50:46Lizzie Bassett?

  You nailed it, Chris.

• 50:47Chris Winterbauer?

  You gotta do what you gotta do.

• 50:49Lizzie Bassett?

  So in that interview, they go on to reveal that he had maybe faked twisting his ankle when they got out of the car the night before for dinner. And according to Terry Southern, the news of his twisted ankle made it to set the next day, but Sellers had still shown up to play the part without too much issue. However, Kubrick decided at the last minute to change the shooting order, suddenly requiring Sellers to climb from the cockpit to the Bombay via two eight-foot ladders. The first one went okay, the second one did not. Sellers slipped and fell onto the Bombay floor, clearly in pain. So from everything I've read, I think Sellers maybe did fake the initial accident. I think he was exhausted. I think he wanted out of having to play four characters, and he was overthinking the accent.

• 51:32Lizzie Bassett?

  We know from early on in production that it was something that was top of mind. I believe he even had his agent write a note to Stanley Kubrick very early on, potentially even before he was cast, saying, "I can't do the accent." And that's part of why they had Terry Southern record the accent for him. So, anyway, I think he had long been trying to get out of this. However, I think Stanley Kubrick maybe tried to call his bluff a little bit by having him climb up and down the ladders. Perhaps he actually fell, genuinely injured himself at that point, and that may have been what happened. Again, just my theory, we'll never know for sure. Once the insurance company found out, however, they insisted that Sellers be replaced immediately versus continuing to perform with the injury. So Sellers got what he wanted. Whether he got it the way he wanted or not, I don't know.

• 52:18Chris Winterbauer?

  That's interesting. I would have assumed the insurance company would have taken the opposite position.

• 52:24Lizzie Bassett?

  No, they, they were like, we do not want him to be hurt any further, especially because if you think about that role, it's one of the most physical ones in the movie. He would have to be moving quite a bit in the cockpit and, you know, down to the Bombay and everything.

• 52:36Chris Winterbauer?

  But if, assuming they had shot his other characters first, I would have assumed that, to be candid, Self-Industriated Insurance Company would have said, it's important that Sellers be in all four of these roles, let's just have him finish out the last one, regardless of the risk to the character. I'm glad the insurance company said, don't hurt yourself further. I am just a little surprised.

• 52:55Lizzie Bassett?

  The 60s were different.

• 52:56Chris Winterbauer?

  They cared.

• 52:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they cared about something, who knows what?

• 53:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Either way, Kubrick was way more than halfway through shooting and he needed a replacement very fast. So the first person he approached, Chris, any guesses?

• 53:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Is it someone that we've already discussed?

• 53:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It is not. It's someone very famous.

• 53:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 53:16Lizzie Bassett?

  To replace this role.

• 53:18Chris Winterbauer?

  John Wayne?

• 53:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 53:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, really?

• 53:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 53:21Chris Winterbauer?

  But he's not funny at all.

• 53:23Lizzie Bassett?

  He's not funny at all.

• 53:25Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he would have been a great ripper. And he never would do it, but he could have been a good ripper.

• 53:30Lizzie Bassett?

  If you tricked him, yes, he could have been a good ripper. Although I think Sterling Hayden's wonderful.

• 53:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, yeah.

• 53:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, John Wayne.

• 53:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 53:37Lizzie Bassett?

  He either dismissed it immediately or never even responded, but that did not go well.

• 53:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 53:42Lizzie Bassett?

  So then Kubrick sent an offer to another actor who was famous for Bonanza, named Dan Blocker. Apparently Blocker's agent wrote back, quote, "Thanks a lot, but the material's too pinko for Dan, or anyone else we know for that matter."

• 53:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, I've reported you to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Die, commie, die.

• 54:04Lizzie Bassett?

  So Kubrick reached out to an actor slash real life cowboy by the name of Slim Pickens.

• 54:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So good.

• 54:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Kubrick had met him on the set of One Eyed Jax earlier when Kubrick was temporarily attached to direct that. I believe Marlon Brando actually ended up directing that.

