Dr. Strangelove
“I WAS INTERESTED in whether or not I was going to get blown up by an H Bomb prior to Lolita,” Kubrick told Jeremy Bernstein.1 His interest got more intense during Lolita’s shooting in the summer of 1961. The Cold War was heating up, with JFK and Khrushchev in a nerve-racking standoff over Berlin, and the threat of a war between superpowers gripped the world. After his return to New York, the now-obsessed Kubrick read a long list of books about nuclear apocalypse. Among them was the Welsh author Peter George’s Red Alert (1958), a novel about a rogue air force general who orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. In 1961, Kubrick decided that Red Alert would be his next movie. He started work on the project with Jimmy Harris, but soon Harris was on his way to Hollywood to become a director himself.
Kubrick thought that nuclear war was a horrible absurdity, so he wanted make Red Alert a comedy. He and Harris had come up with some broad comic touches during their story conferences, imagining, for example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordering from a deli during the atomic crisis. But now Harris was getting worried. A feature-length comedy about the Bomb just wasn’t feasible, he thought: the subject was simply too dreadful. Harris remembers thinking, “ ‘I leave him alone for ten minutes and he’s going to blow his whole career.’ ”
Harris was wrong. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, turned out to be Kubrick’s best work so far: his first truly pathbreaking film, ghastly and hilarious at once in a way never seen before in Hollywood. After watching it for the first time, Kubrick’s high school friend Alex Singer wrote to him, “I laughed so hard and so often that I thought I’d be asked to leave the theatre.”2 Along with many Strangelove fans, I’ve had the same thought.
Harris’s split with Kubrick during the Strangelove scriptwriting was an amicable one. Kubrick had been feeding Harris’s filmmaking ambitions, telling him, “You’ll never know complete satisfaction until you’ve tried your hand at directing.” “Kubrick invited enormous input from me on Lolita,” Harris remembered. “Stanley had a very open mind,” he added. “He admired anybody who thought enough about something to have an idea.”3
On Lolita, Harris had been inspired by Kubrick’s assured manner. “You’ve got to supervise everybody, and answer all the questions,” Harris told an interviewer. “It seemed so easy for Stanley.” But Kubrick confessed to Harris that the hardest time for a director was “the moment when you arrive on the set each morning.” As Harris put it,
You’ve got a city block filled with equipment, trucks, extras in costume, honeywagons. There you are pulling up, and dozens if not hundreds of people are looking straight at you. They’ve all got questions, and they need them answered right away. Everybody likes the idea of being a director—of being that guy that everybody looks to—but the reality is a whole other ballgame. You’ve got to be ready to answer, but you’ve got to keep your nerve and not answer too fast.4
When Harris went off to LA, he remembered, Kubrick “wrote down things for me like I was a kid he was sending to school. ‘Don’t get bullied into making a shot-list’ was key advice. He said, ‘A lot of magic happens on the set; it’s no disgrace to not know what you want to do.’ . . . If you’re not careful, people will bully you into thinking there’s something wrong with you if you don’t have a clear image of where every shot is, and where you’re going to put the camera. Stanley said, ‘It’s much better to discover your strategy with dialogue scenes. You want the actors to make a contribution. Don’t put them in a position where they’re told what to do.’ ”5
Harris went on to direct a series of odd, intriguing movies, including a Cold War thriller that ends with an atomic blast, The Bedford Incident (1965), the unclassifiable erotic fairy tale Some Call It Loving (1973), and Cop (1988), a white-knuckle James Ellroy adaptation starring James Woods.
Strangelove grew out of Kubrick’s deep research about nuclear war. His favorite prophet of radioactive Armageddon, and the chief model for Dr. Strangelove himself, was Herman Kahn, a theorist at the RAND Corporation, the think tank where scientists loosened their ties and lolled on the floor as they pondered the unthinkable. Kahn, who spoke frequently to military and civilian groups, warned that “nuclear war is an immediate peril,” and he added, “prepare to be struck, fight back, and survive.” On Thermonuclear War (1960), which Kubrick read at least three times, featured spookily calm postapocalyptic summaries like “Table 3, Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States”: “2 million dead=economic recuperation 1 year; 10 million=5 years; 20 million=10 years; 80 million=fifty years; 160 million=100 years.” Even if the fifty major cities in the United States were struck by Soviet bombs, Kahn stressed, the country could rebuild them in ten years, “complete with slums, and some extra ones,” he joshed.6 The cheeriness was deceptive, since Kahn failed to mention the devastating long-term effects of radiation.
