Trivia for
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) More at IMDbPro »

• Peter Sellers was cast in four roles, but experienced problems when trying to develop a Texas accent for Maj. T.J. "King" Kong. After Sellers broke his ankle, Stanley Kubrick was forced to find another actor. Convinced that nobody could have acted the part as well as Sellers, Kubrick decided to cast someone who naturally fit the role. The producers first approached John Wayne, who did not even bother to respond, and "Bonanza" (1959) star Dan Blocker, who declined the role because of the script's progressive political content. Remembering his work on the western One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Kubrick cast Slim Pickens as Kong, the gung-ho hick pilot determined to drop his bombs at any cost. Pickens was never shown the script nor told it was a black comedy; ordered by Kubrick to play it straight, he played the role as if it were a serious drama - with amusing results.
  
  
• George C. Scott was reputedly annoyed by the fact that Stanley Kubrick was pushing him into an overacting performance, even though his work on the film is now regarded as some of his best work on-screen. Although he vowed never to work with Kubrick again, Scott himself came to regard this as one of his favorite performances.
  
  
• Peter Sellers was paid $1,000,000 for his work on the film (five-ninths of the film's budget). Stanley Kubrick famously quipped "I got three for the price of six".
  
  
• Columbia Pictures agreed to provide financing only on the provision that Peter Sellers play at least four major roles. This came from the fact that they deemed Sellers' playing of multiple roles was one of the big selling points in making Lolita (1962) a success. Kubrick agreed to these conditions.
  
  
• Peter Sellers improvised much of his dialog during filming. Stanley Kubrick incorporated his ad-libbed lines into the written screenplay as shooting progressed.
  
  
• Once they read the script, The Pentagon withheld any co-operation with the film so the set designers were forced to reconstruct the cockpit of the B52 bomber from one single photograph in their possession that had been carelessly printed in a British flying magazine and comparing it to the cockpit of the B29 Superfortress, and relating it to the geometry of the B52's fuselage. (In the early 60s, the B52 represented cutting edge technology and access to it was a matter of national security.) When some American Air Force personnel were invited to view the film's reconstruction of the B52 cockpit (which had cost $100,000 to construct), they were astounded to see that it was almost note perfect, so much so that Stanley Kubrick feared that Ken Adam's production design team had resorted to illegal moves and could be under investigation from the FBI.
  
  
• The film's first test screening was due to take place on November 22, 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The film was just weeks away from its scheduled premiere, but, after the assassination, this was pushed back to late January 1964, as it was felt that the public would not be in a mood for a black comedy so soon after such a traumatic event.
  
  
• The only known public showing of the famous custard pie footage was at the 1999 screening of the film at London's National Film Theatre following Stanley Kubrick's death.
  
  
• While shooting aerial footage of wastelands over Greenland, the second unit camera crew accidentally filmed a secret US military base. Their plane was forced down under suspicion of being Russian spies.
  
  
• In researching for the film, Stanley Kubrick read nearly 50 books about nuclear war.
  
  
• There is a great deal of cutting in the sequences where Dr. Strangelove gets carried away in the War Room mainly to cover up the fact that most of the cast were laughing at Peter Sellers' gyrations.
  
  
• Initially, the President was played in a slightly effeminate manner, but these scenes were later reshot to make him seem like an oasis of reason amidst all the madness.
  
  
• In Terry Southern's script, Muffley has a bad cold. Peter Sellers played this up so hilariously that the cast kept breaking up during filming, but Stanley Kubrick then decided to make him a foil for everyone else's craziness instead, and re-shot the scenes with Sellers now playing the role straight.
  
  
• The photographic mural in General Ripper's office, presumably showing an aerial view of Burpelson AFB, is actually a view of Heathrow Airport, London.
  
  
• Gen. Turgidson (George C. Scott)'s tripping and falling in the War Room was actually an accident, but Stanley Kubrick decided it was in character, and left it in.
  
  
• The illuminated symbols on the War Room map displays were cutouts lit by individual floodlights behind them. These generated so much heat that the display was quickly damaged and special air-conditioning had to be installed.
  
  
• Another reason for cutting the custard pie fight at the end of the film was that at one point, President Muffley took a pie in the face and fell down, prompting Gen. Turgidson to cry, "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has just been struck down in his prime!" Stanley Kubrick had already decided to cut the pie fight by the time of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, but this line (or possibly even the whole sequence) would certainly have been cut anyway due to its eerie similarity to real events.
  
  
• When Strangelove is talking about the doomsday device, Turgidson says, "Strangelove. What is that, German?" The reply he receives is "He changed his name; it was originally Merkwürdigliebe." In German Merkwürdigliebe means Strangelove.
  
  
• The end sequence, in which Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" is played over several shots of nuclear explosions, was suggested by Peter Sellers' fellow ex-Goon, Spike Milligan.
  
  
• The centerfold in the copy of Playboy being read by one of the B-52 crew is Gen. Turgidson's secretary, Miss Scott.
  
