Novel and screenplay Stanley Kubrick started with nothing but a vague idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident that built on the widespread
Cold War fear for survival. While doing research, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and paradoxical "
balance of terror" between nuclear powers. At Kubrick's request,
Alastair Buchan (the head of the
Institute for Strategic Studies) recommended the thriller novel
Red Alert by
Peter George. Kubrick was impressed with the book, which had also been praised by
game theorist and future
Nobel Prize in Economics winner
Thomas Schelling in an article written for the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and reprinted in
The Observer, and immediately bought the film rights. In 2006, Schelling wrote that conversations between Kubrick, Schelling, and George in late 1960 about a treatment of
Red Alert updated with intercontinental missiles eventually led to the making of the film. In collaboration with George, Kubrick started writing a screenplay based on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some brief consultations with Schelling and later, Herman Kahn. In following the tone of the book, Kubrick originally intended to film the story as a serious drama. However, he began to see comedy inherent in the idea of
mutual assured destruction as he wrote the first draft. He later said: The title of the film satirically references Dale Carnegie's
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Among the other titles that Kubrick initially considered were
Dr. Doomsday or: How to Start World War III Without Even Trying, ''Dr. Strangelove's Secret Uses of Uranus
, and Wonderful Bomb''. After deciding to make the film a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer in late 1962. The choice was influenced by reading Southern's comic novel
The Magic Christian, which Kubrick had received as a gift from Peter Sellers, and which itself became a Sellers film in 1969. Southern made important contributions to the film, but his role led to a rift between Kubrick and Peter George; after
Life magazine published a photo-essay on Southern in August 1964 which implied that Southern had been the script's principal author—a misperception neither Kubrick nor Southern did much to dispel— George wrote a letter to the magazine, published in its September 1964 issue, in which he pointed out that he had both written the film's source novel and collaborated on various incarnations of the script over a period of ten months, whereas "Southern was briefly employed ... to do some additional rewriting for Kubrick and myself and fittingly received a screenplay credit in behind Mr. Kubrick and myself."
Sets and filming Dr. Strangelove was filmed at
Shepperton Studios, near
London, as Sellers was in the middle of a divorce at the time and unable to leave England. For the War Room, Ken Adam first designed a two-level set which Kubrick initially liked, only to decide later that it was not what he wanted. Adam next began work on the design that was used in the film, an
expressionist set that was compared with
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang's
Metropolis. It was an enormous concrete room ( long and wide, with a -high ceiling) Kubrick asked Adam to build the set ceiling in
concrete to force the director of photography to use only the on-set lights from the circle of lamps. Moreover, each lamp in the circle of lights was carefully placed and tested until Kubrick was happy with the result. Lacking cooperation from
the Pentagon in the making of the film, the set designers reconstructed the aircraft cockpit to the best of their ability by comparing the cockpit of a
B-29 Superfortress and a single photograph of the cockpit of a
B-52 and relating this to the geometry of the B-52's
fuselage. The B-52 was state-of-the-art in the 1960s, and its cockpit was off-limits to the film crew. When some United States Air Force personnel were invited to view the reconstructed B-52 cockpit, they said that "it was absolutely correct, even to the little black box which was the CRM." Home movie footage included in
Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove on the 2001 Special Edition DVD release of the film shows clips of the B-17 with a cursive "Dr. Strangelove" painted over the rear entry hatch on the right side of the fuselage. In 1967, some of the flying footage from
Dr. Strangelove was re-used in
The Beatles' television film
Magical Mystery Tour. As told by editor Roy Benson in the
BBC radio documentary
Celluloid Beatles, the production team of
Magical Mystery Tour lacked footage to cover the sequence for the song "
Flying". Benson had access to the aerial footage filmed for the B-52 sequences of
Dr. Strangelove, which was stored at Shepperton Studios. The use of the footage prompted Kubrick to call Benson to complain.
Fail Safe Red Alert author Peter George collaborated on the screenplay with Kubrick and
satirist Terry Southern.
Red Alert was more solemn than its film version, and it did not include the character Dr. Strangelove, though the main plot and technical elements were quite similar. A
novelization of the actual film, rather than a reprint of the original novel, was published by Peter George, based on an early draft in which the narrative is bookended by the account of aliens, who, having arrived at a desolated Earth, try to piece together what has happened. It was reissued in October 2015 by Candy Jar Books, featuring never-before-published material on Strangelove's early career. During the filming of
Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick learned that
Fail Safe, a film with a similar theme, was being produced. Although
Fail Safe was to be an ultrarealistic thriller, Kubrick feared that its plot resemblance would damage his film's box office potential, especially if it were released first. Indeed, the novel
Fail-Safe (on which the film is based) is so similar to
Red Alert that Peter George sued on charges of plagiarism and settled out of court. What worried Kubrick the most was that
Fail Safe boasted the acclaimed director
Sidney Lumet and the first-rate dramatic actors
Henry Fonda as the American president and
Walter Matthau as the adviser to the Pentagon, Professor Groeteschele. Kubrick decided to throw a legal wrench into
Fail Safes production gears. Lumet recalled in the documentary
Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove: "We started casting. Fonda was already set ... which of course meant a big commitment in terms of money. I was set, Walter [Bernstein, the screenwriter] was set ... And suddenly, this lawsuit arrived, filed by Stanley Kubrick and Columbia Pictures." Kubrick argued that
Fail Safes own source novel
Fail-Safe (1962) had been plagiarized from Peter George's
Red Alert, to which Kubrick owned creative rights. He pointed out unmistakable similarities in intentions between the characters Groeteschele and Strangelove. The plan worked, and the suit was settled out of court, with the agreement that Columbia Pictures, which had financed and was distributing
Strangelove, also buy
Fail Safe, which had been an independently financed production. Kubrick insisted that the studio release his movie first, and
Fail Safe opened eight months after
Dr. Strangelove, to critical acclaim but mediocre ticket sales.
Original ending fight was removed from the final cut. It was originally planned for the film to end with a scene that depicted everyone in the War Room involved in a
pie fight. Accounts vary as to why the pie fight was cut. In a 1969 interview, Kubrick said, "I decided it was
farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film." Critic Alexander Walker observed that "the cream pies were flying around so thickly that people lost definition, and you couldn't really say whom you were looking at." During post-production, one line by Slim Pickens, "a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff", was dubbed to change "Dallas" to "
Vegas", since Dallas was where Kennedy was killed. The original reference to Dallas survives in the English audio of the French-subtitled version of the film. The assassination also serves as another possible reason that the pie-fight scene was cut. In the scene, after Muffley takes a pie in the face, General Turgidson exclaims: "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!" Editor Anthony Harvey stated that the scene "would have stayed, except that Columbia Pictures were horrified, and thought it would offend the president's family." Kubrick and others have said that the scene had already been cut before preview night because it was inconsistent with the rest of the film.
Re-release in 1994 In 1994, the film was re-released. While the 1964 release used a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the new print was in the slightly squarer 1.66:1 (5:3) ratio that Kubrick had originally intended. == Themes ==