Kahn was, by any standard, a true character. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, his biographer, says he was “buoyant and ingratiating. He was appealingly eccentric: grossly fat, a stammerer and a wheezer, nearly narcoleptic at times, but, when awake, insatiably chatty.” Kahn, who would talk to anybody, wanted to figure out what made the peace movement tick. He said to a reporter in 1968, “I like the hippies. I’ve been to Esalen. I’ve had LSD a couple of times. In some ways I’d like to join them.”7
He also wasn’t afraid to sound crazy. “At the Hudson Institute” (another think tank where Kahn worked) “we’re proud to say we stand halfway between chutzpah and megalomania,” he jested. Kahn thought “frivolity [was] a permissible approach to intolerably catastrophic ideas,” writes Ghamari-Tabrizi8—and so did Kubrick. The Kubricks had dinner with Kahn a few times, and they were highly impressed by the rotund, wisecracking theorist.
After Kubrick’s movie came out, the Daily Mail called Kahn “the real Dr. Strangelove,” and they weren’t far wrong. Strangelove, like Kahn, plays around with the line between passionate idiocy and shrewd strategic gamesmanship. And Strangelove echoes Kahn nearly word for word when he asks, “Will the survivors envy the dead?” after the Doomsday Machine goes kaboom. Kahn, for his part, when he heard that Strangelove was based on him, badgered the director for royalties. (“It doesn’t work that way,” Kubrick told him.)9
Kahn spoke to one of Kubrick’s key obsessions, the blurry line between mastery and insanity. Without meaning to, Kahn illustrates a key theme of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, that reason can run amok. He sounds like a character in Swift whose dream of rational control starts to look like madness. Yet he was on to something, since his thinking mirrored the paranoid Cold War reality. The Soviets might feel compelled to attack us, Kahn said, out of fear that our strategic vulnerability would tempt us to strike them first. But if we said that we were considering a first strike, and thought we could survive a nuclear war, we would look strong rather than weak, so war would be less likely. Such were the labyrinthine twists of Kahn’s logic. The Kennedy administration did in fact draw up plans for a first strike, and Strategic Air Command chief General Tommy Powers glowered, “If a general atomic war is inevitable, the US should strike first.”10
Kahn’s daredevil paradoxical thinking both entranced and scared Kubrick. Life is not a war game, he knew. “The people who make up these war scenarios are not really as inventive as a great writer, or as reality,” Kubrick told Bernstein. “Herman Kahn is a genius, but the scenarios don’t read like the work of a master novelist.”11
In On Thermonuclear War, Kahn argued against a Doomsday Machine, which was supposed to deter a nuclear first strike by ensuring worldwide destruction. (That’s right, the Doomsday Machine was a serious idea, not merely a Kubrickian fantasy: in February 1950 nuclear physicist Leo Szilard publicly warned that Soviet or American scientists might build a cobalt-coated H-bomb that could destroy all life on earth.)12 But Kahn did not see the special danger of the Doomsday Machine highlighted in Dr. Strangelove, that craziness combined with human error might bring about the end of the world.
Here Kubrick was a better theorist than Kahn. Dr. Strangelove’s plot is not nearly so absurd as it might seem: in a New Yorker article from 2014, Eric Schlosser argued that such nuclear mishaps had come close to happening.13 And in 1983, the Soviet general Stanislav Petrov saved the world by disobeying orders and disregarding a satellite warning that American nuclear missiles were heading for Russia. Terrifyingly, a technical glitch had made the satellite malfunction.
For most of 1962 Kubrick worked with Peter George on what would become the Strangelove screenplay. Kubrick liked George, who had flown night missions for the RAF during World War II, and Christiane found him “a lovely man.”14 George had a dark side, though: depressed and alcoholic, he killed himself a few years later, in 1966.