• 54:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Lizzie Bassett?

  So let's stop for a moment and talk about Louis Burton Lindley Jr., aka Slim Pickens, because I love him.

• 54:32Chris Winterbauer?

  He's great.

• 54:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, even though he sounds like the most Texas man ever to Texas, Slim was born in 1919 in Kingsburg, California. He was a tall, gangly farm boy turned local Bronco riding rodeo star. And apparently, his name came from a rodeo manager telling him there would be Slim Pickens that day in terms of him winning. And since he didn't want his dad to know he'd signed up, he had them write down Slim Pickens as his name, and it stuck. By the way, his brother later on went as Easy Pickens.

• 55:04Chris Winterbauer?

  That's great.

• 55:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Different.

• 55:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Lizzie Bassett?

  One day, when he was an established Bronco rider, the rodeo clown didn't show up. And so they asked Pickens to stand in. He did, and he loved it. By the way, rodeo clown is apparently the most dangerous job.

• 55:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Which I didn't know.

• 55:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I guess it makes sense. You're like taunting the bull. So once he started clowning, he actually became one of the highest paid professionals in the rodeo circuit. He had a whole number where he'd dress up like a Spanish matador. It looked absolutely insane. Eventually, Slim started getting jobs as a stunt rider and background actor in movies. And he couldn't believe that someone would pay him to just simply fall off a horse. Because keep in mind, he had spent years basically being gored by bulls.

• 55:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 55:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Sounded great. He made a career out of playing smaller roles as villains and henchmen in the westerns, as well as continuing to perform as a stunt rider for actors like Gregory Peck. Kubrick remembered Pickens from One Eyed Jax and called him up, asking how quickly he could get to London for a one-day shoot. Obviously, this is not going to be a one-day shoot with Stanley Kubrick. Now, Pickens is pretty much perfect for the role. Not much acting required, even down to the fact that he had served in the Air Force. Reportedly, he told Pickens that Sellers had broken his hip—again, we don't know what the hell's going on there—and he needed Pickens ASAP. Now, Pickens said yes immediately, perhaps even a little too quickly, because according to some sources, he had never left the US, so he had to go get a passport.

• 56:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I totally believe that. I mean, international air travel was basically, you know, the result of—

• 56:37Lizzie Bassett?

  It was a big deal.

• 56:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it was jet travel was created by the technologies developed for World War II. This is very new for a lot of people, and that there was no reason for him to travel abroad.

• 56:46Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 56:47Chris Winterbauer?

  You know?

• 56:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, he made it to London lickety-split. Apparently, when he asked his agent what he should wear to travel—because, again, he's never done this before—his agent told him to just wear whatever he'd put on to go into town to buy a sack of feet.

• 57:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 57:00Lizzie Bassett?

  So he did. Put on his cowboy boots and a giant Stetson hat. However, this horrified, extremely British production manager Victor Lindon, who proceeded to tell Kubrick that Pickens had, quote, "arrived in costume."

• 57:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yes, and also, this was an era when men wore suits on planes and women wore dresses.

• 57:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Not him!

• 57:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Not Slim Pickens.

• 57:21Lizzie Bassett?

  When Terry Southern asked Pickens if his hotel was all right, Pickens reportedly said, "Well, it's like this old friend of mine from Oklahoma says, 'Just give me a pair of loose-fitting shoes, some tight pussy, and a warm place to shit, and I'll be all right.'"

• 57:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 57:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, boy.

• 57:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Let him improvise.

• 57:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. James Earl Jones remembers that Pickens, quote, "didn't change a thing on or off-set—not his temperament, his language, or his behavior." In fact, a lot of the British crew thought that he may have been method acting—because he never got out of here.

• 57:55Chris Winterbauer?

  This can't be a real person. This is just a character he's created.

