Terry Southern on Stanley Kubrick

Dr. Strangelove (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)

Writer Terry Southern was hired by Stanley Kubrick to make a satire out of a screenplay originally based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George. Released as Dr. Strangelove (1964), the movie takes us into the war room of a certain President Merkin Muffley, to reveal a military culture gone berserk, as its leaders cheerfully prepare for the imminent end of the world.

Kubrick's examination of Cold War unease is one of the most biting satires ever produced in Hollywood. The movie is set at the height of Cold War hostilities and centres on a deranged US general (played by Sterling Hayden) who, frustrated by his sexual impotence, plots to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a disparate coalition of political leaders makes a last-ditch effort to avert apocalypse. Peter Sellers plays three separate parts, including Dr. Strangelove, a weapons specialist with Nazi sympathies, while George C. Scott stands out as a hawkish general. The film was initially intended to be a dramatic examination of the Cold War (based on Peter George's book Red Alert), but Kubrick determined that it would be more successful as a parody. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a subversive masterpiece that established Kubrick as an unmatched stylist and bitter ironist. 

The moment in which an air force major (played by Slim Pickens) rides atop a falling nuclear weapon is one of the film’s most lasting images. Originally, the film concluded with a lavish pie fight within the War Room. The section was omitted, and the rewritten conclusion depicts a sequence of nuclear explosions set to Vera Lynn's iconic World War II song "We'll Meet Again." 

Dr. Strangelove's development was hampered by a plagiarism action involving the 1964 picture Fail Safe, which was based on a book similar to Red Alert, and the fact that the picture's premiere was initially scheduled for Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was killed.

Kubrick deftly weaves social critique onto an otherwise straightforward Cold War narrative. Kubrick clearly underlines a sense of dramatic irony in practically every scene via staging and language, most notably in the Strategic Air Command's slogan, "Peace is Our Profession,"

Kubrick deftly incorporates this lethal irony to demonstrate what occurs when communication is disrupted. Fundamentally, the tragedy is the loss of discourse during translation, which invites the question: Who is responsible? What is both funny and distressing about the film’s escalation into nuclear annihilation is that many of the film's ill-advised scenarios (such as the mishandled hotline between President Muffley and Premier Kissov) might have been prevented with appropriate planning and technology. Kubrick, however, does not underplay its baleful repercussions. By portraying caricatures of powerful characters, Kubrick skillfully suggests to the audience his own cynical views of society’s leaders: powerful men who are tragically out of touch with reality and whose paranoia will eventually destroy the world. Gens. Ripper and Turgidson exemplify this craziness. Ripper believes the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans, while Turgidson asserts that a coordinated preemptive attack would restrict reprisal to a "modest" 20 million American deaths. As the adult men quarrel in the War Room, Kubrick wrestles with a world gone mad, warning cogently against naive reliance on a system that may result in destruction and chaos. 

While the Cold War’s immediate terrors have mostly subsided since the debut of "Dr. Strangelove," Kubrick's disturbing images implying the inevitability of nuclear war can nevertheless strike fear and dread – even today. Kubrick consistently infuses "Dr. Strangelove" with contradictory feelings of exhilaration and terror, patriotic enthusiasm and troubling hate, until the film's terrifying conclusion. As the soothing verses of Vera Lynn's optimistic World War II anthem "We'll Meet Again" plays on the soundtrack, coordinated scenes of nuclear explosions fill the screen, a disturbing vision of darkness unleashed. 

The following extract is taken from an interview with Terry Southern by Lee Hill in which Southern discusses his experience of working with Stanley Kubrick.

What was the status of the ‘Dr. Strangelove’ script before Stanley Kubrick decided to hire you in the fall of 1962?

When Kubrick and Peter George first began to do the script, they were trying to stick to the melodrama in George’s book, Red Alert [published under the pseudonym ‘Peter Bryant’... There was an outline. They didn’t go into a treatment but went straight into a script. They had a few pages and in fact had started shooting, but in a very tentative way. Kubrick realized that it was not going to work. You can’t do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or boy–meets–girl way. You have to do it in some way that reflects your awareness that it is important and serious. It has to be a totally different treatment, and black humor is the way to go. That was Kubrick’s decision.

When you first got together with Kubrick, did you start changing the tone of the script right away?

Yeah, after the first day, at our first meeting, he told me what the situation was. All those things that I’ve told you were his very words. ‘It’s too important to be treated in the conventional way. It’s unique! The end of the world is surely a unique thing, so forget about the ordinary treatment of subject and go for something like a horror film.’ He decided to use humor. The flavor that attracted him in my novel The Magic Christian could be effective in this new approach. He would talk about the mechanics of making it totally credible and convincing in terms of the fail-safe aspect and then how to make that funny. And the way you make it funny, because the situation is absurd, is by dealing with it in terms of the dialogue and characters.

