by Lee Hill
Later, James Earl Jones dropped by to meet Pickens, whom he would be working with in the bomber sequences. Jones asked, in somewhat Shakespearean tones, how he enjoyed working with Brando on One-Eyed Jacks.
Pickens replied, “Well, I worked with him for six months and in that time, I never saw him do anything that wasn’t all-man and all-white.” Pickens didn’t realize what he was saying. Jones managed to keep a straight face through this potentially explosive meeting and the two worked quite well together as shooting progressed.
Sellers’s ad-libbing would add to future confusion over credit. “Sellers’s improvisation was very specific,” insists Southern.” One scene immediately comes to mind, when Sterling Hayden goes into the bathroom, Sellers changed his lines to include ‘Good idea, General, splash a bit of cold water on the back of the neck,’ which is a very British thing.”
Christiane Kubrick often sketched on the set and was able to observe her husband’s sensitive handling of Sellers’s manic genius. “Sellers would get a distinct high as his ideas became more and more fabulous and ingenious. However, he would sort of hype himself into a complete frenzy of ideas and then he couldn’t reach that state again. He didn’t want to do a particular take again because he felt he could never get it as good…. Stanley was ready with many cameras so Sellers wouldn’t have to do it again. He shot a scene from every angle at once so he would have many cuts and be able to catch that one great flight of fancy. Peter was very fond of Stanley because he was willing to do this while other directors might not have prepared all those cameras for him.”
Christiane remembers Sellers constantly cutting up the crew with his “Heil Hitler” salute and mimicking obscene gestures with Strangelove’s mechanical hand. When the camera rolled, the crew would literally clap their hands over their mouths and almost choke trying to stifle their own laughter.
Carol Southern visited the cavernous set during the marathon shooting days that led to an elaborate pie-throwing sequence, which would be cut from the film mere weeks from release. “I don’t know if this was for technical reasons, but Stanley’s set was very very wide. And he didn’t just bark out directions. He would sort of whisper them to his assistants. Who would then tell the person. So it was very quiet. Or he would go to talk to people quietly. And in the midst of all this quiet, people were throwing pies. It was hysterical.”
The pie-throwing sequence was originally designed to end the film. Once it became clear that the world outside the War Room was now a postnuclear wasteland, representatives of the Army, Navy, and Air Force begin to lapse into their traditional interservice rivalry. One of the officers picks up a pie from the lavish buffet at the end of the War Room and throws it. The president is hit by accident and all hell breaks loose.
The sequence took more than a week to shoot. The pies were a mixture of dough, a generic pie filling, and shaving cream. Under the hot studio lights, this mixture eventually gave off an unpleasant stale odor.
“After a few days, the studio became very smelly,” recalls Christiane. “Because of continuity, they had to leave the mess as it was. The black plastic floor of the War Room was covered with all this gunge and everybody was totally soiled. Toward the end of filming, the crew decided they were going to all throw pies at Stanley during the last take. However, Stanley had a very good scheme. He went on adding and completing shots and then telling each cast member, ‘Okay, you can get cleaned up.’ They were so relieved to get out of their disgusting outfits that they didn’t want to throw pies at Stanley and get filthy again. So he didn’t get anything thrown at him. It was very much a chessplayer’s way of thinking.”
“What was happening in the pie fight is that people are laughing,” says Southern. “It’s supposed to be deadly serious. And it was such a funny situation that people outside the periphery, including Stanley and myself, were tossing pies into the melee. And so it lost its edge. It was like a comedy scene, where everything else in the film had been played straight—except once when the Coca-Cola machine spurted in Keenan Wynn’s face.”
Peter Bull, who played the Russian envoy, recalls the rigors of shooting the pie-fight scene: “I know that at least 2,000 custard pies were ordered every day. Well, not custard, as a matter of fact, because they were laced with shaving cream so that they looked more like lemon-meringue pies. It was just as well that we did get fresh ones because the pastry after a day or two was as lethal as a cast-iron brick.”
In addition to the genius of Kubrick and Sellers, Southern was impressed with the personalities and talents of George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Peter Bull, James Earl Jones, and Slim Pickens. Key members of Kubrick’s crew helped maintain the level of creative excellence throughout the production. Director of photography Gilbert Taylor’s glittering black-and-white imagery matched the mood of each location perfectly, from the smoky still-photo quality of the War Room scenes to the newsreel verité of the air base attack. German-born production designer, Ken Adam, reworked countless sketches for Kubrick to come up with the technocratic nightmare of the War Room. Dr. Strangelove may have sounded absurd, but it looked all too real.
During the long postproduction process, Anthony Harvey, the chief editor, worked with Kubrick to establish the right pacing for the crosscutting between the War Room, air base, and bomber cockpit. While this was in the shooting script, Harvey says certain problems in continuity had to be addressed.
“It was the most stunning script I have ever read; but it just didn’t work in edited film. It was too confusing—you just didn’t know where you were half the time. And there was no variation of pace or buildup of tension. We found by experiment that, if we stayed for much longer on each setting, everything became clearer and clearer and interest was held much more strongly,” says Harvey.
