Notes from The War Room
by Terry Southern
1962. It was a death-gray afternoon in early December and the first
snow of the New England winter had just begun. Outside my window, between
the house and the banks of the frozen stream, great silver butterfly
flakes floated and fluttered in the failing light. Beyond the stream, past
where the evening mist had begun to rise, it was possible, with a
scintilla of imagination, to make out the solemnly moving figures in the
Bradbury story about the Book People; in short, a magical moment --
suddenly undone by the ringing of a telephone somewhere in the house, and
then, closer at hand, my wife's voice in a curious sing-song:
"It's big Stan Kubrick on the line from Old Smoke."
I had once jokingly referred to Kubrick, whom I had never met but
greatly admired, as "big Stan Kubrick" because I liked the ring and lilt
of it. "Get big Stan Kubrick on the line in Old Smoke," I had said, "I'm
ready with my incisive critique of Killer's Kiss." And my wife, not
one to be bested, had taken it up.
"Big Stan Kubrick," she repeated, "on the line from Old Smoke."
"Don't fool around," I said. I knew I would soon be on the hump with
Mr. Snow Shovel and I was in no mood for her brand of tomfoolery.
"I'm not fooling around," she said. "It's him all right, or at least
his assistant."
I won't attempt to reconstruct the conversation; suffice to say he told
me he was going to make a film about "our failure to understand the
dangers of nuclear war." He said that 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." He said he could only see it now as "some
kind of hideous joke." He told me that he had read a book of mine which
contained, as he put it, "certain indications" that I might be able to
help him with the script.
I later learned the curious genesis of all this: during the '50s I was
friends with the English writer Jonathan Miller. I knew him for quite a
while before I discovered that he was a doctor -- of the sort who could
write you a prescription for something like Seconal -- at which point I
beseeched him to become my personal physician and perhaps suggest
something for my chronic insomnia. To encourage his acceptance, I gave
him a copy of my recently published novel, The Magic Christian,
which had been favorably reviewed in the Observer by the great
English novelist Henry Green. Miller was impressed, at least enough to
recommend it to his friend Peter Sellers. Peter liked it to the
improbable degree that he went straight to the publisher and bought a
hundred copies to give to his friends. One such friend, as luck would
have it, was Stanley Kubrick.
At Shepperton Studios in London, Kubrick had set up his "Command Post"
in a snug office that overlooked two wintering lilac bushes and,
poetically enough, the nest of an English nightingale. Next to his big
desk, and flush against it, stood an elegant wrought-iron stand that
resembled a pedestal, and on top of the stand, at desk level, was one of
the earliest, perhaps the very first, of the computerized
"chess-opponents," which they had just begun to produce in West Germany
and Switzerland. It was a sturdy, workman-like model, black with
brushed-metal lettering across the front: GRAND MASTER LEVEL
"I have perfected my endgame," Kubrick said, "to such a degree that I
can now elude the stratagems of this so-called opponent," he gave a curt
nod toward the computer, "until the proverbial cows come home.... Would
that I could apply my newly acquired skill," he went on, "vis-a-vis a
certain Mo Rothman at Columbia Pix."
Mo Rothman, I was to learn, was the person Columbia Pictures had
designated executive producer on the film, which meant that he was the
bridge, the connection, the interpreter, between the otherwise
incomprehensible artist and the various moneybags incarnate who were
financing the film. As to whether or not the streetwise" Mo Rothman was a
good choice for this particular project, I believe the jury is still out.
Once, when Kubrick was out of the office, Rothman insisted on giving me
the following message:
"Just tell Stanley," he said in a tone of clamor and angst, "that New
York does not see anything funny about the end of the
world!" And then added, not so much as an afterthought as a simple
Pavlovian habit he'd acquired, "as we know it."
I realized he had no idea whom he was talking to, so I took a flyer.
"Never mind New York," I said with a goofy inflection, "What about
Gollywood?"
This got a rise out of him like a shot of crystal meth.
"Gollywood?" he said loudly. "Who the hell is this?"
The Corporate, that is to say, studio reasoning about this production
affords an insight as to why so many such projects are doomed, creatively
speaking, from the get-go. It was their considered judgment that the
success of the film Lolita resulted solely from the gimmick of Peter
Sellers playing several roles.