I’m curious about the day-to-day working relationship with Kubrick as you wrote the film from the preproduction period through the actual shooting.

Well, after my first day in London when he told me what he had in mind, I got settled into a hotel room not far from where he lived in Kensington. That night, I wrote the first scene, and then he picked me up at four-thirty the next morning in a limo. The limo was a big Rolls or Bentley. We rode in the backseat with the light on. There was this desk that folded down. It was very much like a train compartment. It was totally dark outside. If it got light, we would pull the shades down. He would read the script pages; then we would rewrite them and prepare them for shooting when we got to the studio, which was about an hour to an hour–and–a–half drive depending on the fog.

Kubrick is notorious for his organizational mania.

Yes, he loved nothing so much than to go into stationery stores and buy gadgets and organizational aids.

You hear all these fantastic stories about how Kubrick lives. Did you visit his home much when you were in London?

Yes, several times. He has a castlelike structure, a grand old mansion, which has this two–projector screening room. It has electric fences and security devices. It has everything except a moat. He’s super private because he lives for his children. He lives in comfort and luxury in almost total isolation.

Peter Sellers was going to play all four parts originally, including the Texan bombardier. I understand you coached Sellers on his accent.

The financing of the film was based almost 100 percent on the notion that Sellers would play multiple roles. About a week before shooting, he sent us a telegram saying he could not play a Texan, because he said it was one accent he was never able to do. Kubrick asked me to make a tape of a typical Texan accent. When Sellers arrived on the set, he plugged into this Swiss tape recorder with huge, monster earphones, and listened to the tape I made. He looked ridiculous, but he mastered the accent in about ten minutes. Then Sellers sprained his ankle and couldn’t make the moves going up and down the ladder in the bomb bay. So he was out of that part. The doctor told him he couldn’t do it. Then it was a question of replacing him. Stanley had set such store by Sellers’s acting that he felt he couldn’t replace him with just another actor. He wanted an authentic John Wayne. The part had been written with Wayne as the model.

       

Did Kubrick ever try to get Wayne to play the role?

Wayne was approached, and dismissed it immediately. Stanley hadn’t been in the States for some time, so he didn’t know anything about television programs. He wanted to know if I knew of any suitable actors on TV. I said there was this very authentic, big guy who played on Bonanza, named Dan Blocker. Big Hoss. Without seeing him, Kubrick sent off a script to his agent. Kubrick got an immediate reply: ‘It is too pinko for Mr. Blocker.’ Stanley then remembered Slim Pickens from One-Eyed Jacks [1961], which he [had] almost directed for Marlon Brando, until Brando acted in such a weird way that he forced Stanley out.

When Pickens was hired and came to London, wasn’t that the first time he had ever been out of the States?

Yes, in fact it was the first time he had ever been anywhere outside the rodeo circuit as a clown or the backlots of Hollywood. Stanley was very concerned about Slim being in London for the first time and asked me to greet him. I got some Wild Turkey from the production office and went down to the soundstage. It was only ten in the morning, so I asked Slim if it was too early for a drink. He said, ‘It’s never too early for a drink.’ So I poured out some Wild Turkey in a glass and asked him if he had gotten settled in his room. ‘Hell, it doesn’t take much to make me happy. Just a pair of loose shoes, a tight pussy, and a warm place to shit.’ One of Kubrick’s assistants, a very public-school type, couldn’t believe his ears, but went ‘Ho, ho, ho’ anyway.

Finally, I took Slim over to the actual set where we were shooting. I left him alone for a few minutes to talk to Stanley. While we were standing there talking, Stanley went, ‘Look there’s James Earl Jones on a collision course with Slim. Better go over and introduce them.’ James Earl Jones knew that Pickens had just worked with Brando. Jones was impressed and asked Pickens about the experience of working with Brando. ‘Well, I worked with Marlon Brando for six months, and in that time, I never saw him do one thing that wasn’t all man and all white.’ Slim didn’t even realize what he was saying. I glanced at James Earl Jones, and he didn’t crack [a smile]. Slim replacing Sellers worked out well because, unbeknownst to me at the time, the actor that was playing the co-pilot [Jack Creley] was taller and stockier than Sellers. Whereas Slim was about the same size [as the co-pilot] and more convincingly fulfilled the intention of this larger-than-life Texan.