Dr. Strangelove cost $2 million to shoot, making it one of the more expensive films shot in Britain at the time. Despite these financial pressures, Kubrick’s deal with Columbia pictures gave him final cut and considerable control over marketing and distribution. The film was slowly fine-tuned until the eve of its Oscar-qualifying premiere in December 1963. Kubrick spent almost eight months editing the film. One key change was the famous pie-fight ending. It would be replaced with Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again” over a montage of mushroom clouds.
Near the end of his stint on Strangelove, Terry began canvassing for more film work. He was beginning to enjoy his new role as hot film scribe. Carol recalls him hanging out with Charles Kasher, a London producer, who made Funeral in Berlin. With offers of more work on the horizon, Southern decided to treat himself to a present.
“Nile, a girlfriend, and I went to Italy for about ten days to pick up an Alfa-Romeo Giulia that [Terry] had ordered, which was kind of a dream come true,” said Carol. “We ordered one in white. The three of us went down on the train to pick it up from the factory.”
After principal photography was completed, Carol, Nile, and Terry remained in England for a few more months. During the shoot, they became good friends with Kubrick and his family. They would visit him for dinner in his Kensington apartment. Later, Kubrick would move to a castle-like mansion with electric fences, security devices, a 35mm screening room, and state-of-the-art editing facilities. Terry envied Kubrick’s combination of luxury and almost total seclusion.
“One night, somebody brought a hard-core porn film over to show to Stanley,” Southern recalled. “Very soon into the film, Kubrick got up and left. We watched some more and then stopped it. Somebody said, ‘It would be great if someone were to make a movie like that under studio conditions.’ We thought Kubrick would be the ideal person to direct such a movie.”
These casual comments got Southern thinking about a new novel. When he came back to the States, Terry started writing the book that became Blue Movie. Over the years, he would send Kubrick pieces of the work-in-progress. One section elicited a laudatory telegram praising Terry for having written “the definitive blow job.”
While still in England, Terry bega
n to meet with producers about other script work. There were some discussions with John Schlesinger about a possible adaptation of Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. The producers of James Bond, Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, set Terry up with Peter Yates to work on a treatment called The Marriage Game. Carol Southern remembered the manic quality of those meetings.
“We would have dinner at Broccoli and Saltzman’s house. It was surreal, because they had this huge, elegant home with literally only a few pieces of furniture. They were in sweatshirts with their wives. They were very manic and funny, as they talked ideas…. They were very dynamic.”
Terry spent an afternoon driving around London with the producers in their Rolls-Royce. Broccoli took particular pride in his young son’s ability to point out such “historic” London landmarks as the Park Lane Hotel and various casinos. The treatment went into limbo, but the writing fees eased the Southerns’ financial woes considerably.
Somehow Southern found time to write for Queen, the slick London monthly that documented the first glimmers of Swinging London with stories by the likes of Penelope Gilliat and photos by David Bailey and Lord Snowdon. One of the pieces was an essay on John Fowles’s The Collector, which would become Southern’s first gig as a script doctor when William Wyler began shooting the film in the spring and summer of 1964.
While the Southerns were in England, Terry’s Quality Lit status was rising. The appearance of “Twirling at Ole Miss,” in the February 1963 issue of Esquire, created a stir. Then three back-to-back issues of the magazine carried significant Southern contributions (garnering the now rising star the magazine’s top dollar rate of $750). “Recruiting for the Big Parade,” appeared in June, “I Am Mike Hammer,” in the July literary special issue, and the short story “You’re Too Hip, Baby” in August. The Mike Hammer story was a particularly droll take on the whole low-versus-high-culture debate that would become irrelevant during the sixties. The Writers in Revolt anthology also came out that spring. Southern was now at the top of his game, working with one of the best directors in the world and getting the kind of critical attention to which Mailer, Capote, and Vidal had long been accustomed.
Southern spent this transitional period between the completion of shooting and the eventual release of Dr. Strangelove growing more conscious of his own celebrity. More time was spent in New York going to parties or generating heat for future projects. Whether it was restlessness or a genuine desire to have the best of both worlds, it was apparent that the traditional conventions of family life did not suit Southern’s rebellious sympathies. There were rumors of women on the side, but these fissures in his marriage were invisible to Carol and, probably, to Terry as well.
John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, instantly changed the nature of the new decade’s optimism. On the day of the tragic news, a stunned Southern conferred with an equally numb Lenny Bruce about the appropriate way to discuss the event. In the end, Bruce solemnly walked onstage and said, “Phew, Vaughn Meader,” in reference to the forgotten comedian whose career consisted solely of a JFK impersonation. The assassination also forced Kubrick to tinker even more with his new film, deleting or relooping the odd line that could cause hurt to the Kennedy family or a mourning American public.
As was customary for him, Kubrick held test screenings of Dr. Strangelove for Columbia executives and other industry insiders in London and New York in the fall of 1963. The lack of official support from the State Department and air force had always embarrassed Columbia. Many executives found the film funny, but it was so different from their typical releases they were worried it would flop. A discreet campaign to distance Columbia from the upcoming December release was initiated. Carl Foreman’s The Victors, a more conventional (and now almost forgotten) World War II melodrama was given full studio backing and released at the same time.