Kubrick and George soaked their script in black humor, influenced by MAD magazine and Paul Krassner’s scabrous underground magazine the Realist, a Kubrick favorite. In mid-November 1962 Terry Southern came in as a third screenwriter. Southern had written a wild satire called The Magic Christian (1959) that Peter Sellers liked to give as a birthday present. Southern is not “the writer” of Dr. Strangelove, as he has sometimes been called, but his pitch-perfect black comedy proved essential to the movie.
Southern would arrive at Kubrick’s house in Knightsbridge, London, at 5 in the morning, and sit down with him in the back seat of Kubrick’s Bentley. While they were driven to Shepperton Studios, Kubrick and Southern wrote side by side on two small tables in the back of the car. Their work on the script continued until the end of 1962.
At home, too, Kubrick and Southern fixated on the nuclear peril. “Stanley and Terry Southern talked and talked about it and whipped themselves into a frenzy of fears,” Christiane says. “People were really afraid and there were long conversations about ‘when is it going to happen, and don’t think it’s not going to happen.’ ”15
Kubrick even decided to move to Australia, out of the likely range of the coming nuclear destruction. “Stanley had this fantasy,” Christiane recalls:
We’d go on a ship to Australia. He said, “The Jews always made jokes, ‘Oh it’s not dangerous, they can’t kill us all,’ we have to learn a lesson and go to Australia.” I said, “Okay, let’s go.” Weeks later he still hadn’t bought the tickets. He said, “Well they don’t have a bathroom, we’d have to share a bathroom.”
I said “Go, I’m all for it, I’ve got suitcases.” It became a very weird joke—other people teased him and he teased himself. “No, I haven’t done anything yet but next week we have to do something,” [he said]. “Well go ahead, I can go as I am” [I said]. My readiness drove him crazy. If his typewriter was on a different desk he was upset. I said it’s not so bad if we have to go on a ship where we share a sink. “You’re just very destructive now,” he said. “I’m not joking. I don’t appreciate it, it’s not funny. Your not saying anything is another way of being horrible.”
[We had] the most asinine conversations—“When are you going? Have you booked on the ship? Okay, I’m ready to go, I’m so packed. . . . I can leave everything else behind, can you?” This went on until it became an absolute family joke, everyone pounced on him.16
Kubrick was too wedded to home to consider taking off for the ends of the earth, even to save himself and his family from the apocalypse.
All his life Kubrick wanted well-defended stasis, which went along with his wish to exert control and minimize risk. But in a world on the brink of nuclear war such security seemed impossible. War games were the order of the day, and their twisted plots had the earth hanging in the balance. The nuclear planners hinted at a macabre upside-down reality: the most secure state of all was universal annihilation, apocalypse being the surest way to control fate.
Dr. Strangelove argues that a single crazed individual with access to the Bomb might decide to go out with a bang, taking down the whole of the human race along with him. Exhibit A is the openly wacko General Jack D. Ripper, a cigar-chewing macho monolith muttering darkly about Commie conspiracy. Kubrick matches Ripper with the more strategic minded but equally bananas General Buck Turgidson, jockish, pigheaded, and snorting disdain, who clamors for a first strike against the Russkies.
Dr. Strangelove’s plot is ignited by Ripper’s mad decision to start a nuclear war with the Russians. The movie cross-cuts between the American War Room, with the president trying to recall Ripper’s bombers, and a B-52 bomber crew headed by Major King Kong. The Soviets, we learn, have a Doomsday device that will detonate a series of world-destroying explosions if even one atomic bomb strikes Russia. Meanwhile, the black-gloved ex-Nazi Strangelove is clearly excited by the prospect of global ruin. The world ends with a bang, or rather lots of them, when Major Kong’s plane makes it through and triggers the Doomsday Machine.
Kubrick’s movie makes its terrific impact because instead of just mocking the military industrial complex, it has an awestruck appreciation of the power-mad generals Ripper and Turgidson, as well as the doom-hungry Strangelove. Strangelove is a perverted savior promising rebirth through violence. Ripper and Turgidson are manly colossi, unafraid to welcome the death of millions as the way to victory. They are Achilles, Ahab, all the mad warriors from the canon, made ridiculous, yes, but with their warlike integrity front and center. Kubrick was an enthusiastic reader of Rabelais, and his style in Strangelove is rich and savage Rabelaisian satire, rather than any pinched, humanistic denunciation of militarism.
