Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964): trivia & fun facts

Fun facts

• Slim Pickens, an established character actor and veteran of many Western films, was eventually chosen to replace Sellers as Major Kong after Sellers' injury.
• For the War Room, Ken Adam first designed a two-level set which Kubrick initially liked, only to decide later that it was not what he wanted.
• It is loosely based on the thriller novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George, who wrote the screenplay with Kubrick and Terry Southern.
• The black-and-white cinematography was by Gilbert Taylor, and the film was edited by Anthony Harvey and an uncredited Kubrick.
• Kubrick pleaded with him, and he asked the screenwriter Terry Southern (who had been raised in Texas) to record a tape with Kong's lines spoken in his accent; Sellers then practiced using Southern's tapes.
• After deciding to make the film a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer in late 1962.
• The choice was influenced by reading Southern's comic novel The Magic Christian, which Kubrick had received as a gift from Peter Sellers, and which itself became a Sellers film in 1969.
• The website's consensus reads: "Stanley Kubrick's brilliant Cold War satire remains as funny and razor-sharp today as it was in 1964."
• The film was selected as the 2nd best comedy of all time in a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by the BBC in 2017.
• Sellers drew inspiration for the role from Adlai Stevenson, a former Illinois governor who was the Democratic candidate for the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections and the U.N. ambassador during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• One of the most celebrated of all film comedies, in 1998, Time Out conducted a reader's poll and Dr. Strangelove was voted the 47th greatest film of all time.
• Entertainment Weekly voted it at No. 14 on their list of 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. in 2002, it was ranked as the 5th best film in Sight & Sound poll of best films.
• In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked it 26th in its list of the best American films (in the 2007 edition, the film ranked 39th), and in 2000, it was listed as number three on its list of the funniest American films.
• Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, paranoid commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, which is part of the Strategic Air Command.

Source: Wikipedia

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