Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released in 1964 as Stanley Kubrick’s 8th feature film as director. A pitch-black satire about Cold War nuclear paranoia, the film features Peter Sellers in three roles, an ensemble cast including George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens, and one of the most memorable and influential sets in cinema. Receiving four Oscar nominations on release, the film has since been recognised as one of the greatest comedies ever made. We’re telling that behind the scenes story now with some huge facts about Dr. Strangelove. And if you want even more, listen to our full podcast episode on the film.

1. The director became obsessed with nuclear war

The producer on Stanley Kubrick’s previous three films had been James B. Harris. Harris said that Kubrick had become consumed by Cold War paranoia about nuclear conflict and was determined that his next film would tackle the subject. In researching it, Kubrick read around 50 books on nuclear warfare and consulted the Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based security and defence think tank that is still operating today. Its head, Alastair Buchan, recommended he read Red Alert, a 1958 thriller novel by Peter George. A Nobel Prize-winning political economist called Thomas Schelling had also praised Red Alert in an article for The Observer, and Kubrick spoke to him about the book as well.

Impressed by what he read, Kubrick bought the film rights to Red Alert for just $3,500 and, when James B. Harris left the project to pursue directing, Kubrick took on the role of producer himself. He approached Columbia Pictures for financing and they agreed to put up the $1.8 million budget on one very specific condition: Peter Sellers had to play four roles. The stipulation came from Kubrick’s previous film Lolita (1962), where Sellers had played two roles, and Columbia believed that was the reason for the film’s success. Kubrick later called it a “crass and grotesque stipulation,” but he agreed.

2. The screenplay started as a serious thriller

After buying the rights to Red Alert, Kubrick asked Peter George if he wanted to co-write the adaptation with him. They began developing a screenplay in 1962, initially titled Edge of Doom. Like the novel, it was a serious thriller about the threat of nuclear warfare. Other working titles included On The Edge of Destruction, The Delicate Balance of Terror, Wonderful Bomb, Dr. Doomsday or: How to Start World War III Without Even Trying, and the rather more colourful Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus.

3. The material was too absurd to play straight

Kubrick later said that while writing the screenplay, he kept having to change plot points or dilute them because presenting them as serious was simply too farcical. He decided the best approach was to lean into the comedy and changed the tone from thriller to satire. This creative shift came in late 1962 and prompted Kubrick to hire author Terry Southern as co-writer. Southern had published a comedy novel in 1959 called The Magic Christian, about a billionaire who uses his wealth to play elaborate pranks on people. Peter Sellers had given the book to Kubrick as a gift, and Kubrick thought its tone was close to what he wanted for Dr. Strangelove. Southern flew to London and worked directly with Kubrick for two months. According to Southern’s son, Nile, Kubrick’s brief to Terry was usually “what’s the most outrageous thing this character can say and still be credible?”

Also, The Magic Christian was later adapted into a film in 1969, starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.

4. The new writer’s involvement caused a rift

Terry Southern coming in to rewrite the screenplay led to a falling out between Kubrick and Peter George. In 1964, Life Magazine published an article about Southern calling him Dr. Strangelove’s principal author. George was furious and wrote a letter to the magazine, which they published the following month. In it, George pointed out that he had written the original novel and spent ten months on the script, and that Southern had “fittingly received a screenplay credit in third place behind Mr. Kubrick and myself.”

5. The Fail Safe legal battle

There was another complication. Four years after Peter George wrote Red Alert, two authors called Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler published a more successful novel about nuclear war called Fail Safe. When that was optioned for a film adaptation, Kubrick and George sued, claiming that Fail Safe had plagiarised Red Alert. The lawsuit didn’t stop the release of Fail Safe as a film, but did push it back by nine months, meaning it came out well after Dr. Strangelove. As part of the settlement, Columbia Pictures agreed to buy Fail Safe as well, so the studio ended up producing both films. Directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, Fail Safe (1964) became a hit of its own – it holds a 93% critics score and 91% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes today.