To what extent did Peter Sellers’ improvisation depart from the shooting script?

It was minimal. It wasn’t like Lolita, where he improvised a great deal. His improvisational bits in Strangelove were very specific. One scene that comes to mind is when [Sterling] Hayden goes into the bathroom to kill himself, Peter’s lines are: ‘Oh, go into the bathroom and have a brushup . . . good idea.’ Sellers changed that to: ‘Splash a bit of cold water on the back of the neck . . .,’ which is more of a British thing. That was good.

What was Columbia’s reaction to this subversive black comedy that the studio had helped to finance?

Columbia was embarrassed by the picture and tried to get people to see Carl Foreman’s The Victors instead. At the time we thought we were going to be totally wiped out. People would call up the box office and be told there were no seats for Strangelove and asked if they would like to see The Victors instead. Gradually, the buzz along the rialto built word of mouth in our favor.

Wasn’t there some falling-out between Kubrick and yourself over screen credit following the film’s release?

Stanley’s obsession with the auteur syndrome – that his films are by Stanley Kubrick – overrides any other credit at all. Not just writing but anything. He’s like Chaplin in that regard. That’s the reason why he rarely uses original music in his films. [Since I had] written this great best-seller, Candy, which was number one on the New York Times best-seller list for something like twenty-one weeks, my reputation eclipsed Stanley’s; so I got total credit for all the Strangelove success in Life, the New York Times, and other publications. The credit I was getting was just so overwhelming and one sided that naturally Stanley was freaking out. He took out an ad in Variety saying I was only one of the three writers on the film, the other two being Peter George, and himself. He just lashed out. But it was like an overnight thing. I wrote a letter to the New York Times explaining that there was no mystery involved, and that I was brought in to just help with the screenplay.

Terry Southern on Easy Rider

Easy Rider (Directed by Dennis Hopper)

Terry Southern was an influential American short story writer, novelist and screenwriter noted for his distinctive satirical style. Southern collaborated on screenplays for several popular movies of the 1960s, including Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Loved One (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1966), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1968), and End of the Road (1969). The success of these films helped define the 1960s youth counterculture.

Easy Rider, 1969, is a key film of the American counterculture movement, now considered a rebellious harbinger for its message of nonconformism and its reflection of late 1960s societal values and conflicts in the United States. It contributed to the birth of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a style of cinema centred on low budgets and avant-garde filmmakers emerged that was markedly different from the classic Hollywood studio approach. 

Wyatt (Peter Fonda, who also produced) and Billy (Dennis Hopper, who also directed) are purportedly on their way to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but in truth they are on a quest for freedom and purpose in life. They meet a colourful assortment of characters along the road, including George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), an establishment lawyer with a propensity for drink. The individuals they encounter and the circumstances that ensue mirror the best and worst of contemporary American society and reflect on subjects that were especially popular at the time, ranging from hippies and communes to racism, war, religious tolerance, and drug usage. 

Many of the scenes are raw and seemingly inconsequential—the film's original cut came in at nearly four hours. Although Easy Rider is now viewed as a period piece, albeit a significant one, that reflected simplistic, though widespread, beliefs of the day, with its dichotomy into the countercultural or mainstream, the film's bleak conclusion—in which Wyatt and Billy are violently attacked by guys in a pickup truck— still retains its power to shock. The popularity of low-budget films transformed filmmaking and accelerated the demise of Hollywood's studio system. Additionally, the film's usage of popular rock tunes in lieu of original music became a trend that other directors quickly copied. Easy Rider further established Nicholson as a star, earning him an Academy Award nomination in the process.

Peter Fonda is credited with the concept for Easy Rider while he was working with legendary low budget producer Roger Corman. Fonda pitched his proposal to his friend Dennis Hopper and they proceeded to bring in screenwriter Terry Southern, who had worked with Stanley Kubrick on the darkest of dark comedies, Doctor Strangelove. Southern brought his literary pedigree and a certain degree of legitimacy to the picture. By giving their protagonists the names of two legendary gunslingers (Wyatt and Billy), they created a type of reverse, updated Western: instead of two heroes travelling west on horseback, they had two motorbike antiheroes. Rip Torn was the leading contender for the supporting part of an alcoholic lawyer who joins them on the journey, but he withdrew from the movie after an alleged confrontation with the volatile Hopper in a restaurant, and Jack Nicholson was given the opportunity to take centre stage. Filming was done on location, mostly with natural light, with cinematographer László Kovács creating the visual spectacle.

Dennis Hopper spent several months editing the material down to two hours and forty-five minutes, only to find that against his desire and with the encouragement of Fonda and the production team, the film was reduced to its current length of 95 minutes. 