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• 58:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, I had a hard time confirming this 100% from a primary source, so take it with a grain of salt. But there are several sources that say that Pickens was only sent the scenes that he was in, not the full script. Furthermore, he may not have been told that the film was as satirical as it was. Now, I am inclined to believe this for a couple of reasons. One, Kubrick had reached out to both John Wayne and Dan Blocker, as we know, and they turned him down because of the material. So it makes sense to me that he would hide it from the third person that he goes to, although, to be fair, I think Pickens would have said yes if he knew what it was. Two is that Kubrick needed a replacement really fast, and there's no way he could find someone with Sellers comedic genius that quickly.

• 59:24Lizzie Bassett?

  So he may have realized he needed to just hire the real thing. And the easiest thing to do was to hire Slim Pickens to sincerely play himself. Also, from Pickens' perspective, he said Kubrick wouldn't show me anything that he had shot. He said, "Play it as straight as you can. It'll be fine." I guess it was.

• 59:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the only thing that would give it away if you were Slim Pickens is riding the bum.

• 59:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And you could still, I'm sure Kubrick could come up with a way to say... You know you're gonna die and you're gonna go out just like any rodeo rider would go out. You're gonna ride that motherfucker all the way to that commie base. So you could still pull it off, I think.

• 1:00:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you know, in some versions of this, I had always heard it told as like, oh, it was kind of like a pulling one over on Slim Pickens. Like, look at this guy, he's turning in this performance. I don't think that's what it was.

• 1:00:13Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I don't, I don't think he tricked him.

• 1:00:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I think they were rushed.

• 1:00:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I think, I don't think he tricked him. I think it was more, he withheld some information from him that he didn't necessarily need.

• 1:00:24Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's not at the expense of the character either. The whole point is the character plays it straight. And that's the whole tension of the film is they think they are dealing with a nuclear crisis and everybody else knows they're not.

• 1:00:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and I think that Slim Pickens was very happy with this. He had a great time. He seems to have just enjoyed life in general. Although if you watch the faces of the other people in the airplane when he's talking, they look like they're fighting laughs at every turn. I do think they are maybe a bit more in on the joke than he is, which works.

• 1:00:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It also though works, like you said, because he is trying to inspire them and he is very

• 1:01:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:01:00Chris Winterbauer?

  jingoistic, go-go America. And I get the sense they don't really wanna die for this cause, which is why when he rides the bomb at the end, they go, what about Major Kong? It's so funny. It's great.

• 1:01:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you pointed this out, but apparently with Pickens' addition, also that may have been the genesis for the idea to have Kong actually ride the bomb out, which makes sense as a nod to Pickens' very famous at that point rodeo background.

• 1:01:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:30Lizzie Bassett?

  But it was a last minute addition, which stressed out poor Ken Adam. He said, "The bomb bay has already been built and it was 60 feet long." But because they hadn't intended on the shot, there were no bomb doors built into the set. Adam asked Kubrick, "When do you need it by?" And Kubrick said, "We should shoot in two days." Adam said, "Stanley, even if I work three shifts, day and night, to make these bomb doors practical, we will never do it in time." So he looped in special effects coordinator Wally Vivers, Vivers is what we used to call my cat, who died a year ago, by the way, so RIP Vivers, who came up with the idea that made it possible. They would take a black and white still of the bomb bay and then Vivers would cut out the doors in post.

• 1:02:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Pickens sat on the bomb with a blue backdrop and the camera suspended from a crane, which would pull back as the bomb dropped to create the visual effect of it falling down into oblivion. Works great.

• 1:02:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It does, and they do a really nice job simulating a tilt of the bomb as well. They're not just pulling back, they're also tipping away, which I think also sells the trajectory really nicely. Again, I think a lot of the technology that he's experimenting with here, although it's for comedy, would really come into play in 2001.

• 1:02:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. So filming wrapped in late May, that was a month later than Kubrick had originally planned, but by Stanley Kubrick standards, pretty good.

• 1:02:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Fantastic. If it's not the May of the following year, that is a huge win.