6. Major characters were changed from the novel

Despite George’s objections to the writing credits, there were some significant changes from his book to the finished film. Most notably, the title character – former Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove – wasn’t in the novel at all. He was created for the film after Southern was hired. In earlier drafts, the character was called Von Klutz. Other characters had their names changed too: Major Howard became Group Captain Mandrake, Brigadier Quinten became General Jack D. Ripper, and the unnamed US President from the novel became Merkin Muffley.

7. Kubrick drew on real-life nuclear paranoia

Several elements of the script were taken directly from reality. The idea of a Doomsday Machine (that would launch an automated counter-strike in the event of a nuclear attack) had been conceived by an American physicist called Herman Khan. Kubrick spoke to Khan and asked how he would build such a device. Khan gave him the exact specifications he would use, and that’s what ended up in the film. This research was happening around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which was a significant influence on the production.

General Ripper’s conspiracy theory about fluoridation was also rooted in fact. In the 1950s and 1960s, a far-right political organisation in the US called the John Birch Society promoted a conspiracy theory that fluoride in the water supply was a Communist plot to weaken American children. Some US states actually refused to adopt water fluoridation as a result.

8. Kubrick originally had a very different opening in mind

An early draft of the script begins with aliens in outer space coming across the remains of a destroyed Earth. The story then flashes back to take us into the main narrative and explain what happened. The idea was dropped, but Kubrick’s interest in extraterrestrial life clearly didn’t go away: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was already bubbling away in his mind.

9. The opening credits created the film’s visual identity

The opening credits are a montage of B-52 bombers refuelling midair, scored with an instrumental version of popular song “Try a Little Tenderness.” The sequence was designed by Pablo Ferro, a graphic designer known for creating TV commercials with quick-cutting styles and large, bold text. Kubrick wanted that energy to define the visual identity of Dr. Strangelove, so he hired Ferro. The tall, thin, hand-drawn title font is striking and creates an immediate sense of the film’s personality.

Incidentally, there is a small error in the titles: when crediting Peter George’s book, it reads “base on Red Alert” rather than “based on,” missing the ‘d’. Whether this was intentional or not has varying reports.

10. The refuelling footage has a sexual subtext

The idea to use footage of the bombers came from a conversation between Kubrick and Ferro. Kubrick asked Ferro what he thought about human beings and technology, and Ferro said that all machines invented by men have a sexual aspect to them. It made Kubrick think of the image of B-52s refuelling in midair, but he knew filming it would be difficult. Ferro suggested that the Air Force would have been so proud of the technology that they would likely have filmed the refuelling process from every angle. He was right, and they were able to source stock footage, which is what we see in the film.

The sexual theme, established in this opening sequence, runs through the entire movie and is the reason the credits are scored with “Try a Little Tenderness,” a song written by Harry M. Woods, Jimmy Campbell, and Reg Connelly and first recorded in 1932 by Jack Payne & His Band. The version used in the film was arranged by Laurie Johnson, who composed the score. (Otis Redding’s soulful classic version of the song was released in 1966).

11. The star couldn’t leave London

Peter Sellers played another part in the production beyond his acting roles. With the film set mostly in the United States, Kubrick had planned to shoot there and had been scouting locations. Once Sellers was cast, however, he told Kubrick he couldn’t leave London as he was in the middle of a divorce from his first wife, Anne Howe. This is why Kubrick switched to filming at Shepperton Studios in England. Following Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick would go on to film all of his remaining movies in England.

Then, shortly after Dr. Strangelove was released, Sellers married the Swedish actress Britt Ekland, just ten days after they first met.

12. Sellers got paid more than half the budget

Columbia had originally wanted Sellers to play four roles, not the three he ended up performing. The fourth was Major Kong, which we’ll come to later. Kubrick was comfortable with Sellers playing multiple characters, having seen what he could do on Lolita, and Sellers was by far the highest-paid member of the cast. He received $1 million for the film, which was roughly 56% of the entire production budget. There’s a famous Kubrick quote about Sellers’ salary: “I got three for the price of six.”

13. President Muffley was based on a real politician

Sellers took inspiration from real life for each of his three roles. He said that President Merkin Muffley was partly based on Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat candidate in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, who lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower both times. Stevenson was also the US Ambassador during the Cuban Missile Crisis, tying back to Kubrick’s real-world inspirations.