“We are simply going to have to be prepared to operate with people who are nuts,” President Eisenhower said in 1956, speaking of nuclear strategy.17 Kubrick’s movie cherishes such madness. Everyone remembers Jack D. Ripper puffing his cigar in an extreme low-angle shot, his forward-jutting jaw looming like Mount Rushmore, as he tells the stiff-upper-lip British Group Captain Mandrake, “I don’t avoid women, Mandrake, I just deny them my precious bodily fluids.”
Kubrick enlisted Sterling Hayden, the star of The Killing, to play Ripper. For the previous six years Hayden had been living on a houseboat in Paris while the IRS extracted chunks of back taxes from his stateside property. He was jittery. On his first day of shooting Hayden muffed his lines. “I was utterly humiliated,” he remarked, but Kubrick bucked him up, telling him that it could happen to anyone. “He was beautiful,” Hayden said.18
Ripper was based in part on the former head of SAC, General Curtis LeMay, a spikey, testosterone-fueled troglodyte who had overseen the destruction of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and who later proposed bombing the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Age.” Add a strong whiff of John Birch Society paranoia about Commies fluoridating the water supply, and you get Ripper.
For his General Turgidson, Kubrick picked George C. Scott, who had most recently appeared in John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). Scott’s Turgidson is the gum-chewing, belly-slapping, whooping male ego, a thirteen-year-old boy grown to monstrous size. He clutches his briefing book to his chest, and we notice the title: “World Targets in Megadeaths.” Scott, like Hayden, was an ex-Marine, and expert at conveying the bluff macho stance that shoos away doubts like pesky flies. For Turgidson war is a matter of breaking some eggs. He predicts that the bombs the Russians drop on America will kill “ten or twenty million tops, depending on the breaks.”
“Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion and militancy” since “nothing but complete victory will do,” Richard Hofstadter noted in his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”19 Victory starts to seem a little silly when you think of the mountains of smoking corpses involved, but Turgidson wants us to look on the bright side: winning is what matters. You can deal with megadeaths like a fan at a football game, rooting hard for the home team.
In an early script Kubrick called the Turgidson character General Schmuck, “a gruff, tough, folksy Air Force Chief” who “keeps in top physical shape, and is proud of it.”20 In order to turn Shmuck into Turgidson, Kubrick needed to inflate the character to grandiose size. During shooting Kubrick urged Scott to play Turgidson with broad strokes and make his character larger than life. The coaching worked: sublimely unaware of his idiocy, Turgidson is a giant figure in Kubrick’s satire.
While directing Scott, Kubrick relied on his usual calm, reassuring manner with his actors. Scott later said that “Kubrick most certainly is in command . . . but he’s so self-effacing. It is impossible to be offended by him. No pomposity, no vanity.” He added that Kubrick “has a brilliant eye; he sees more than the camera [does].”21 Kubrick saw more at the chessboard too, where he invariably beat Scott at their games on the set.
Kubrick relished Scott’s splashes of buffoonery, however he could get them. At one point Scott trips as he points to “the big board,” which he’s afraid the “Russkies” will see if their ambassador enters the War Room. This was an actual mishap, but Kubrick decided to keep the shot in the movie. Scott recovers acrobatically, laughing a little at himself, and never breaks his stride.
When the shooting was over Scott was convinced he had given a terrible performance, since Kubrick had coaxed him into big, bold, hyperbolic acting. Kubrick wrote to Scott, “I hope you will at least be somewhat assuaged knowing that if, in fact, this is the worst performance you have ever given, everyone will think it is the best”:
The opinion of approximately 1000 people who have seen the film is that your performance is one of the most brilliant, penetrating and hilarious they have ever seen. This includes directors, producers, writers, actors, critics, editors, publishers, disc jokeys [sic], secretaries, executives, lawyers, housewives, hairdressers and psychiatrists.22
Columbia Pictures appears to have insisted that Peter Sellers star in Dr. Strangelove, convinced that his comic zest as Quilty had made Lolita a success. According to Terry Southern, Kubrick groused about this decree.23 But Sellers was crucial to the movie, as Kubrick must have quickly realized. In a tour de force, Sellers played three characters: the nuclear theorist Strangelove, the American President Merkin Muffley, and British officer Lieutenant Mandrake. Mandrake, stiff upper lip and oh-so-British, and Muffley, a liberal egghead modeled on Adlai Stevenson, are the movie’s straight men. At first Sellers played Muffley with a bad cold, blowing his nose and sniffling incessantly, but Kubrick reined him in. Muffley blandly embodies humanist normality, his plainness spectacularly overshadowed by the loonies crowding around him.