• 1:02:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. So he was now tentatively planning for an October release. Let's talk about the title sequence, AKA, the airplane porn.

• 1:03:02Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so good.

• 1:03:04Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great. Obviously, they deliberately set out to make something sexual because, quote, "Everything humans invent is sexual." Title designer Pablo Faro searched for stock footage of a bomber refueling. At this time, stock footage was stored in physical warehouses. You can't just look it up online, so that's a pretty major task. He managed to find what they needed and spliced together a scene of, quote, "two planes fornicating in midair," which is exactly what you see. But while he was focused on plane porn, he did make one minor mistake. Chris, did you notice the typo in the title sequence?

• 1:03:39Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I didn't.

• 1:03:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, two or three months after the film was released, Faro got a call from Kubrick informing him that he had forgotten the letter "D" in "based." So to this day, the title sequence reads "base" on the book, red alert.

• 1:03:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Which reminds me of the missing "S" in the glitter IMDb logline. And she become a music star.

• 1:04:00Lizzie Bassett?

  And she become superstar.

• 1:04:04Lizzie Bassett?

  So while Pharaoh was off looking for his sex planes, editor Anthony Harvey was searching for some missing film.

• 1:04:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh oh.

• 1:04:11Lizzie Bassett?

  The very last reel of film that he edited was a bombing sequence with Slim Pickens, and it was made up of hundreds of tiny cuts. It had taken months to edit. And then, according to Harvey, it suddenly vanished from the labs and was never found. So he actually had to recut the entire last reel of film from memory.

• 1:04:28Chris Winterbauer?

  But at least he didn't lose the negative, like, meaning the original footage. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:32Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he didn't.

• 1:04:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank God.

• 1:04:33Lizzie Bassett?

  But he lost a lot of work.

• 1:04:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, that's brutal.

• 1:04:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Chris, there was also still the small matter of how to end the movie. You may know this, but the original ending of this movie is not what we see in the final product, and Kubrick had struggled with this well into production. Apparently, it wasn't until six weeks into shooting that he had made up his mind. It was supposed to be a gigantic food fight in the war room where everyone was slinging cream pies at each other, just like countries slinging missiles.

• 1:05:01Chris Winterbauer?

  You can feel that there's a setup with the food behind them that doesn't ever really get paid off because it's so extravagant, how long that buffet line is.

• 1:05:11Lizzie Bassett?

  That's huge table, yeah.

• 1:05:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 1:05:14Lizzie Bassett?

  They shot it in one take because the studio said so on account of the mess. And not surprisingly, it was a disaster. The cream was too thick, people's faces got too obscured. None of the actors could stop laughing, though they were supposed to be furious. Despite the fact that it looks like it belonged in an entirely different movie, Kubrick apparently loved it. However, he did officially cut it from the movie at the beginning of November. I believe the footage has only been shown once, in like 1999 or something, maybe?

• 1:05:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Around his death, maybe, like a retrospective?

• 1:05:45Lizzie Bassett?

  You can see pictures if you look it up. Now, it ended up being a good thing that he did cut it because that sequence showed Turgenson approach the president, whose face is covered in pie, and say, "Mr. President, Mr. President, gentlemen, our beloved president has just been infamously struck down with a pie in the prime of his life." And just three weeks later, on November 22nd, 1963, the same day there was supposed to be a pre-screening of Strange Love for film critics, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The PR team obviously canceled the preview, and the filmmakers went back, and they reexamined the film. They worried about how the public would react to its depiction of elected officials after Kennedy's death. Because of this, they actually change a line from Slim Pickens

• 1:06:29Lizzie Bassett?

  via ADR. Did you notice this?

• 1:06:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-mm.

• 1:06:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I've always wondered about this. So when he's reading off the list of what's in their survival packets.

• 1:06:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:06:38Lizzie Bassett?

  You can hear him, after he notes the lipstick and stockings, he says, "A fella could have had a good time in Vegas with all that stuff." But if you watch his mouth, what he's actually saying is, "A fella could have had a good time in Dallas with all that stuff."