"What we are dealing with," said Kubrick at our first real talk about
the situation, "is film by fiat, film by frenzy." What infuriated him most
was that the "brains" of the production company could evaluate the entire
film -- commercially, aesthetically, morally, whatever -- in terms of the
tour de force performance of one actor. I was amazed that he handled it
as well as he did. "I have come to realize," he explained, "that such
crass and grotesque stipulations are the sine qua non of the
motion-picture business." And it was in this spirit that he accepted the
studio's condition that this film, as yet untitled, "would star Peter
Sellers in at least four major roles."
It was thus understandable that Kubrick should practically freak when a
telegram from Peter arrived one morning:
Dear Stanley: I am so very sorry to tell you that I am
having serious difficulty with the various roles. Now hear this: there is
no way, repeat, no way, I can play the Texas pilot, 'Major King Kong.' I
have a complete block against that accent. Letter from Okin [his agent]
follows. Please forgive. For a few days Kubrick had been in the throes of a Herculean effort to
give up cigarettes and had forbidden smoking anywhere in the building.
Now he immediately summoned his personal secretary and assistant to bring
him a pack pronto.
That evening he persuaded me, since I had been raised in Texas, to make
a tape of Kong's dialogue, much of which he had already written (his
announcement of the bomb targets and his solemn reading of the Survival
Kit Contents, etc.). In the days that followed, as scenes in the plane
were written I recorded them on tape so that they would be ready for
Sellers, if and when he arrived. Kubrick had been on the phone pleading
with him ever since receiving the telegram. When he finally did show up,
he had with him the latest state-of-the-art portable tape recorder,
specially designed for learning languages. Its ultrasensitive earphones
were so over-sized they resembled some kind of eccentric hat or space
headgear. From the office we would see Sellers pacing between the lilac
bushes, script in hand, his face tiny and obscured beneath his earphones.
Kubrick found it a disturbing image. "Is he kidding?" he said. "That's
exactly the sort of thing that would bring some Brit heat down for
weirdness." I laughed, but he wasn't joking. He phoned the production
manager, Victor Linden, right away.
"Listen, Victor," I heard him say, "you'd better check out Pete and
those earphones. He may be stressing... Well, I think he ought to cool it
with the earphones. Yeah, it looks like he's trying to ridicule the BBC
or something, know what I'm saying? All we need is to get shut down for a
crazy stunt like that. Jesus Christ."
Victor Linden was the quintessential thirty-five-year-old English
gentleman of the Eton-Oxford persuasion, the sort more likely to join the
Foreign Office than the film industry; and, in fact, on more than one
occasion I overheard him saying, "With some of us, dear boy, the wogs
begin at Calais."
As production manager, it was his job to arrange for, among other
things, accommodations for members of the company, including a certain
yours truly. "I've found some digs for you," he said, "in Knightsbridge,
not far from Stanley's place. I'm afraid they may not be up to Beverly
Hills standards, but I think you'll find them quite pleasant.... The main
thing, of course, is that you'll be close to Stanley, because of his
writing plan."
Stanley's "writing plan" proved to be a dandy. At five A.M., the car
would arrive, a large black Bentley, with a back seat the size of a small
train compartment -- two fold-out desk tops, perfect over
the-left-shoulder lighting, controlled temperature, dark gray windows. In
short, an ideal no-exit writing situation. The drive from London to
Shepperton took an hour more or less, depending on the traffic and the
density of the unfailing fog. During this trip we would write and
rewrite, usually the pages to be filmed that day.
It was at a time when the Cold War was at its most intense. As part of
the American defense strategy, bombing missions were flown daily toward
targets deep inside the Soviet Union, each B-52 carrying a nuclear bomb
more powerful than those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Bombers
were instructed to continue their missions unless they received the recall
code at their "fail-safe" points.
In my Knightsbridge rooms, I carefully read Red Alert, a book written
by an ex-RAF intelligence officer named Peter George that had prompted
Stanley's original interest. Perhaps the best thing about the book was
the fact that the national security regulations in England, concerning
what could and could not be published, were extremely lax by American
standards. George had been able to reveal details concerning the
"fail-safe" aspect of nuclear deterrence (for example, the so-called black
box and the CRM Discriminator) -- revelations that, in the spy-crazy
U.S.A. of the Cold War era, would have been downright treasonous. Thus
the entire complicated technology of nuclear deterrence in Dr Strangelove
was based on a bedrock of authenticity that gave the film what must have
been its greatest strength: credibility.