Sellers said Muffley’s midwestern accent was based on Stevenson’s voice and, with the politician being bald, Kubrick apparently wanted Sellers to shave his head for the role, but Sellers refused, so the makeup artist Stuart Freeborn created a bald cap instead. (Freeborn would later become famous for designing Yoda in the Star Wars films.)

When filming began, Sellers played Muffley as having a cold, blowing his nose and sniffling throughout. The crew kept cracking up, but Kubrick wanted Muffley to be a calm, rational foil for everybody else’s craziness, so he told Sellers to play it straighter. A couple of scenes where Muffley wipes his nose with a handkerchief survived from that earlier approach.

14. Mandrake drew on Sellers’ RAF experience

For Group Captain Mandrake, Sellers drew on his own military service. He had served in the RAF during World War II and had a reputation for impersonating his fellow officers. He said this was a direct influence on how he played the character. One small moment of improvisation also made it into the final cut: in Ripper’s office, when Mandrake talks about his injured leg, Sellers accidentally said “the string in my leg has gone” instead of “the thing in my leg has gone.” Sterling Hayden started to laugh, but Kubrick shouted to keep going. That’s the take in the film.

15. The title character was a composite of several real people

Dr. Strangelove was based on a number of real-life figures. The political scientist Henry Kissinger was an influence, as was scientist Edward Teller, known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Two American physicists, Herman Khan and John von Neumann, have been cited as influences as well. The primary inspiration, though, was Wernher von Braun, the former SS officer and Nazi rocket scientist who worked with the American government after the war and went on to become the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo 11 to the moon.

To create Strangelove’s distinctive voice, Sellers took inspiration from the film’s special photographic effects consultant, a man called Ascher Fellig. Originally from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Fellig was a famous street photographer in New York, better known by his nickname “Weegee”, earned for his supposedly spooky, Ouija board-like ability to arrive at crime scenes before anyone else. Fellig had a New York/Hungarian hybrid accent, and Sellers recorded him talking, then exaggerated it for the character.

The single black glove that Strangelove wears came from Sellers too. He said he had seen Kubrick handling lights on set wearing black leather gloves and asked if he could wear one as the character, though some accounts say it was Kubrick’s suggestion. The rest of Strangelove’s look, the sleek suit and the sunglasses worn indoors, was designed by Bridget Sellers, the film’s costume designer (and no relation to Peter).

16. Sellers improvised the famous phone call

One of the film’s best-known scenes is the telephone call between President Muffley and the Soviet Premier, Dmitri Kissoff. We only hear Muffley’s side of the conversation and Pamela Carlton, who worked in continuity as script supervisor, said the call was scripted in full, but Sellers would usually ignore it. For each take, he played the first line as written and then improvised the next ten minutes. Kubrick was famously resistant to improvisation, so his willingness to let Sellers go shows how highly he rated him. Classic lines like “It’s good to be fine” were all made up on the spot.

17. A key performer was playing Shylock when Kubrick found him

The character of General Buck Turgidson was based on General Curtis LeMay, who was Chief of Staff of the US Air Force at the time. LeMay was known for his extreme anti-Communist views and once said he wouldn’t be afraid to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union if he were president. General Ripper, meanwhile, was largely based on General Thomas S. Power, who succeeded LeMay. During a meeting about the possibility of war with Russia, somebody suggested limiting a nuclear attack to military targets rather than civilians, and Power reportedly said: “Why are we so concerned with saving lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards! At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.”

Kubrick had liked the idea of George C. Scott for Turgidson and went to see him in a Central Park production of The Merchant of Venice, where Scott was playing Shylock. He approached him afterwards and Scott agreed to take the part. James Earl Jones was also in that production, which is how Kubrick came to cast him as Lieutenant Lothar Zogg.

18. Kubrick used chess to control Scott

The director and actor had a tense relationship on set at times. They were both expert chess players, so Kubrick brought a chess board to the studio. He would play Scott between takes and beat him regularly. Kubrick’s wife, Christiane, later said this made Scott respect Kubrick more and gave Kubrick some control over him. According to Tracy Reed, who played Miss Scott in the film, George C. Scott would sit studying the board for 20 minutes before making a move. Kubrick would stroll over, make his move in a few seconds, and walk off. He won every game.