• 1:06:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 1:06:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Which would tie in more to his Texas character.

• 1:06:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I always thought Vegas was weird.

• 1:06:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. That's interesting. I never noticed until you pointed it out.

• 1:07:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Out of respect, they also delayed the film's release by one month, from December of 1963 to January of 1964. Now, Kubrick had agreed with the studio's decision to delay the release, but he and the studio were at odds when it came to promotion, perhaps because famous plane sex editor Pablo Faro had cut some unusual TV ads. Chris, let's take a look at a little bit of one.

• 1:07:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, you got the idea. Chris, can you just explain to our listeners of what we just watched?

• 1:07:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So, first of all, that is amazing. It feels so modern. It is a frenetically cut, text-heavy interrogation of the absurdity of the film, presented, I think, in the style of a very, like, French New Wave editing style, that also evokes subliminal messages, I think.

• 1:07:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it has an MKUltra vibe.

• 1:07:58Chris Winterbauer?

  It does. It has a very MKUltra, government propaganda vibe, and it has a very conspiratorial bent. It's very funny.

• 1:08:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:08:05Chris Winterbauer?

  But it's also very deadpan. And so I would worry that it might confuse audiences who are unused to that type of material. But I am blown away. That is...

• 1:08:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, it's really cool.

• 1:08:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Please look it up. It's so cool.

• 1:08:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe we can post it on Patreon. You can actually see a couple of them. They're all sort of strung together. They're amazing.

• 1:08:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Lizzie Bassett?

  They also include, I don't know if you noticed this, there are shots of Kubrick himself in there, intercut.

• 1:08:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, at the beginning. Yes.

• 1:08:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you can see a few of them. And again, it is very sort of subliminal messaging, like, you know, MKUltra backward masking type stuff, which is really interesting. They also had a paper pocket radioactivity calculator, like the one Doctor Strangelove used, which they made available to theaters around the country. And there was a print ad campaign, micromanaged by Kubrick himself, which featured minimalist cartoons instead of photos of the actors. So the studio was like, this is a little avant garde for us. They did not love it. They were at odds with them about it. However, as you said, Chris, these are amazing. They're very sort of modern. They became kind of the blueprint for promoting films moving forward.

• 1:09:12Chris Winterbauer?

  They are better than most of the trailers released today. That is no-

• 1:09:16Lizzie Bassett?

  100%.

• 1:09:17Chris Winterbauer?

  By the way, though, I'm not knocking trailer editors. I just think culturally, we've moved to a point where it's so hard to get somebody's attention, you have to effectively compress the entire movie into two minutes to try to convince them to come watch it.

• 1:09:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Now, another obstacle they faced, which had nothing to do with Kubrick himself, was the fact that most of its stars were extremely averse to interviews, and I believe Kubrick was as well. So in the end, they could only convince Slim Pickens to take a slot on The Tonight Show. It went great, and they showed a clip of him riding the bomb. To be honest, that's probably the best case scenario because he's very charming.

• 1:09:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And as you mentioned, like Scott wasn't a huge name yet, I don't think. George C. Scott.

• 1:09:56Lizzie Bassett?

  No, they were known, but they were not like superstars.

• 1:10:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course. And then Sellers is borderline unrecognizable through a lot of the film.

• 1:10:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, Peter Sellers, I think, was kind of the biggest star at this point in this. Pink Panther had come out in 1963, but I believe in the first Pink Panther, he is not sort of as synonymous with the brand as he would become. His part in that movie was celebrated, and of course, he goes on to kind of become synonymous with the franchise as Inspector Clouseau. But that sort of took some time to build. So Doctor Strangelove was released on January 29th, 1964. It earned roughly 9.6 million on a budget of 1.8 million. Pretty good. Although, under pressure from the Air Force, Columbia shipped out a special little prologue to the film that reads, "It is the stated position of the United States Air Force that

• 1:10:46Lizzie Bassett?

  their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film." Would they?