The shooting schedule, which had been devised by Victor Linden and of
course Kubrick -- who scarcely let as much as a trouser pleat go
unsupervised -- called for the series of scenes that take place inside a
B-52 bomber to be filmed first. Peter Sellers had mastered the tricky
Texas twang without untoward incident, and then had completed the first
day's shooting of Major Kong's lines in admirable fashion. Kubrick was
delighted. The following morning, however, we were met at the door by
Victor Linden.
"Bad luck," he said, with a touch of grim relish, "Sellers has taken a
fall Last night, in front of that Indian restaurant in King's Road. You
know the one, Stanley, the posh one you detested. Well, he slipped
getting out of the car. Rather nasty I'm afraid. Sprain of ankle,
perhaps a hairline fracture." The injury was not as serious as everyone
had feared it might be. Sellers arrived at the studio shortly after
lunch, and worked beautifully through a couple of scenes. Everything
seemed fine until we broke for tea and Kubrick remarked in the most
offhand manner, "Ace [the co-pilot] is sitting taller than Peter."
Almost immediately, he announced that we would do a run-through of
another scene (much further along in the shooting schedule), which
required Major Kong to move from the cockpit to the bomb-bay area via two
eight-foot ladders. Sellers negotiated the first, but coming down the
second, at about the fourth rung from the bottom, one of his legs abruptly
buckled, and he tumbled and sprawled, in obvious pain, on the unforgiving
bomb-bay floor.
It was Victor Linden who again brought the bad news, the next day,
after Sellers had undergone a physical exam in Harley Street. "The
completion-bond people," he announced gravely, "know about Peter's injury
and the physical demands of the Major Kong role. They say they'll pull
out if he plays the part." Once that grim reality had sunk in, Kubrick's
response was an extraordinary tribute to Sellers as an actor: "I can't
replace him with another actor, we've got to get an authentic character
from life, someone whose acting career is secondary -- a real-life
cowboy." Kubrick, however, had not visited the United States in about
fifteen years, and was not familiar with the secondary actors of the day.
He asked for my opinion and I immediately suggested big Dan ("Hoss
Cartwright") Blocker. He hadn't heard of Blocker, or even -- so
eccentrically isolated had he become -- of the TV show Bonanza.
"How big a man is he?" Stanley asked.
"Bigger than John Wayne," I said.
We looked up his picture in a copy of The Player's Guide and
Stanley decided to go with him without further query. He made
arrangements for a script to be delivered to Blocker that afternoon, but a
cabled response from Blocker's agent arrived in quick order: "Thanks a
lot, but the material is too pinko for Dan. Or anyone else we know for
that matter. Regards, Leibman, CMA."
As I recall, this was the first hint that this sort of political
interpretation of our work-in-progress might exist. Stanley seemed
genuinely surprised and disappointed. Linden, however, was quite
resilient. "Pinko. . ." he said with a sniff. "Unless I'm quite
mistaken, an English talent agency would have used the word subversive."'
Years earlier, while Kubrick was directing the western called One
Eyed Jacks (his place was taken by Marlon "Bud" Brando, the producer
and star of the film, following an ambiguous contretemps), he'd noticed
the authentic qualities of the most natural thesp to come out of the west,
an actor with the homey sobriquet of Slim Pickens.
Slim Pickens, born Lotus Bert Lindley in Texas in 1919, was an
unschooled cowhand who traveled the rodeo circuit from El Paso to Montana,
sometimes competing in events, other times performing the dangerous work
of rodeo clown -- distracting the bulls long enough for injured cowboys to
be removed from the arena. At one point, a friend persuaded him to accept
work as a stunt rider in westerns. During an open call for One Eyed
Jacks, Brando noticed him and cast him in the role of the uncouth
deputy sheriff. Except for the occasional stunt work on location, Slim
had never been anywhere off the small-town western rodeo circuit, much
less outside the U.S. When his agent told him about this remarkable job in
England, he asked what he should wear on his trip there. His agent told
him to wear whatever he would if he were "going into town to buy a sack of
feed" -- which meant his Justin boots and wide-brimmed Stetson.
"He's in the office with Victor," Stanley said, "and I don't think they
can understand each other. Victor said he arrived in costume. Go and see
if he's all right. Ask him if his hotel is okay and all that." When I
reached the production office, I saw Victor first, his face furrowed in
consternation as he perched in the center of his big Eames wingbat. Then
I saw Slim Pickens, who was every inch and ounce the size of the Duke,
leaning one elbow to the wall, staring out the window.