  
• Not only is Gen. Turgidson's secretary, Miss Scott, the centerfold in Major Kong's copy of Playboy, if you look closely, you will see she had a copy of the DC quarterly policy-wonk magazine FOREIGN AFFAIRS covering her derriere - a nice double-entendre.
  
  
• Premiere voted this movie as one of "The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time" in 2006.
  
  
• Dr. Strangelove apparently suffers from agonistic apraxia (also known as "alien hand syndrome"), a real neurological affliction that can be caused by a stroke or other brain injury causing damage to the nerve fibers that connect the two brain hemispheres (the corpus callosum). Researchers at the University of Aberdeen who identified it named it Dr. Strangelove Syndrome. According to Professor Sergio Della Sala, the patients behave exactly like Dr. Strangelove: "...[T]hey slam their hand and shout 'My hand does things that I don't want it to do!'"
  
  
• Based on the novel "Red Alert" by Peter George, and originally conceived as a tense thriller about the possibility of accidental nuclear war. Stanley Kubrick was working on the script when he realized that many scenes he had written were actually quite funny. He then brought in Terry Southern to turn the story into a satire. Among the changes were the addition of the title character and the renaming of other characters using satirical names such as Turgidson, Kissoff, Guano, DeSadesky, and Merkin Muffley.
  
  
• In an original script draft, Dr. Strangelove is referred to as Von Klutz.
  
  
• This film was the debut for James Earl Jones. Kubrick cast Jones after seeing him in a production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which George C. Scott also appeared.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Stanley Kubrick] [three-way] USA vs. Russia vs. General Ripper.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Stanley Kubrick] [faces] General Turgidson, General Ripper, and Dr. Strangelove.
  
  
• According to Christiane Kubrick in her 2002 book "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures," her husband Stanley Kubrick often played chess with George C. Scott on the set between setups. Kubrick, renowned as a master-level chess player who used to hustle other players in his youth in New York City, outclassed Scott as a player and easily beat him, which had the effect of winning Scott's admiration for the director and keeping the famously volatile actor (who was only a few months younger than Kubrick) focused during the down-time.
  
  
• Peter Bull, playing the role of the serious Soviet Ambassador de Sadesky, can be seen struggling to keep his composure in the scene towards the end when he is standing behind Dr. Strangelove. Just as the scene changes, his face cracks up.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Stanley Kubrick] [114] Name of the message decoder CRM-114.
  
  
• Terry Southern was brought in as co-writer by Peter Sellers because Sellers was a big fan of Southern's novel "The Magic Christian". Five years later Sellers starred in the film version of The Magic Christian (1969).
  
  
• The glove worn by Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove came from director Stanley Kubrick's personal collection. Sellers had seen Kubrick wearing them to handle hot lights on the set and thought of them as sinister-looking, so he wore one of them on his right hand (the one not under his control) to add to Strangelove's eeriness.
  
  
• The stock footage shown in the opening credits (a suggestive image of refueling military aircraft) was also used in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)
  
  
• Early titles for the project were "The Edge of Doom" and "The Delicate Balance of Terror".
  
  
• One version of the script featured all of the action being observed by aliens from outer space.
  
  
• The background footage for the model B-52 is filmed from a Boeing B-17G, whose shadow can be seen on the ground.
  
  
• When Stanley Kubrick selected Slim Pickens for the role of Maj. Kong, it caused a delay in production. Pickens had never been outside the United States and, therefore, did not have a passport to travel to England.
  
  
• This was the final collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and his producing partner James B. Harris. Harris left to begin his own directing career. Harris was involved in the early development stage of this production. It was during this stage that, according to Harris, Kubrick began to toy with the idea of turning it into a comedy.
  
  
• Was voted the 14th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
  
  
• Other than Miss Scott (Tracy Reed), there are no female characters in the film.
  
  
• Number 3 in the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest comedies.
  
  
• The score for the B-52 scenes is mostly made up of the melody of "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye", a traditional Irish anti-war song, which also provides the melody for the somewhat better-known (at least in the United States) American Civil War song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again". While the former tells the story of a soldier coming back from a war heavily mutilated and broken, with the last lines being "They're rolling out the guns again, but they'll never take my sons again", the latter describes the celebrations that will take place when the soldiers return from war: "The men will cheer and the boys will shout / The ladies they will all turn out / And we'll all feel gay / When Johnny comes marching home."
  
  
• The premise of Slim Pickens' character riding the H-Bomb to his death was "borrowed" from an early-1950s episode of "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" (1950) in which Cadet Astro (Al Markim) rides an atomic torpedo.
  
  
• Major Kong's plane's primary target, is an ICBM complex at Laputa. In Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, Laputa is a place inhabited by caricatures of scientific researchers.
  