19. Kubrick tricked Scott into giving the performance he wanted

Scott wanted to play Turgidson as what he called “a dignified, well-intentioned extremist,” making him more of a tragic figure than a buffoon. Kubrick wanted the absurdity. To get his way, Kubrick asked Scott to perform exaggerated, over-the-top takes as “warm-ups” before the supposedly serious versions. He then used the warm-up takes in the finished film. When Scott saw the final cut, he was furious, felt betrayed, and vowed never to work with Kubrick again. He was true to his word and never did. Though in later years, Scott reportedly admitted that Kubrick had been right.

20. Turgidson’s fall was real

In the War Room, there’s a moment where Turgidson stumbles and falls over mid-sentence. It wasn’t in the script. George C. Scott genuinely tripped, but he stayed in character so convincingly that Kubrick kept it in the film. When we watch we see Scott doesn’t miss a beat, he simply gets up and carries on talking.

21. Kubrick considered Gene Kelly for the mad General

Kubrick reportedly considered Gene Kelly for the role of genocidal General Jack D. Ripper before turning to Sterling Hayden. Hayden had already worked with Kubrick on noir thriller The Killing (1956) and had recently retired from acting, not having made a film in five years. At the time, Hayden had apparently been living on a ferryboat in California, writing his autobiography. Kubrick convinced him to come back. When Hayden said, “You’ve got the wrong man to play the part of a general,” Kubrick replied: “That’s why I want you.”

22. Hayden had a remarkable military past

The actor had a real-life military background that gave him insight into characters like Ripper. During World War II, Hayden had worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA), ran guns, parachuted into Yugoslavia, and fought alongside Communist resistance fighters for thirteen months. Unlike Ripper, Hayden actually liked Communists and joined the Communist Party USA after the war ended.

Then, in 1951, during the McCarthy era, the FBI threatened custody of Hayden’s children, and he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming names. Among those he identified were Bea Williams, his mistress who had recruited him to the Party, and Robert Lees, a screenwriter whose Hollywood career was ended as a result. Hayden later said naming names was the one moment in his life he was truly ashamed of. That kind of moral complexity is likely another reason Kubrick wanted him for the role.

23. The B-52 set was almost entirely guesswork

The scenes aboard the B-52 bomber were filmed at Shepperton Studios, and the flight deck set was designed by production designer Ken Adam. At the time, the interior of a real B-52 was classified, so the production team couldn’t get access to it. The art director, Peter Murton, found a non-fiction book called Strategic Air Command by Mel Hunter that included information about US Air Force technology. The cover featured a partial shot of a B-52 cockpit, and based on that alone, they designed the entire set.

During filming, US Air Force personnel visited the B-52 set and told Kubrick it was almost 100% accurate. Even the CRM, the machine which verifies three-letter code messages, was a fictional creation that looked exactly like the real black box aboard a B-52. It apparently unnerved the Air Force visitors considerably and as a result, Ken Adam received a memo from Kubrick the next day asking him to confirm that all his research had come from legal sources. It had – they’d made most of it up. Adam was a former wartime pilot himself, which presumably helped.

24. There is just one woman in the film

Miss Scott, General Turgidson’s secretary, is played by Tracy Reed, the only woman in the entire film. Reed was the daughter of the actress Penelope Dudley-Ward and the stepdaughter of acclaimed director Carol Reed, whose credits include The Third Man (1949) and Oliver! (1968). Reed said she met Kubrick at a dinner with friends, and he asked her if she wanted to play the part, though he warned her she would be in a bikini for her only dialogue scene.

Reed also appears in one other moment. In the first scene aboard the bomber, Major Kong is reading a copy of Playboy, and the centrefold model is Miss Scott. Reed said Kubrick wanted to shoot her as a fully nude Playboy centrefold, but she refused. Instead, we see her lying on her front, covered by a real copy of Foreign Affairs magazine. That specific edition was from January 1963, and it contains a famous article written by Henry Kissinger about Cold War nuclear tensions. Even the magazine was chosen for a reason!