"This place," I heard him drawl, "would make one helluva good horse
pasture ... if there's any water."
"Oh, I believe there's water, all right," Victor was absurdly assuring
him when he saw me. "Ah, there you are, dear boy," he said. "This is Mr.
Slim Pickens. This is Terry Southern." We shook hands, Slim grinning
crazily.
"Howdy," he drawled, as gracious as if I were a heroine in an old
western. "Mighty proud to know yuh." I went straight to our little
makeshift bar, where I had stashed a quart of Wild Turkey specifically for
the occasion, which I was ballpark certain would meet his requirements.
"Do you reckon it's too early for a drink, Slim?" I asked. He guffawed,
then shook his head and crinkled his nose, as he always did when about to
put someone on. "Wal, you know ah think it was jest this mornin' that ah
was tryin' to figure out if and when ah ever think it was too early fer a
drink, an' damned if ah didn't come up bone dry! Hee-hee-hee!" He cackled
his falsetto laugh. "Why hell yes, I'll have a drink with you. Be glad
to."
"How about you, Victor?" I asked. His reply was a small explosion of
coughs and "hrumphs."
"Actually, it is a bit early for me in point of fact," he spluttered.
"I've got all those bloody meetings... ." I poured a couple and handed one
to Slim.
"Stanley wanted me to find out if you got settled in at your hotel,
Slim, and if everything is all right." Slim had this unusual habit of
sometimes prefacing his reply to a question with a small grimace and a
wipe of his mouth against the back of his hand, a gesture of modesty or
self-deprecation somehow. "Wal," he said, "it's like this ole friend of
mine from Oklahoma says: jest gimme a pair of loose-fittin' shoes, some
tight pussy, and a warm place to shit, an' ah'll be all right."
We were occupying three of the big sound stages at Shepperton: one of
them for the War Room set, another for bomber set and a third that
accommodated two smaller sets, General Ripper's office, including its
corridor with Coke machine and telephone booth ("If you try any perversion
in there, I'll blow your head off "), and the General Turgidson motel-room
set. The B-52 set, where we were shooting at the time, consisted of an
actual B-52 bomber, or at least its nose and forward fuselage, suspended
about fifteen feet above the floor of the stage. They were between takes
when I climbed into the cockpit area where they were doing "character
shots": individual close-ups of the co-pilot scrutinizing a Penthouse
centerfold, the navigator practicing his card tricks, the radar
operator wistfully reading a letter from home. Short snippets of action
meant to establish the crew as legendary boy-next-door types.
Conspicuously absent from the line-up was the bombardier and single black
member of the crew, James Earl Jones, or Jimmy, as everyone called him. A
classic thespian of high purpose, Jones was about as cultured and
scholarly as it is possible for an actor to be, with a voice and presence
that were invariably compared to Paul Robeson's.
Kubrick came over to where I was standing, but he remained absorbed in
what he called "this obligatory Our Town character crap that always
seems to come off like a parody of All Quiet on the Western Front,"
a movie that took an outlandish amount of time to focus on the individual
behavioral quirks of every man in the regiment. "The only rationale for
doing it now," Kubrick said, "is that you're making fun of that historic
and corny technique of character delineation." Just as he started to go
back to the camera, I saw that his eye was caught by something off the
set. "Look at that," he said, "Slim and Jimmy are on a collision course."
Slim was ambling along the apron of the stage toward where Jimmy was
sitting by the prop truck absorbed in his script. "Why don't you go down
there," Kubrick went on, "and introduce them." It was not so much a
question as a very pointed suggestion, perhaps even, it occurred to me, a
direct order. I bounded down the scaffolding steps and across the floor
of the stage, just in time to intercept Slim in full stride a few feet
from where Jimmy was sitting.
"Hold on there, Slim," I said. "I want you to meet another member of
the cast." Jimmy got to his feet. "James Earl Jones -- Slim Pickens."
They shook hands but both continued to look equally puzzled. They had
obviously never heard of each other. Somehow I knew the best route to
some kind of rapprochement would be through Jones. "Slim has just
finished working on a picture with Marlon Brando," I said.
"Oh well," he boomed, "that must have been very interesting indeed....
Yes, I should very much like to hear what it is like to work with the
great Mr. Brando."