Dr. Strangelove is probably Sellers’s most memorable film role. It’s certainly his most frightening. Strangelove speaks in a herky-jerky rhythm that shifts between serpentlike cooing and impulsive shouts forced out through gritted teeth. His hand itches to make the Heil Hitler salute, so he twists and pounds it into submission, struggling furiously. Strangelove’s rogue hand is a stupendous repurposing of Rotwang’s aggressively gloved fist in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and his wheelchaired body, first seen in ominous shadow, shows how the leather-and-steel glint of fascism has migrated into the American military think tank.
Despite Kubrick’s repeated denials, Strangelove seems clearly modeled on Henry Kissinger, author of a best seller about “limited” nuclear war, as well as on Kahn and nuclear physicist Edward Teller. These men were all Jewish, but Strangelove is a Nazi through and through, one-man proof that Hitler’s excited devotion to mass slaughter as a cleansing force lives on. “It’s a German name, Merkwürdigliebe,” someone tells Turgidson (a goofy literal-minded translation: the actual German title for Dr. Strangelove was the less bizarre-sounding Dr. Seltsam).
Kubrick’s Strangelove has a peculiar love for death on a vast scale, an old Nazi’s ecstasy over being the master who remains exempt from destruction. Facing the endless spectacle of the dead, he feels immortal. Who can watch the exhilarated Strangelove crowing “Mein Führer, I can walk” without feeling chills down the spine at this macabre rebirth? It could be the most penetrating moment in any movie, ever, summing up as it does our twentieth century’s heartless excitement at the mass death of other people.
Along with Strangelove, Muffley, and Mandrake, Sellers was supposed to play Major King Kong, commander of the B-52 bomber. Sellers was having trouble with Kong’s Texas accent, but he was in the role for a day. It would have been his fourth in the movie, but he sprained his ankle (or claimed that he had), and so could not climb the plane’s ladders. Kubrick turned to Slim Pickens, a former rodeo clown and stunt rider who had appeared in a number of westerns, including Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks. Pickens arrived in London in his Stetson hat and cowboy boots. When Southern asked him how he liked his hotel, Pickens replied, “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.”24
As Kong, Pickens relishes the prospect of “nucular combat, toe to toe with the Russkies.” Dogged and ingenious, he gets his bomber to swoop through to its destination, and so singlehandedly destroys the world. The killer ape rides again.
Kubrick came up with the genius idea of having Pickens ride a nuclear missile to world annihilation. Bronco-busting his bomb as it plummets, Major Kong feels the biggest thrill on earth, a wargasm to end all wargasms. (A Herman Kahn coinage: he once joked that people don’t have war plans but war-gasms.) Here Dr. Strangelove is again close to real history. One of the Enola Gay’s bombs had a picture of Rita Hayworth on it: mass destruction as the ultimate fuck.
Kubrick knew that Strangelove needed to have a sleek modern look, fitting for the atomic age. He chose Ken Adam, a German Jew from Berlin who was an RAF pilot during World War II, to design the movie. Kubrick had liked Adam’s futuristic-looking work on the James Bond flick Dr. No (1962). “I think I fell in love with him,” Adam said of Kubrick. “It was like a marriage.”25 Adam was, like Kubrick, Southern, and Sellers, dry, low-key and ironic. The four men, quizzical cynics all, fit well together.
In Dr. Strangelove, Adam created one of the most distinctive sets in movie history, a masterstroke of military modernism: the cavelike, triangular War Room with its vast round table in the middle. The table was covered with green baize, to suggest that the politicians and generals were playing poker with the fate of the world (a detail lost in the film’s exquisitely stark black-and-white photography). The set’s floor was black and shiny, as if to suggest the abyss. In later years Adam loved to tell the story that when Ronald Reagan became president he asked to see the War Room, having confused Dr. Strangelove’s set with reality.26
Dr. Strangelove cost just under two million dollars. The critics’ screening, scheduled for November 22, 1963, was canceled when President Kennedy was shot that day. “A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas” with the flight crew’s emergency kit (condoms, stockings, pep pills), Slim Pickens remarks. After November 22, “Dallas” became “Vegas.”