25. The film has one of the greatest sets in cinema

Ken Adam’s most famous piece of work on Dr. Strangelove is the War Room. Born Klaus Adam before his family fled Nazi Germany, Adam studied architecture at University College London, which led to a career as a production designer. He had worked on the first James Bond film Dr. No (1962), designing the nuclear reactor set, and Kubrick was impressed by that style for the War Room. (Adam went on to work on seven Bond films in total, including Goldfinger (1964), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and Moonraker (1979).)

Adam had heard Kubrick was difficult to work with, so said he was surprised when the director signed off his first War Room design immediately. A few weeks later, Kubrick came back and said it wasn’t going to work and the whole thing had to be redesigned. Adam had designed it on two levels, like the Dr. No set, but Kubrick asked what he was supposed to do with all the extras on the second level. Adam said he had to take some valium to calm himself down, and Kubrick then watched over his second design like a hawk, approving every detail.

The final War Room set was built in Studio B at Shepperton. It measured 130 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 35 feet high. The floor was made from formica, and the crew had to wear slippers to avoid scratching it. The centrepiece was a circular table, 22 feet in diameter. Over 10 miles of cables and 1,000 lightbulbs were used to light the board, and the whole set was constructed by over 150 workers. Air conditioning had to be installed because the lightbulbs were so hot they blistered the maps. And even though the film is in black and white, Kubrick told Adam he wanted the table covered in green felt, like a poker table. The idea was that the politicians are playing a high-stakes game of life and death with the fate of the world.

26. Adam found working with Kubrick “miserable”

The production designer said his working relationship with Kubrick revolved around a daily ritual: he drove Kubrick to and from Shepperton Studios every day in his Jaguar. He said at first this was useful because he quickly learned what Kubrick liked, but after a while it meant he was getting feedback on his work twice a day. He described it as “miserable.” On those daily drives, Kubrick wouldn’t let Adam drive above 30 miles per hour and when Kubrick later asked Adam to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Adam said no. He did eventually work with Kubrick again on Barry Lyndon (1975), but said the experience gave him a nervous breakdown that put him in hospital. Despite all of this, the great production designer said he and Kubrick always remained friends.

27. The editor was “sacked every day”

Anthony Harvey had been the editor on Lolita and Kubrick brought him back for Dr. Strangelove. Harvey said he came to work with Kubrick simply by calling him up and asking. Kubrick’s response was to interrogate him: “What kind of hours do you work? What time do you go to bed? Are you married? Do you go on holidays?” Harvey said Kubrick wanted somebody who was going to be there seven days a week, twenty-two hours a day. In interviews, Harvey said Kubrick would sack him almost daily, telling him to go home and not come back, only to greet him with a cheerful “Hi, Tony!”the next morning as though nothing had happened.

Anthony Harvey went on to become a director himself, most notably with historical drama The Lion in Winter (1968), starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.

28. The cinematographer covered many, many miles

By 1963, the film’s cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, was known as a master of documentary-style black-and-white photography. He had shot Seven Days to Noon (1950) for the Boulting Brothers and pioneered the use of bounced and reflected light to create a naturalistic look. He had also shot the special effects cinematography on The Dam Busters (1955), giving him extensive experience with airborne sequences.

Taylor said his experience wasn’t the only reason he was hired. Kubrick didn’t like flying, and he needed someone who could shoot aerial footage over the Arctic for the B-52 sequences. While Kubrick remained in pre-production, Taylor was in a B-17 Flying Fortress over Iceland, Greenland, and Northern Canada, filming all the aerial footage we see of the bomber in flight. He covered approximately 28,000 miles. The model of the B-52 was then filmed on top of that footage using rear projection visual effects work.

29. The camera crew were detained as suspected spies

Gilbert Taylor’s wife, Dee Vaughan, said that while shooting the aerial footage over Greenland, Taylor and his crew accidentally filmed a secret US military base. Two military planes appeared alongside them and forced them to land. They weren’t released until the military was convinced they weren’t Soviet spies. The conditions were harsh: filming inside the plane over the Arctic, the walls were so cold they would burn the crew’s fingers, and on one occasion the crew opened their cameras to find the film stock had turned to dust.