  
• In the novel by Peter George the two H-bombs are named Hi There! and Lolita. Two years earlier, Stanley Kubrick directed Lolita (1962). The graffiti on the second bomb is Dear John in the movie.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick intended the film to end with a custard pie fight between the Russians and the Americans in the War Room (which is why we see a big table of food there). The footage was shot, but he decided not to use it because he considered it too farcical to fit in with the satirical nature of the rest of the film.
  
  
• Originally planned to be shot in the United States, filming had to take place at England's Shepperton Studio since Peter Sellers had to stay in England for the duration of the shoot due to the pending settlement of divorce of his first wife, Anne.
  
  
• The Playboy magazine that Slim Pickens is reading in the B-52 is the June 1962 issue.
  
  
• For the role of Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Stanley Kubrick was able to talk Sterling Hayden into coming out of retirement to make his first film in five years. Kubrick had previously used Hayden in The Killing (1956).
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick usually gave directions to actors without cracking a smile. However, during the shooting of this film, Kubrick was laughing a good deal of the time while Peter Sellers was performing, often so hard that he brought himself to tears.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick wanted the tablecloth on the War Room table to be green, so it looked like the world leaders were playing poker with the world's fate. However, this makes little sense, since the film's budget required it to be shot in black & white, so color of the tablecloth would make no difference on the final film release.
  
  
• President Muffley (Peter Sellers) was patterned after Adlai Stevenson.
  
  
• Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) was patterned after Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Gen. Curtis LeMay, who was renowned for his extreme anti-Communist views and who once stated that he would not be afraid to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union if he was elected president.
  
  
• Major Kong's comment about the survival kit ("a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff") was originally "pretty good weekend in Dallas". This was overdubbed after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. Slim Pickens can still be seen mouthing the word "Dallas".
  
  
• The ending in the novel was more like that of the novel and movie Fail-Safe (1964) - see also trivia for that film. Author Peter George detested the conversion of his book to a satire, but consented to write a tie-in novelization of the film anyway.
  
  
• The U.S. government dismissed Stanley Kubrick's scenario of an accidental nuclear war as being too far-fetched. However, one scene caught their attention and was shown at a session of Congress: the scene where Group Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) is trying to get through to the Pentagon with the code to recall the bombers, and can't because he doesn't have enough change for the pay phone. Congress said it raised legitimate questions about whether crucial information could find its way to the right people during a nuclear crisis.
  
  
• The ninth shot of a nuclear explosion in the end sequence is the US nuclear test designated "Baker" from "Operations Crossroads", the first post-war nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll. Shot No. 14 is test "Able" from the same operation. Shot No. 15 could be the "Trinity" test, the first atomic explosion that ever occurred.
  
  
• General Ripper's paranoia about water fluoridation is based on a conspiracy theory by the John Birch Society, which was founded in 1958 and was prominent in conservative politics for a short time in the early 1960s.
  
  
• One definition of the word "guano" is "A substance composed chiefly of the dung of sea birds or bats", meaning Col. "Bat" Guano's name can be translated into "Bat Shit", which could also describe his reasoning with Mandrake about not wanting to shoot the Coca-Cola machine.
  
  
• The target map used by the bombardier to guide the B-52 on the bomb run is a contorted world map -- it has Greenland and part of Canada just to the right of Japan.
  
  
• The character names of Mandrake (Peter Sellers) and Lothar (James Earl Jones) should ring bells in the minds of comic book fans, in that Mandrake The Magician and his faithful sidekick Lothar have been memorable comic book perennials from their heyday of the 1930's forward to the current day.
  
  
• It was during this production that writer Terry Southern gave Stanley Kubrick a copy of Anthony Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange." Kubrick's film version would be released seven years later.
  
  
• The opening titles contain a spelling mistake - "Base on the book Red Alert by Peter George". The error wasn't noticed until the final print had been made.
  
  
• Peter Sellers was the first actor to be nominated for a single Academy award (best actor) for a film in which he portrayed three different characters in the same film.
  
  
• Many of the characters have names which are double entendres often referring to sex or love. Jack D. Ripper refers to the famous London murderer; Merkin Muffley's two names refer to female parts; Turgidson's first name is "Buck"; the Soviet premier is "Kissoff"; the Soviet ambassador is named after the Marquis de Sade (the original "sadist"); and the title character is called "Strangelove".
  
  
• The last film Stanley Kubrick ever shot in black & white.
  
  
• As seen in the code book ("today's codes", on top of the page just after the crew member finds the right codes), the action takes place on 13 September 1963.
  
  
• When General Ripper first speaks to Captain Mandrake, he refers to "Attack Plan R, as in Robert". This was the correct phonetic for R in the RAF phonetic alphabet (c. 1924 - 1942) Presumably this was used due to the character's WW2 experience in the RAF.
  
  
• The President of the United States' (Peter Sellers) name is "Merkin Muffley." The word "merkin," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was first used in 1617 to mean a pubic wig. "Muff" is slang for a woman's pubic area.
  
  

• SPOILER: DIRTRADE(Stanley Kubrick): [bathroom]: General Ripper commits suicide in a bathroom.
  
  

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