Kubrick made another, bigger change to Dr. Strangelove before its general release. He had spent two weeks filming a pie fight in the War Room, the intended conclusion of the picture. (The pie fight exists in a set of still photos taken by Weegee, the production’s still photographer, but I don’t know anyone who has seen the actual footage.) Kubrick decided that this was farce rather than satire, and inappropriate for the ending of Strangelove. Instead, after Strangelove rises from his wheelchair, the movie ends with a series of mushroom clouds and Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again,” a World War II era classic for British soldiers heading off to the front.
When Strangelove was first screened at Columbia, Kubrick was consumed with worry that the studio had no idea how to promote the movie and was planning to shrug it off as a wacky novelty flick. “I have the feeling distribution is totally fucked,” he gloomily confided to Southern. But the next day, Southern says, Kubrick was full of cheer, trumpeting, “I have learned . . . that Mo Rothman is a highly serious golfer.” (Rothman was one of the film’s producers.) He had an expensive electric golf cart delivered to Rothman’s Westchester Country Club, but much to Kubrick’s disappointment, Rothman refused to accept the gift. “The son of a bitch . . . said it would be ‘bad form,’ ” Kubrick reported to Southern. “Can you imagine Mo Rothman saying that? His secretary must have taught him that phrase!”27
“I think that the film will be grotesquely successful everywhere,” James Mason wrote to Kubrick from Malibu about Dr. Strangelove. “In the US of course much bile will be secreted & many will die frothing,” Mason added. To an extent this was true. The public relations firm that handled Strangelove remarked, “Among the Hollywood opinion-makers, there are at least three who are like the psychotic Air Force General of the film. They feel the film is a tool of the devil which plays into the hands of the Commies.”28
As Mason predicted, Strangelove was a huge hit, eventually grossing more than nine million dollars. Elvis Presley, who screened Strangelove at Graceland, was a big fan. The movie was nominated for four Academy Awards: best screenplay, best director, best actor (Sellers), and best picture—none of which it won. But Kubrick did pick up an award for best director from the New York Film Critics, the last time he would get such acclaim from New York’s critical establishment. Strangelove was his own favorite among his movies, Kubrick said at the time, followed by Lolita and Paths of Glory, in that order.29
Robert Brustein wrote the best review of Dr. Strangelove, responding to critics who saw it as just a gag, an irresponsible way to treat the end of the world. Brustein said that “Kubrick has managed to explode the right-wing position without making a single left-wing affirmation: the odor of the Thirties, which clung to even the best work of Chaplin, Welles, and Huston, has finally been disinfected here. Disinfected, in fact, is the stink of all ideological thinking. . . . Its only politics is outrage against the malevolence of officialdom.” “Humanitarians will find it inhuman,” Brustein added—but they’re wrong. Dr. Strangelove “releases, through comic poetry, those feelings of impotence and frustration that are consuming us all; and I can’t think of anything more important for an imaginative work to do.” Kubrick himself said that Brustein’s review of Strangelove was “the most perceptive and well-written one I have read.”30
In the wake of Strangelove’s success Kubrick got many speaking requests, but he nearly always declined. “I can’t do TV or radio without getting tongue-tied,” he told Herbert Mitgang of CBS News. He said to Gilbert Seldes in April 1964, “I never make speeches or write articles. I like to think I do this out of humility, but it is probably a form of the most supreme egotism. Seriously, I always feel there is something not quite right about film makers or writers who decide to become critics or lecturers.” “I am a lousy lecturer, I avoid all speaking engagements, TV shows, etc.,” he wrote to the Actors Studio, turning down an invitation to do a workshop for young film directors.31
Kubrick also slighted the New Left, ignoring a request from Todd Gitlin of SDS to appear at their conference. The antinuclear war organization SANE offered Kubrick its Eleanor Roosevelt Peace Award, which he refused. Kubrick didn’t want Dr. Strangelove to be labeled “a peace group effort,” though he “obviously share[d] most of [SANE’s] views and objectives,” he said. Kubrick did enjoy seeing a Toronto Daily Star cartoon of Barry Goldwater as Dr. Strangelove, and he asked for a copy of Lyndon Johnson’s anti-Goldwater campaign commercial with a child picking daisies.32