30. The DP knew how to handle Kubrick

Taylor said there was some tension between him and Kubrick, as Kubrick was extremely controlling. The director would shoot Polaroid images of setups to show Taylor how he wanted shots to look. Taylor said: “He’d ask ‘What do you think?’ I’d say, ‘It’s dreadful,’ and that’s how we got on… I sometimes felt as if his hand was on the brush and I was the paint coming off it!”

Taylor had a particular trick for managing Kubrick. He told a story about Kubrick visiting the B-17 just before they left to film the aerial shots. Kubrick was criticising everything, insisting the camera mountings were “too tight” and making constant demands. Knowing Kubrick didn’t like flying, Taylor asked the pilot to start the engine. The moment the engine fired up, Kubrick bolted out the door. Taylor then set the mountings up exactly as he’d had them before.

31. Major Kong was based on a real cowboy test pilot

The character of Major T. J. “King” Kong was based on Alvin “Tex” Johnston, the chief test pilot for Bell Aircraft and Boeing in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Kong in the film, Johnston flew wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson.

32. Peter Sellers couldn’t play Kong

As mentioned, Peter Sellers was originally contracted to play four roles, including Major Kong. From the start, though, he wasn’t keen. Before production began, he sent Kubrick a telegram: “Dear Stanley: I am 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.”

Co-writer Terry Southern was Texan, so he recorded all of Kong’s dialogue on tape for Sellers to practice against. It helped enough for Sellers to manage one day of filming as Kong, and there are behind-the-scenes photographs of Sellers in costume for the role, though no footage survives. Then, during production, disaster struck. Sellers fell from a ladder on the B-52 set and sprained his ankle. Doctors told Kubrick there was no way Sellers could continue in the physically demanding role.

33. A Hollywood heavyweight ignored a Kubrick request

The director set about replacing Sellers but wanted to keep the Texan persona for Kong, sending a telegram to western legend John Wayne asking if he wanted the part. Wayne never replied. Kubrick also approached Dan Blocker, the star of the western TV series Bonanza (1959–1973), but Blocker’s agent responded: “Thanks a lot, but the material is too pinko for Dan. Or anyone else we know for that matter.” (“Too pinko” essentially meant “too left-wing.”)

34. Kubrick turned to a real cowboy

Slim Pickens had started out in rodeo, working for twenty years as a rodeo clown before moving into movies. He had appeared in several westerns, including One-Eyed Jacks (1961), which is what brought him to Kubrick’s attention. Interestingly, that film was directed by Marlon Brando in his only directorial credit. The first person attached to direct it had actually been Kubrick, who pulled out to make Lolita.

Dr. Strangelove was shot in London, and Pickens had never travelled outside the United States. It took over a month to apply for and receive a passport, so his scenes were the last to be filmed. Kubrick apparently didn’t tell Pickens they were making a comedy. The actor was only shown the script for his own scenes and was directed to play the part completely straight. James Earl Jones said he initially thought Pickens was playing it method and staying in character all the time, before realising “no, that’s just him.”

35. Other casting near-misses

According to Reconstructing Strangelove, a 2017 making-of book by Mick Broderick, there were some other interesting casting considerations. The part of the Russian Ambassador, Alexei de Sadeski, was first offered to playwright Noël Coward and then Theodore J. Flicker, a playwright and actor known for improvisational comedy. Both declined, and the role went to Peter Bull, a British character actor with a Hollywood career going back to the 1930s, whose credits included The African Queen (1951). Broderick’s book also says that Paul Newman, Orson Welles, and Burt Lancaster were all considered by Kubrick for roles in the film, though it doesn’t specify which parts.

36. A supporting actor was cast for his straight-faced delivery

Colonel “Bat” Guano is played by Keenan Wynn, a well-known character actor at the time who had started on Broadway in the 1930s before moving to Hollywood. His credits before Dr. Strangelove included Annie Get Your Gun (1950), Touch of Evil (1958), and The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), and he would later appear in western classic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Kubrick cast him because he wanted somebody who could play the role completely straight, much as he had done with Sterling Hayden. And for those wondering about the character’s name: “guano” is the word for bat droppings, which is why Guano’s nickname is “Bat”. The name is a sly nod to a rather more vulgar expression.