• 1:10:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It actually, I think it improves the film that they had to put that at the beginning. And it reminds me again of, if you guys haven't been watching the rehearsal this season, where the FAA is now saying, basically, you know, what Nathan Fielder is depicting in this series, we have safeguards against as a governing body.

• 1:11:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It makes it funnier.

• 1:11:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It legitimizes it.

• 1:11:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Reviews surprisingly were pretty mixed, but the bad reviews were really bad. The New York Times tore Kubrick and the film to shreds, calling it a shattering, sick joke and not a bit funny.

• 1:11:26Chris Winterbauer?

  The New York Times consistently throughout this podcast just misses the mark on some real classics.

• 1:11:33Lizzie Bassett?

  They have. Yeah, they really have. It's interesting. Others did not appreciate its warped humor, but the New York Herald Tribune said it was, quote, "one of the most cogent comic and cruel movies to come along for many a year. Don't miss it, provided you have the wit and stamina to withstand a savage satire on any number of society's untouchables." The Guardian called the film Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece. I would agree.

• 1:11:57Chris Winterbauer?

  You can see like a UK-based publication, understanding it and appreciating the humor better.

• 1:12:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and they were thrilled to claim it as British as well because it was shot at Shepperton Studios. Also, Terry Southern said that Columbia Pictures initially kind of distanced themselves a little bit from it to be like, "It's just a funny little, you know, zany movie. We don't agree with that. We love the army."

• 1:12:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm. And this, you know, this is not at the height of McCarthyism, but...

• 1:12:24Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's there. The tail end, right?

• 1:12:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's there. The tail end. And Hollywood had become a very scary place of, you know, it just took one person, mostly John Wayne, tagging you as a comedy to get you...

• 1:12:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, don't hire him for this.

• 1:12:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Obviously, I'm being a little hyperbolic, but it did, you know, happen. The specific movie that I want to cover at some point that I'm thinking of is High Noon.

• 1:12:47Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:12:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Carl Forman, the screenwriter, was dragged up in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the production of that film, failed to identify fellow members, got labeled an uncooperative witness. And I believe John Wayne, president of the NPA at the time, was one of the people who pressured the other Hollywood studios to blacklist him. And Carl Forman ended up going to the United Kingdom and left the United States for some time.

• 1:13:14Lizzie Bassett?

  The film ended up getting nominated for four Academy Awards, however, Best Picture, Best Actor, for Peter Sellers, Best Director, and Best Writing. And in 1989, it was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Now, to give you a sense of its impact, Chris, after his January 1981 inauguration, then-President Ronald Reagan, of course, an ex-Hollywood actor, immediately asked his chief of staff to see the war room. It was then that he was informed that that is not real.

• 1:13:44Chris Winterbauer?

  There's no big board? Where's the big board?

• 1:13:46Lizzie Bassett?

  There's no big board, Ronnie. Here's our final fun fact, Chris. Sometime in 1985, a vast system of computers connected all across the USSR came online. The system, named Perimeter, was designed to remain dormant until turned on by a high-ranking official in a time of crisis. Once fully functioning, it would monitor a complex system of sensors to determine if the Soviet Union had been hit by a nuclear attack. Any guesses what would happen if Perimeter decided they'd been hit?

• 1:14:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Launch all the nukes.

• 1:14:19Lizzie Bassett?

  That's correct. Russia actually went and built a doomsday machine. It's also known by the name Deadhand. It's featured in, I believe, the final season of The Americans. They really did it.

• 1:14:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Isn't that what War Games is also loosely based on with Matthew Broderick?

• 1:14:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm not sure, but that would make sense.

• 1:14:38Chris Winterbauer?

  War Games was 83. I mean, the doomsday device, right? It's because it's a computer system that ultimately is running its own simulations.

• 1:14:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe. This was not public knowledge until later, so.

• 1:14:50Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I know. I'm saying War Games was also based on the idea of a doomsday machine. And then what's funny is, obviously, Russia was clearly building that computer at the time War Games came out.

