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

• Peter Sellers was also cast as Maj. T.J. "King" Kong, but he had trouble developing a Texas accent. When Sellers broke his ankle, Stanley Kubrick decided to cast another actor who naturally fit the role. John Wayne, never responded. "Bonanza" (1959) star Dan Blocker, declined the role because of the script's progressive political content. Kubrick cast Slim Pickens because of his work on _One-Eyed Jacks (1961)_. Kubrick told Pickens to play it straight.
  
  
• George C. Scott was reputedly annoyed that Stanley Kubrick was pushing him to overact. While he vowed never to work with Kubrick again, Scott eventually saw this as one of his favorite performances. Many consider it some of his best work on-screen.
  
  
• Peter Sellers was paid $1 million, 55% of the film's budget. Stanley Kubrick famously quipped "I got three for the price of six".
  
  
• Columbia Pictures agreed to provide financing only if Peter Sellers played at least four major roles. In their eyes, Sellers playing multiple roles was one reason Lolita (1962) was so successful.
  
  
• Peter Sellers improvised most of his lines.
  
  
• In the early 60s, the B52 was cutting-edge technology. Access to it was a matter of national security. The Pentagon refused to lend any support to the film after they read the script. Set designers reconstructed the B52 bomber's cockpit from a single photograph that appeared in a British flying magazine. When some American Air Force personnel were invited to view the movie's B52 cockpit, they said it was a perfect copy. Stanley Kubrick feared that Ken Adam's production design team had used illegal methods and could be investigated by the FBI.
  
  
• The first test screening was scheduled for November 22, 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The producers felt that the public would not be in a mood for a black comedy so soon after such a traumatic event, so the premier was moved back to late January 1964.
  
  
• While shooting aerial footage over Greenland, the second unit camera crew accidentally filmed a secret US military base. They plane was forced down, and the crew was suspected of being Soviet spies.
  
  
• As research, 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 cast cracking up.
  
  
• Initially, the President was played in a slightly effeminate manner. Those scenes were later re-shot 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 cracking up during filming.Stanley Kubrick 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 is actually a view of Heathrow Airport, London.
  
  
• Gen. Turgidson's fall in the War Room was an accident. 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. They generated so much heat that the display was damaged. Air-conditioning had to be installed.
  
  
• During the pie-fight scene, 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 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but the line (or possibly whole sequence) likely would have been cut anyway due to its eerie similarity to real events.
  
  
• When Strangelove talks 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 Playboy centerfold is Gen. Turgidson's secretary, Miss Scott. The magazine covering her butt is Foreign Affairs.
  
  
• 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". It's caused by damage to the corpus collosum, the nerve fibers that connect the brain's two hemispheres. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen who identified it named it Dr. Strangelove Syndrome. According to Professor Sergio Della Sala, the patients "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.
  
  
• James Earl Jones's film debut. 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 Soviet Ambassador de Sadesky, cracks up towards the end.
  
  
• 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).
  
  
• Dr. Strangelove's glove is from Stanley Kubrick's personal collection. Peter Sellers had seen Kubrick wearing them to handle hot lights on the set, and thought they looked sinister. He wore one 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".
  
  
• In one version of the script, aliens from outer space observed all of the action.
  
  
• The background footage for the model B-52 is filmed from a Boeing B-17G, whose shadow can be seen on the ground.
  
  
• When Slim Pickens was cast as Maj. Kong, he had never been outside the United States. Production was delayed while he got a passport.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Miss Scott (Tracy Reed) is the only female character.
  
  
• Number 3 in the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest comedies.
  
  
• The score for the B-52 scenes is mostly "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye", a traditional Irish anti-war song that tells the story of a broken, heavily mutilated soldier coming back from war. The last lines are "They're rolling out the guns again / but they'll never take my sons again." It's also the melody of the American Civil War song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," which describes the celebrations that will happen 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.
  
  
• The War Room contains a large table of food because Stanley Kubrick intended to end the film with a custard pie fight between the Russians and the Americans. He decided not to use the footage because he found it too farcical to fit with the satirical nature of the rest of the film. The only known public showing of the pie fight scene was at the 1999 screening of the film at London's National Film Theatre, following Kubrick's death.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick intended to film in the United States. Filming was moved to England's Shepperton Studio because Peter Sellers had to stay in England due to his pending divorce.
  
  
• The Playboy magazine Slim Pickens reads 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 was originally "A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff". "Dallas" was overdubbed with "Vegas" after President John F. Kennedy was assassination in Dallas. Kong still mouths the word "Dallas".
  
  
• The ending in the novel was similar to the novel and movie Fail-Safe (1964). Author Peter George detested the conversion of his book to a satire, but wrote a tie-in novelization of the film anyway.
  
  
• The U.S. government dismissed Stanley Kubrick's scenario of an accidental nuclear war as too far-fetched. However, the scene where Group Captain Mandrake is trying to get through to the Pentagon with the code to recall the bombers, but doesn't have enough change for the pay phone, was shown at a session of Congress. Members said it raised legitimate questions about whether crucial information could find its way to the right people during a nuclear crisis.
  
  
• The ninth nuclear explosion shot in the end sequence is US nuclear test "Baker" from "Operations Crossroads", the first post-war nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll. Shot No. 14 is "Able" from the same operation. Shot No. 15 is "Trinity," the first atomic explosion ever.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Mandrake The Magician and his sidekick Lothar have been comic book perennials since the 1930's.
  
  
• 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' names are double entendres. Jack D. Ripper refers to the famous London murderer of prostitutes. The president's name is slang for female genitalia. Turgidson's first name is "Buck". The Soviet premier is "Kissoff." The Soviet ambassador is named after the Marquis de Sade. The title character is called "Strangelove".
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick's last black and white film.
  
  
• 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 Friday, 13 September 1963.
  
  
• The Soviet ambassador describes the Doomsday Machine as an array of 100 megaton bombs covered with a special fallout-inducing material. A few years before the movie's release, the Soviets produced a working 100egaton bomb design (the "Tsar Bomba") but scaled it back to 50 megatons before testing. If the full- scale bomb were tested, it would have increased the global radioactive fallout from all nuclear detonations to that point in history by 25%. Interestingly, by removing the fallout-producing uranium third stage, the scaled-back test had the lowest fallout per kiloton of explosive power.
  
  
• In addition to the 100 megaton bomb citation there are other oblique references to the Soviets' "Tsar Bomba" project in regards to the Doomsday Machine: The Ambassador laments his citizens' wanting, among other things, "more nylons" and the political difficulty this presented to defense spending. It is alleged that construction of the retardation parachute for the tested bomb's air drop disrupted the Soviet hosiery industry for months in order to secure enough material. Dr. Strangelove says "When you only wish to bury bombs there is no limit to the size". The manufactured test bomb was so large and heavy that no early 1960s vintage strategic bomber was capable of carrying it without substantial modifications impacting speed, range and radar-eluding capabilities. Its utility as a strategic weapon was therefore so severely limited as to render it negligible. Announcement of the Doomsday Machine was supposed to be announced at a coming party conference because "the Premier loves surprises". The Tsar Bomba test took place during what was supposed to be a several year nuclear test suspension between the US and USSR.
  
  

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

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