As if the question were a cue for a well-rehearsed bit of bumpkin
business, Slim began to hem and haw, kicking at an imaginary rock on the
floor. "Wal," he drawled, his head to one side, "you know ah worked with
Bud Brando for right near a full year, an' durin' that time ah never seen
him do one thing that wudn't all man an' all white."
When I asked Jimmy about it later, he laughed. His laugh, it must be
said, is one of the all-time great laughs. "I was beginning to think,"
and there were tears in his eyes as he said it, "that I must have imagined
it."
The quality of Jones's voice comes through most clearly as he delivers
the last line of the Strangelove script before the bomb is released. The
ultimate fail-safe device requires the manual operation of two final
safety switches, to insure that the bomb will never be dropped by
mistake. Major Kong's command over the intercom is brisk: "Release second
safety!" Jones's response, although measured, is unhesitating. He reaches
out and moves the lever. It is in his acknowledgement of the order, over
the intercom, that he manages to imbue the words with the fatalism and
pathos of the ages:" Second safety..."
Not long afterward, we began shooting the famous eleven-minute "lost
pie fight," which was to come near the end of the movie. This footage
began at a point in the War Room where the Russian ambassador is seen, for
the second time, surreptitiously taking photographs of the Big Board,
using six or seven tiny spy-cameras disguised as a wristwatch, a diamond
ring, a cigarette lighter, and cufflinks. The head of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Air Force General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) catches him in
flagrante and, as before, tackles him and throws him to the floor. They
fight furiously until President Merkin Muffley intervenes:
"This is the War Room, gentlemen! How dare you fight in here!"
General Turgidson is unfazed. "We've got the Commie rat redhanded this
time, Mr. President!"
The detachment of four military police, which earlier escorted the
ambassador to the War Room, stands by as General Turgidson continues: "Mr.
President, my experience in these matters of espionage has caused me to be
more skeptical than your average Joe. I think these cameras," he indicates
the array of ingenious devices, "may be dummy cameras, Just to put us
off. I say he's got the real McCoy concealed on his person. I would like
to have your permission, Mr. President, to have him fully searched."
"All right," the President says, "permission granted."
General Turgidson addresses the military police: "Okay boys, you heard
the President. I want you to search the ambassador thoroughly. And due
to the tininess of his equipment do not overlook any of the seven bodily
orifices." The camera focuses on the face of the ambassador as he listens
and mentally calculates the orifices with an expression of great annoyance.
"Why you capitalist swine!" he roars, and reaches out of the frame to
the huge three-tiered table that was wheeled in earlier. Then he turns
back to General Turgidson, who now has a look of apprehension on his face
as he ducks aside, managing to evade a custard pie that the ambassador is
throwing at him. President Muffley has been standing directly behind the
general, so that when he ducks, the president is hit directly in the face
with the pie. He is so overwhelmed by the sheer indignity of being struck
with a pie that he simply blacks out. General Turgidson catches him as he
collapses.
"Gentlemen," he intones, "The president has been struck down, in the
prime of his life and his presidency. I say massive retaliation!" And he
picks up another pie and hurls it at the ambassador. It misses and hits
instead General Faceman, the joint Chief representing the Army. Faceman
is furious.
"You've gone too far this time, Buck!" he says, throwing a pie himself,
which hits Admiral Pooper, the Naval Joint Chief who, of course, also
retaliates. A monumental pie fight ensues.
Meanwhile, parallel to the pie-fight sequence, another sequence is
occurring. At about the time that the first pie is thrown, Dr.
Strangelove raises himself from his wheelchair. Then, looking rather
wild-eyed, he shouts, "Mein Fuhrer, I can valk!" He takes a
triumphant step forward and pitches flat on his face. He immediately
tries to regain the wheelchair, snaking his way across the floor, which is
so highly polished and slippery that the wheelchair scoots out of reach as
soon as Strangelove touches it. We intercut between the pie fight and
Strangelove's snakelike movements -- reach and scoot, reach and scoot --
which suggest a curious, macabre pas de deux. When the chair finally
reaches the wall, it shoots sideways across the floor and comes to a stop
ten feet away, hopelessly out of reach.