• 1:14:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. If you look into this device more and you start reading what it does, it is literally how Dr. Strangelove explains the machine.

• 1:15:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's so funny when he says, "You have defeated the purpose of the machine if you do not publicize its existence."

• 1:15:15Lizzie Bassett?

  We were going to announce it at the premier's birthday next week.

• 1:15:18Chris Winterbauer?

  You know how the premier loves surprises. So it's... So good. And one of the reasons I love this movie so much is because for all of the grandiosity of at times very smart or powerful men, they fall victim to all of the same little hiccups, flubs and slip ups that we all do. And their downfall is just the, it's always these silly, stupid little things. And it's the human, you know, when he turns it in says like, you know, clearly we underestimated the human element here, or whatever his life is. Because people are dumb.

• 1:15:55Lizzie Bassett?

  People are dumb. Amazing. All right, Chris, what went right?

• 1:15:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, man, so much. This is, okay, it could go to Kubrick, it could go to Sellers. I'm gonna give it to George C. Scott. And I know it's not the performance maybe he wanted Kubrick to pick, but he kills me in this movie.

• 1:16:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:16:19Chris Winterbauer?

  He is so funny. I love the wild oscillations of his character. I love how he has been so ingrained to root for specific things that he will do so even if it is at the expense of the human race.

• 1:16:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Chris Winterbauer?

  And I love how he goes from, I will make you Mrs. Buck Turgenson to, so you're saying we would have to get rid of monogamy. And it's so exciting by the end of the film. I think the whole cast is amazing, but when I was rewatching it, especially the Tim Robinson thing, which you had primed me for, is so funny. And again, I don't think he gives any other performances that are this comedic in his career. I tend to associate him with more really wonderful dramatic roles. And I'm so glad that this performance exists.

• 1:17:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, I thought for sure you were gonna give it to Peter Sellers. So I will have to do a dual what went right, which I think is appropriate for Peter Sellers. Obviously, he is phenomenal in this. I know he was, you know, something of a troubled person himself. I think we may explore him more in other coverage. I would like to. He's very interesting. He's just incredible in this. He is so, so funny across all these roles. And, you know, obviously, I think Stanley Kubrick was smart enough to realize that you basically just have to get out of his way.

• 1:17:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Lizzie Bassett?

  And just help him sort of light himself up, which he does. However, I think I must also share some of this what went right with Slim Pickens, who came in to replace him. Peter Sellers, it would have been amazing. I'm sure it would have been an incredible performance. It would not have felt as sincere as what we end up getting from Slim Pickens. And I think that that is a really important part of this movie, and it ends up being kind of a bit of a palate cleanser for some of how zany some of the other performances are. So I'll give it to Peter Sellers and Slim Pickens because love them both.

• 1:18:05Chris Winterbauer?

  And I love that, you know, Slim Pickens' character, you have to believe that he is going to do this without questioning orders.

• 1:18:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and you do 100%.

• 1:18:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And he really sells that. And I know Sellers could have done that, but there is something so earnest about Pickens that works so well.

• 1:18:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. Well, that wraps up our coverage of Doctor Strangelove, Chris.

• 1:18:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Probably my favorite movie we've covered this year.

• 1:18:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's just so good.

• 1:18:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It's amazing. Guys, if you haven't seen it, re-watch it. It's available for rental on, you know, every streaming platform. Guys, we always encourage you to purchase physical media, because even if you purchase a film digitally, if you read the fine print, you're technically only renting it for as long as that platform owns the rights to said property. So if you want a physical copy of Doctor Strangelove, the Criterion Collection Blu-ray is fantastic and features a lot of extras. So you can head over to criterion.com and give that a purchase. All right, Lizzie, what are we covering next week?

• 1:19:05Lizzie Bassett?

  We are going to be covering 28 Days Later, Chris. It's zombie time.

• 1:19:10Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. Fast zombies, virus zombies, British zombies, a lot of interesting turns to the zombie genre, the kind of revitalization of the genre.