37. The bomb’s target has a literary origin

The B-52’s first target is a Soviet ballistic missile complex at a place called Laputa, a fictional location. The name comes from Jonathan Swift’s seminal 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, where Laputa is a giant floating island full of scientists and intellectuals who have power over ordinary people but are completely detached from reality. “La puta” also means “prostitute” in Spanish, so it may well be yet another of the film’s sexual references. The target later changes to Kotloss, another fictional Russian location.

38. The composer was the perfect fit

The film’s score was composed by Laurie Johnson, a classically trained English composer who studied at the Royal College of Music under Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. By 1964, Johnson had already conducted Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960). He had won an Ivor Novello Award in 1959 for the stage musical Lock Up Your Daughters, and had scored several British films including Tiger Bay (1959). He was working in London at the time Kubrick was preparing Dr. Strangelove, which is how they connected.

Johnson also wrote the theme music for classic British TV programmes including This Is Your Life and The Avengers. Interestingly, one of the films Johnson had previously scored was I Aim at the Stars (1960), a biopic of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket designer who was an inspiration for the Strangelove character.

39. Johnson created three key musical pieces

The composer created three principal pieces for the film. First, his instrumental arrangement of “Try a Little Tenderness” for the opening credits. Second, “The Bomb Run,” which consists of various arrangements of the American Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” played during the B-52 sequences. Third, an arrangement of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” which plays over the closing nuclear explosion montage.

The use of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” is particularly fitting. Written in 1863 during the Civil War as a song celebrating a returning war hero, it was later rewritten in 1867 as “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye” and became a popular anti-war song. That duality, pro-war anthem and anti-war lament, mirrors the film’s own contradictions.

40. The climax was a masterclass in practical effects

The narrative concludes with the B-52 dropping a nuke over Kotloss, and the bombing sequence was overseen by Wally Veevers, who had been head of Shepperton Studios’ Special Effects Department since 1952 and was an expert in matte painting backgrounds. Slim Pickens was filmed sitting on the bomb against a blue screen, and a photograph that Gilbert Taylor’s team had taken from the B-17 was composited into the background. The camera was slowly moved away from Pickens and the bomb, while the background image was manipulated to grow larger and larger, creating the illusion that Kong is falling towards the ground.

Furthermore, shooting the bomb bay scene was one of the production’s biggest technical challenges. The bomb bay set was designed by Ken Adam, and after it was built, Kubrick told Adam he wanted working bomb doors so he could film the bomb drop practically. Adam said the modifications would take weeks, but Veevers came up with the solution: Pickens was again shot against a blue screen, and the bomb bay background is a photograph. Veevers cut out the bomb doors so that when the bomb drops, it appears to fall out of the plane. Kubrick, characteristically, insisted on over 100 takes of the bomb-fall scene.

41. The bombs have names

In the film, the two nukes in the bay have names painted on them: “Hi there!” and “Dear John.” This was a practice that came from World War II bomber crews. In the novel, the second bomb isn’t called “Dear John” but the coincidental “Lolita.” “Dear John” was reportedly the name of a horse Slim Pickens once owned.

A bigger change from the book is that in the novel, the bomb is never actually released. The President believes it has been and offers Atlantic City to the Russians as compensation, but it’s stopped at the last moment.

42. The final speech was largely improvised

Sellers improvised a great deal of Dr. Strangelove’s climactic monologue in the War Room. The Nazi salute was his idea, and the final line of the film – “Mein Führer, I can walk!” – was his too. Kubrick said that because Sellers told him he couldn’t promise to do the same take twice, they set up six cameras to capture everything from every angle. Anthony Harvey, the editor, said there were quite a lot of cuts in the final sequence, moving from close-ups to cutaways, because much of the footage he was working with showed cast members in the background visibly trying not to laugh.

43. The ending could have been very different

The War Room features a table of food, and there’s a reason for that. Kubrick originally planned to end the film with an eleven-minute custard pie fight between the Russians and the Americans. They filmed the sequence, and it played out with Turgidson noticing the Ambassador taking photographs of the Big Board with a spy camera. Turgidson tackles him, the Ambassador throws a pie at Turgidson, Turgidson ducks, and it hits President Muffley square in the face. Muffley falls into Turgidson’s arms, and a huge food fight erupts, played out in fast-motion.