Since the beginning of the sixties, Kubrick had been turning down offers to write bylined pieces for the press. In a letter to Thomas Fryer from August 1964, he explained, “It’s really not possible to say what you think about critics, distributors, actors, etc., etc. with any honesty, without sounding far too misanthropic for the sensitive feelings of one’s fellow human beings.”33
A taste of what Kubrick meant is the rough draft of an undated piece called “Focus + Sound,” in which he complains that “the movie industry is still at the mercy of a projectionist” who can’t tell from where he sits that the movie is out of focus. Kubrick describes going to the movies and asking to see the theater manager about a badly out-of-focus projection. The manager, he writes, is normally “locked into an office, which requires a complicated series of buzzers. . . . After a lot of buzzing, phoning and waiting a little door usually opens and a very suspicious looking man looks up from a very small desk covered with papers.” The manager would then tell Kubrick, “It can’t be out of focus, it’s pre-focused,” or “It’s a bad print.”34
Kubrick’s mantra when dealing with theater managers in later years, Warner Bros producer Julian Senior remembered, was “It’s as easy to do it right as it is to do it wrong.” He would have better success in controlling the screening of his films after A Clockwork Orange, when he insisted that European theaters use the correct 1.66 lenses to project the movie. His assistants got used to calling up and visiting movie theaters to make sure that there were no catastrophic glitches when a Kubrick film was shown. Senior recalls that “Stanley would say [to the theaters], ‘Don’t you understand? This is not just for my movie, but for everybody’s movie.’ ”35
In the spring of 1964, basking in Strangelove’s success, the Kubricks moved to a Lexington Avenue double penthouse at East 84th Street. Stanley was enjoying family life. In a letter to Martin Russ from August 1964, he described a talk with his five-year-old daughter Anya, who insisted to her father that she be allowed to go to lunch with a seven-year-old boy at a restaurant across the street. Kubrick had to argue with her for forty-five minutes, he reported to Russ, but he won. These are the rules of the game, he jokingly added: if he didn’t stop her from going to lunch at five she might be dating at nine.36 Like her father, Anya was, it seems, a steady, determined arguer who knew what she wanted.
Looking for a project to follow Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick read voraciously. A list of his books compiled in the early sixties includes The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, the Kama Sutra, Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, The Book of Meat Cooking, How to Succeed with Women by Shepherd Mead, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Deterrent or Defense by B. H. Liddell Hart, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and Now It Can Be Told by Leslie Groves. There are books by Rabelais, Italo Svevo, Colette, “Philip Wroth” (Letting Go), and, of course, Herman Kahn.37
One oddball book on Kubrick’s reading list was The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger. In the summer of 1964 Kubrick initiated a lengthy correspondence with Ettinger, writing to him in August that “95% of the people” he told about the book had a “blocked-up” response to Ettinger’s scheme for making humans immortal by freezing and eventually reanimating them. “I suppose that in order to consider immortality [t]he[y] must first admit death,” Kubrick continued, “and this is something which is apparently not often accomplished.” He added, “Incidentally, did you know that John Paul Jones was buried in a lead casket filled with alcohol? I wonder if he had some scheme in mind.”38
Kubrick was intrigued by but skeptical about Ettinger’s immortality plan. “I think you tend to gloss over the banal difficulties. It’s almost impossible to get a sink repaired,” he wrote to Ettinger.39 Kubrick’s interest in immortality would develop into 2001, where a man is finally transfigured into a godlike infant with powers far beyond Strangelove’s.
In June 1964, Kubrick turned down Columbia Pictures’ offer of a two-film contract. Among the twenty-three pages of notes he took on the contract is this one: “I must have complete total final annihilating artistic control over the picture.” The studio would be allowed sway only over the budget and the choice of the two principal actors. He also wrote, “I do not agree under any circumstances to be required to make any changes or revisions of the script, the picture or my style of combing my hair when ordered by Columbia.”40 His next movie would be Kubrick’s greatest demonstration so far of total artistic control. In Strangelove he blew up the world. In 2001, he would create a cosmos unlike any seen before in film, sublime and exhilarating beyond our moviegoing dreams.