Easy Rider cost less than half a million dollars to produce but grossed an impressive sixty million worldwide, the vast bulk of which came from American domestic cinemas, such was its appeal to the nascent youth movement. Hopper received the Cannes award for best first film, while the Academy gave it two nominations (for Nicholson's supporting performance and Fonda, Hopper, and Southern's script). Unfortunately, the contentious authorship issue generated by the founders' egos, temperaments, and stubbornness produced a schism between Fonda and Hopper that they never overcame. Despite this tempestuous backdrop, Easy Rider is still viewed as a historically significant picture, as one of the first independent films to generate an impact that resonated across Hollywood in the years that followed. Fonda and Nicholson established themselves as major actors, Hopper established himself as a serious director and a model for independent filmmakers, while its cultural impact was widely felt. Easy Rider is a film of its time, a moment in American history that tapped into the zeitgeist of a divided, uncertain nation.

In the following excerpt from an interview conducted with Southern that appeared in the Paris Review in 1996 Terry Southern discusses making Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper.

What was the real story of Easy Rider? There are so many versions of how, and who created it.

If Den Hopper improvises a dozen lines and six of them survive the cutting-room floor, he’ll put in for screenplay credit. That’s the name of the game for Den Hopper. Now it would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to the film – but, by George, he manages to do it every time. The precise way it came down was that Dennis and Peter (Fonda) came to me with an idea. Peter was under contract to A.I.P. for several motorcycle movies, and he still owed them one. Dennis persuaded him to let him (Denis) direct the next one, and, under the guise of making an ordinary A.I.P. potboiler they would make something interesting and worthwhile – which I would write. So they came to my place on Thirty-sixth Street in New York, with an idea for a story – a sort of hippy dope-caper. Peter was to be the actor-producer. Dennis the actor-director, and a certain yours truly, the writer.

I was able to put them up there – in a room, incidentally, later immortalized by the sojourn of Dr. W.S. Benway (Burroughs). So we began smoking dope in earnest and having a nonstop story conference. The initial idea had to do with a couple of young guys who are fed up with the system, want to make one big score and split. Use the money to buy a boat in Key West and sail into the sunset was the general notion, and indeed already salted to be the film’s final poetic sequence. We would occasionally dictate to an elderly woman typist who firmly believed in the arrival, and presence everywhere of the inhabitants of Venus; so she would talk about this. Finally I started taping her and then had her rap about it, how they were everywhere – Jack Nicholson’s thing with Easy Rider was based on that.

So you can see that during these conferences the hippy dope-caper premise went through quite a few changes. The first notion was that they not be bikers but a duo of daredevil car drivers barnstorming around the U.S. being exploited by a series of unscrupulous promoters until they were finally disgusted enough to quit. Then one day the dope smoke cleared long enough to remember that Peter’s commitment was for a motorcycle flick, and we switched over pronto. It wasn’t until the end that it took on a genuinely artistic dimension. . . when it suddenly evolved into an indictment of the American redneck, and his hatred for anything that is remotely different from himself… and then somewhat to the surprise of Den Hopper (imitates Hopper in Apocalypse Now): ‘You mean kill ‘em both? Hey, man, are you outta your gourd?!’ I think for a minute he was still hoping they would somehow beat the system. Sail into the sunset with a lot of loot and freedom. But of course, he was hip enough to realize, a minute later, that it (their death) was more or less mandatory.

Are you saying that there was no improvisation in the film?

No, no, I’m, saying that the improvisation was always within the framework of the obligations of the scene – a scene which already existed.

Then how did Dennis and Peter get included in the screenplay credits?

After they had seen a couple of screenings of it on the coast, I got a call from Peter. He said that he and Dennis liked the film so much they wanted to be in on the screenplay credits. Well, one of them was the producer and the other was the director so there was no way the Writers Guild was going to allow them to take a screenplay credit unless I insisted. Even then they said there was supposed to be a “compulsory arbitration” because too often producers and directors will muscle themselves into a screenplay credit through some under-the-table deal with the writer. They (the WGA) said I would be crazy to allow it and wanted to be assured that I wasn’t being coerced or bribed in any way, because they hate the idea of these “hyphenates” – you know, writer-producer, director-producer… because of that history of muscle. Anyway, we were great friends at the time, so I went along with it without much thought. I actually did it out of a sense of camaraderie. Recently, in Interview, Dennis pretty much claimed credit for the whole script.

Writers appear to be treated like the lowest of the breed in the film biz.

Yes. Except we still have persuasion.