On Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:53:33 -0500, Mitchell Holman
wrote:

"MWB" wrote in news:480118d5$0$20196
:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcW_Ygs6hm0

Major Kong riding the bomb



Mark




I remember hearing that the movie was a standard
"Fail Safe" project that ran out of money and Kubrick
picked up the screenplay cheap and turned it into,
well, Dr Strangelove.


From

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Str..._Love_the_Bomb

Novel and screenplay

Kubrick on the set of Dr. Strangelove.Kubrick started with nothing but a vague
idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident, building on the widespread
Cold War fear for survival.[12] While doing in-depth research for the planned
film, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and unstable "Balance of
terror" existing between nuclear powers and its intrinsicaly paradoxical
character. At Kubrick's request, Alistair Buchan (the head of the Institute for
Strategic Studies), recommended the thriller novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter
George.[18] Kubrick was impressed with the book, which had also been praised by
game theorist and future Nobel Prize in Economics winner Thomas Schelling in an
article written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and reprinted in The
Observer,[19] and immediately bought the film rights.[20]

Kubrick, in collaboration with George, started work on writing a screenplay
based on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some brief
consultations with Schelling and, later, Herman Kahn.[21] In following the tone
of the book, Stanley Kubrick originally intended to film the story as a serious
drama. However, as he later explained during interviews, the comedy inherent in
the idea of mutual assured destruction became apparent as he was writing the
first draft of the film's script. Kubrick stated:

My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on
the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine
the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either
absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things
seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.[22]

After deciding to turn the film into a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry
Southern as a co-writer. The choice was influenced by reading Southern's comic
novel The Magic Christian (1959), which Kubrick had received as a gift from
Peter Sellers.[8] Sellers is also sometimes considered an uncredited co-writer,
as he changed many lines by way of improvisation.

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