• 1:19:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Chris Winterbauer?

  At the beginning of the 21st century.

• 1:19:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Very excited.

• 1:19:23Chris Winterbauer?

  And if you're interested, we also have a little primer on zombies, their origins, and their Hollywood lineage that we're going to release on Friday before we drop 28 Days Later. So stop by to check that out as well.

• 1:19:37Lizzie Bassett?

  If you want to support our show, there are many ways to do that. Of course, you can tell a friend, you can force them to listen to an episode, you can write a rating or review on whatever platform you're listening to this. You can follow us on that platform. Now, normally, we would start to tell you about what you can get if you decide to join our Patreon. But you know what? There's another way to support us right now as well. And that is you can buy a ticket to our first ever live show. Chris, do you want to tell them a little bit about what we're doing? Not too much, because we'll tell you a lot more later.

• 1:20:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I do. So on October 8th of this year, Lizzie, David and I are going to travel to New York. We're going to bring our children and families.

• 1:20:18Lizzie Bassett?

  What a nightmare.

• 1:20:19Chris Winterbauer?

  We're all gonna die. But assuming we make it at 9 o'clock on October 8th at the Caveat Theater in Manhattan, we will be performing our first live show as part of the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival. Tickets are available. They are $16. It'll be the first time we've ever done it live. I'm sure there will be many a hiccup, but I think it'll also be a lot of fun. And we'll hang out at the bar afterwards if folks would like to ask us any questions or just give us some live in-person corrections. Because, you know, we love those at the end of the day.

• 1:20:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Chris Winterbauer?

  But if you're interested, you can head to podlifeevents.com/cheerfulearful, C-H-E-E-R-F-U-L-E-A-R-F-U-L, to get tickets for our first live show that's at the Caveat Theater in Manhattan on October 8th of this year at 9:00 PM. We would love to see you guys there. We will post more about it on our Instagram as well as our website if you guys are interested. And of course, if you do join our Patreon, we have tickets available there too. Now Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters like ourselves with audience members like yourselves. You can join for free. You can get updates on things like live shows, upcoming episodes, additional information.

• 1:21:33Chris Winterbauer?

  You can pay a dollar to vote in films that we will cover in the future. For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed. And for $50, you can get a shout out from Dr. Strangelove himself at the end of these episodes. Lizzie, should we welcome?

• 1:21:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Dr. Merkverdigliebe. Kay Canaba, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindlenin. As you know, a sacrifice required for the future of human race. Scary Carey, The Provost Family, The O's Sound Like Oars, Zach Everton, Galen, I Can Walk, David Friskolanti, Adam Moffett, Film It Yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Ellington. Of course, the whole point of a doomsday machine, Kate, is lost if you keep it a secret.

• 1:22:34Lizzie Bassett?

  M. Zodiac, C. Grace B., Jen Mastromarino, Christopher Elner, Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Real Jer. Jeez. Lance Stader, Nate the Knight, Lena, Why Didn't You Tell The World, Lena? Ramon Villanueva Jr., Half Gray Howl, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Richard Sanchez, Jake Killen, Andrew McFagelbagel. Based on the findings of my report, my conclusion was that this idea was not a practical deterrent

• 1:23:18Lizzie Bassett?

  for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious. Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, J.J. Rapido, Jewishri Samat, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pengkorea, Chris Lee, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Schiebel, George K., Rosemary Southward, Tom, Kristen, Jason Franco, Somnichainani, Michael McGrath, Lanrelad, Lydia Howes. Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential.

• 1:24:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you guys so much for tuning in. We will see you next week for 28 Days Later. Stop Worrying. Love the bomb.

• 1:24:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Love the zombie.

• 1:24:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It's gonna be AI that kills us anyway. Bye.

• 1:24:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:24:15Speaker 06

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong, and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Sarah Bound and written by Jesse Winterbauer, with additional editing from Karen Krebsaw.