“At the time of the initial release, we were totally wiped out,” said Southern. “They would tell people there were no seats for Dr. Strangelove at the theaters, but the film built up word of mouth.”
Word of mouth quickly turned into a roar of approval and delight. As the film went into wider release in January 1964, it became an event to be celebrated either as a must-see artistic breakthrough or a shocking sign of the decline of pop culture. Both camps seemed to race to the theater to validate their preconceptions. Time and Newsweek got on the “Yes” bandwagon quickly. Bosley Crowther, the New York Times’s notoriously staid critic, was obviously affected by the film’s hearts-and-minds satire, but ultimately responded with this perverse caveat: “I am troubled by the feeling, which runs all through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment, up to and even including the hypothetical commander in chief.” As for the film’s devastating ending with the Vera Lynn soundtrack, Crowther, tongue-firmly-in-some-place-other-than-his-cheek, opined: “Somehow, to me, it isn’t funny. It is malefic and sick.”
January 1964 became the flash point for Terry’s increasing celebrity. He had just signed a contract with Putnam to publish Candy. He and Mason would split the profits fifty-fifty. Of course, things would not work out as planned. A loophole in international copyright law allowed others to issue bootleg editions, which also sold wildly. The byzantine legal status of Candy and various royalties owing would defy the best efforts of their lawyers and agents for the rest of the decade. Hoffenberg and Southern were naturally upset about this, but the latter less so because revenue from screenwriting assignments would cushion the loss of royalties.
In addition to work on The Collector, Southern was approached to work on The Loved One, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel. The film’s producers, Martin Ransohoff and John Calley, would run ads in Variety hyping Southern as the author of Dr. Strangelove. The campaign angered Kubrick and Peter George, who was still prominently credited as a cowriter.
“There was a lot of publicity about Strangelove,” Carol Southern remembers. “Terry was interviewed by the media and was given credit for writing the script, which angered Kubrick. He didn’t take sole credit, but he didn’t really deny it either. He didn’t say, ‘No, I didn’t write the script. I helped with the script.’ This made Kubrick, who had worked for years on Strangelove, really pissed off.”
Southern managed to mollify Kubrick through jokey letters, but Peter George was less easily pacified. [Terry] had been pushed to the sidelines during shooting and watched Southern become the media’s literary flavor-of-the-month because of Candy and Strangelove. A lavish photo essay on Southern in Life prompted George to write a somewhat desperate letter downplaying Southern’s participation:
Sirs: Life (May 8) grossly exaggerated Terry Southern’s importance to Dr. Strangelove, referring to the “sensation Southern caused with his script.” Now (August 21), Life implies Southern’s intervention turned a serious script into an “original irreverent” satirical film. The facts, however, are that when Mr. Southern first appeared at Shepperton studio, England, the script (a satirical adaptation of my novel, Red Alert) was complete. Stanley Kubrick and I had been writing it for 10 months.
Southern was briefly employed (November 16–December 28, 1962) to do some additional writing with Kubrick and myself and fittingly received a screenplay credit in third place behind Mr. Kubrick and myself.
PETER GEORGE, Sussex, England.
George was not only irritated by Southern seemingly hogging credit, but his fears about nuclear war were adding to a sense of persecution and isolation. He wrote the novelization of the film’s script and then began work on a sequel to Red Alert set in a postnuclear landscape. But the work did little to alleviate a growing sense of futility. On June 3, 1966, in his home outside London, George shot himself.
“Needless to say that in so many cases you would never suspect even when you don’t know someone that well,” says James Harris about George’s suicide, “because you don’t know what’s going on in somebody’s mind or what his problems might be—his deep-seated problems—which evidently he never disc
ussed. Stanley never relayed to me any inside observations or predictions about any problems with Peter George.”
“There was gossip written that Peter [George] had complained about what Stanley had done to Red Alert and not using his book in the way it was originally written,” recalls Christiane Kubrick, “but that also was not true as far as I know because he was just very ill and he knew it. He knew he had drunk himself to death and that’s why he ended his life.”
Kubrick’s response to the credit controversy was to take out ads, issue press releases, and patiently explain to interviewers how he had been working on the script for several years. The dispute highlighted Southern’s naïveté. Eager to remain in Kubrick’s good graces, he downplayed the fallout over script credit, which cast a shadow over his success with Dr. Strangelove and Candy.
“Stanley’s obsession with the auteur theory—that his films are by Stanley Kubrick—overrides any other credit at all. Not just writing, but anything,” said Southern. “He’s like Chaplin in this regard. That’s part of the reason why he rarely uses original music in his films. Having written this great bestseller Candy, number one for twenty-one weeks, my reputation eclipsed Stanley, so I got all the credit in places like the New York Times and Life magazine. It was just so overwhelming and one-sided, naturally he was freaking out. He would take out full-page ads saying Terry Southern has nothing to do with it. He felt [slighted] and rightly so and lashed out. It was an overnight thing. I did what I could by writing letters to the Times.”