Strangelove, exhausted and dejected, pulls himself up so that he is
sitting on the floor, his back against the wall at the far end of the War
Room. He stares for a moment at the surreal activity occurring there, the
pie fight appearing like a distant, blurry, white blizzard. The camera
moves in on Strangelove as he gazes, expressionless now, at the distant
fray. Then, unobserved by him, his right hand slowly rises, moves to the
inner pocket of his jacket and, with considerable stealth, withdraws a
German Luger pistol and moves the barrel toward his right temple. The
hand holding the pistol is seized at the last minute by the free hand and
both grapple for its control. The hand grasping the wrist prevails and is
able to deflect the pistol's aim so that when it goes off with a
tremendous roar, it misses the temple.
The explosion reverberates with such volume that the pie fight
freezes. A tableau, of white and ghostly aspect: Strangelove stares for a
moment before realizing that he has gained the upper hand. "Gentlemen," he
calls out to them. "Enough of these childish games. Vee hab vork to do.
Azzemble here pleeze!" For a moment, no one moves. Then a solitary figure
breaks rank: It is General Turgidson, who walks across the room to the
wheelchair and pushes it over to the stricken Strangelove.
"May I help you into your chair, Doctor?" he asks. He begins wheeling
Strangelove across the War Room floor, which is now about half a foot deep
in custard pie. They move slowly until they reach the president and the
Russian ambassador who are sitting crosslegged, facing each other,
building a sandcastle.
"What in Sam Hill --" mutters General Turgidson.
"Ach," says Strangelove. "I think their minds have snapped under the
strain. Perhaps they will have to be institutionalized."
As they near the pie-covered formation of generals and admirals,
General Turgidson announces gravely: "Well, boys, it looks like the future
of this great land of ours is going to be in the hands of people like Dr.
Strangelove here. So let's hear three for the good doctor!" And as he
pushes off again, the eerie formation raise their voices in a thin,
apparition-like lamentation: "Hip, hip, hooray, hip, hip, hooray!"
followed by Vera Lynn's rendition of "We'll Meet Again." The camera is up
and back in a dramatic long shot as General Turgidson moves across the War
Room floor in a metaphorical visual marriage of Mad Scientist and United
States Military. The End.
This was a truly fantastic sequence. In the first place it was a
strictly one-shot affair; there was neither time nor money to reshoot --
which would have meant cleaning the hundred or so uniforms and buying a
thousand more custard pies. The studio representatives, who were
skeptical of the scene all along, had been excruciatingly clear about the
matter: "We're talkin' one take. One take and you're outta here, even if
you only got shit in the can!"
So it was with considerable trepidation that we screened the results
that evening. It must be recalled that each branch of the military
service -- Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine -- receives a separate budget
that determines the welfare and the life-style of its top brass. The pie
fight, at its most contentious and prolonged, was not between the Russian
ambassador and the United States military but between the rival branches
of the U.S. military, and it represented a bitter and unrelenting struggle
for congressional appropriations. This continuing jealousy between service
branches, which causes each one to exaggerate its needs, precludes any
chance of reducing our absurdly high defense budget.
The style and mood of the sequence should have reflected these grim
circumstances. Kubrick's major goof was his failure to communicate that
idea to the sixty or so pie-throwing admirals and generals, so that the
prevailing atmosphere, as it came across on the film, might best be
described as bacchanalian-with everyone gaily tossing pies, obviously in
the highest of spirits. A disaster of, as Kubrick said, "Homeric
proportions." Needless to say, the scene was cut.
It was about this time that word began to reach us, reflecting concern
as to the nature of the film in production. Was it anti-American? or just
anti-military? And the jackpot question, was it, in fact, anti-American to
whatever extent it was anti-military? This "buzz along the Rialto" was
occasionally fleshed out by an actual Nosey Parker type dropping in from
New York or Hollywood on behalf of Columbia Pictures. They usually
traveled in pairs, presumably on the theory that sleaze is more palatable
if spread somewhat thin.
"I feel like Elisha Cook in one of those early Warner films," said
Stanley. "You know, when you learn there's a contract out on you, and all
you can do is wait for the hit. They're ruthless," he went on, carried
away by the film noir image, "absolutely ruthless."
The early visits of those snoopers (with their little high-speed
cameras and voice-activated recorders, which they would try to stash on
the set and retrieve later) were harbingers of stressful things to come
about nine months later, when the first prints of the film were being
sporadically screened at the Gulf and Western Building in New York, and
word came back to Old Smoke that the Columbia head honchos, Abe Schneider
and Mo Rothman, were never in attendance.
I overheard Stanley on the phone to New York. "Listen, Mo," he said,
"don't you think you ought to have a look at the film you're making?"
Afterward he told me: "Mo says they've been too busy with the new Carl
Foreman film -- the one with Bing Crosby singing 'White Christmas' while a
soldier is being executed. He said, 'It's not so zany as yours, Stanley.'
Can you believe it? And that isn't the worst. He also said, get this, he
said, 'The publicity department is having a hard time getting a handle on
how to promote a comedy about the destruction of the planet."
It was the first time I had seen Kubrick utterly depressed, and during
the ride back to London, he said, "I have the feeling distribution is
totally fucked." The next day, however, he was bouncing with optimism and
a bold scheme. "I have learned," he said, "that Mo Rothman is a highly
serious golfer." In a trice he was on the phone to Abercrombie &
Fitch, Manhattan's ultraswank sporting-goods emporium. Some fairly
elaborate manipulations (plus an untold cash outlay) got him a "surprise
gift" presentation of the store's top-of-the-line electric golf cart, to
be delivered to the clubhouse of Rothman's Westchester Country Club.
It is a sad anticlimax to report the negative response on Rothman's
part. "The son of a bitch refused to accept it!" Stanley exclaimed. "He
said it would be 'bad form."'
It soon became apparent that no one in the company wished to be
associated with the film, as if they were pretending that it had somehow
spontaneously come into existence. Kubrick was hopping. "It's like they
think it was some kind of immaculate fucking conception," he exclaimed
with the ultra-righteous indignation of someone caught in an unsuccessful
bribery attempt. It was difficult to contain him. "'Bad form!"' he kept
shouting, "Can you imagine Mo Rothman saying that? His secretary
must have taught him that phrase!"
In the months that followed, the studio continued to distance itself
from the film. Even when Strangelove received the infrequent good
review, it dismissed the critic as a pinko nutcase and on at least one
occasion the Columbia Pictures publicity department defended the company
against the film by saying it was definitely not "anti-U.S. military," but
"just a zany novelty flick which did not reflect the views of the
corporation in any way." This party line persisted, I believe, until about
five years ago, when the Library of Congress announced that the film had
been selected as one of the fifty greatest American films of all time --
in a ceremony at which I noted Rothman in prominent attendance. Who said
satire was "something that closed Wednesday in Philadelphia"?
Dark London winter mornings, and I would go over to Kubrick's place in
Knightsbridge at about 5:00 AM. We would work in the back seat -- more
like a small room than a seat -- of his grand old Bentley, during the long
ride to Shepperton Studios. Outside it was pitch black, cold, and
fantastic with the all-enveloping London fog. Inside it was warm, glowing
with peach-colored sconce light from the corners behind, and the script
pages spread across two table tops, folded out in front of us. With the
driver's partition closed, we could have been in a cozy compartment on the
Orient Express, working on that morning's scene -- already written, of
course, perhaps many times rewritten, but never really perfect. It was a
magical time.
"Now then," Kubrick might begin, only half in jest, "just what is it
we're trying to say with this scene?"
"A comment about some poignant aspect of la condition humaine?"
I might venture.
"Have you been drinking?" he would want to know.
"Are you kidding? It's five-thirty in the morning."
"Last night. You could still be drunk from last night. Don your
think-cap, mister--what's the obligation of the scene? What do we want to
say?"
"That we're up shit creek?"
"No."
"Wait a minute...that we're 'in rat's alley where the dead men lost
their bones.'"
"More specific."
In question might be the Burpelson Air Force Base scene, after the
siege, when Col. "Bat" Guano (Keenan Wynn), having taken Mandrake (Peter
Sellers) prisoner, allows him to use a pay phone to report the recall-code
to the President.
"Now let's consider," Stan would say, waxing expansive. "When 'Bat'
Guano lets Mandrake go into the phone booth to call the President...what's
the most interesting thing he can say to him -- some sort of weird
last-minute admonition to Mandrake."
In the sequence at hand we already had:
Reprinted from the journal "Grand Street", issue
#49
Peter S.
Southern also spoke elsewhere regarding some of Kubrick's
working habits; the following is excerpted from The Movies, Volume One,
No.1, July 1983:
Mandrake (imploring): Colonel, I must know what you
think has been going on here.
Col. "Bat" Guano: You wanna know what I think? I think you're some
kind of deviated pre-vert. I t