Kubrick cut the scene. He later said it was because he thought it was too farcical compared to the rest of the film. Co-writer Terry Southern said Kubrick described the footage as “a disaster of Homeric proportions.” George C. Scott, however, had a different take. He claimed the pie fight wasn’t directed by Kubrick at all, but by the assistant director Eric Rattray, and said: “The scene was terrific! Which is why Stanley cut it! Because the son of a bitch didn’t direct it!”

44. A comedy legend suggested the closing song

Spike Milligan, the writer and star of BBC Radio’s The Goon Show, was close friends with Peter Sellers and visited the set one day. It was apparently Milligan’s idea to use Vera Lynn’s wartime classic “We’ll Meet Again” as the song that plays over the closing montage of nuclear explosions. The song was first recorded in 1939, just after Britain declared war on Germany, and became one of the most iconic songs of World War II. The version in the film is actually a 1953 re-recording with fuller instrumentation and a bigger chorus.

The song stood for reunion and better days ahead. Kubrick takes that sentiment and quite literally blows it all up.

45. The nuclear explosions were real

The footage of nuclear explosions in the closing montage is real. It was made up of declassified US nuclear test footage from the late 1940s and 1950s, mainly from Pacific and desert tests that the government had released as stock material. We see the Trinity test from New Mexico in 1945, Operation Crossroads tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946, Operation Sandstone from 1948, and hydrogen bomb tests from Operation Ivy in the Pacific in 1952. All of these tests were heavily documented by the US military with hundreds of cameras. Some of that footage went into newsreel libraries, and that’s where Kubrick sourced it.

46. A century-defining event delayed the film’s release

A first screening of Dr. Strangelove for press was scheduled for November 22, 1963. On that day, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. As a result, the premiere was delayed until late January 1964 and several changes were made to the film. In the scene aboard the bomber where Kong reads out the aircraft’s survival kit, he says “a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.” The line originally said “Dallas,” not “Vegas,” so Slim Pickens was brought back in to overdub it. If you watch carefully, you can still see him mouth “Dallas” in the film. The pie fight scene had also contained a line where, after Muffley is hit in the face with a pie, Turgidson says: “Our President, cut down in the prime of his life!” Even if the scene had survived post-November 22nd, that line would surely not have.

47. The studio didn’t know how to promote the film

Columbia Pictures weren’t confident about the film before its release and weren’t sure how to market it. Studio heads Abe Schneider and Mo Rothman distanced themselves from the production and didn’t attend any screenings. Terry Southern said that Rothman told him: “New York does not see anything funny about the end of the world!” The marketing turned a corner with the trailer, which was also created by Pablo Ferro, who had designed the opening titles. It featured quick cuts and bold on-screen text, very much in Ferro’s signature style. His fingerprints are all over the film’s visual identity.

48. The poster was created by a famous satirist

The film’s poster was designed by the French-American satirical artist Tomi Ungerer. It features illustrations of B-52 bombers and two leaders on either side of a globe, connected by a telephone line. The tagline reads: “The hot-line suspense comedy.”

49. The film made a healthy profit and earned four Oscar nominations

From a production budget of $1.8 million, Dr. Strangelove grossed over $9.1 million worldwide. A very healthy return for Columbia Pictures. At the Academy Awards, the film was nominated for four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director for Kubrick, Best Actor for Sellers, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Kubrick, George, and Southern. It didn’t win any of them, losing out across the board to My Fair Lady (1964) and Becket (1964). Four nominations for a black comedy about nuclear annihilation, though – it did okay for itself.

Today, on Rotten Tomatoes, Dr. Strangelove has an enormous 98% approval rating from critics and 94% from audiences. On IMDb, the film scores 8.3 out of 10, placing it at number 83 on the all-time Top 250.

50. Kubrick wanted another filmmaker to direct a sequel

Terry Gilliam, the director of Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995), later said that in the early 1990s, Kubrick had asked Terry Southern to start working on a Dr. Strangelove sequel and wanted Gilliam to direct it. Southern didn’t get further than laying out a few index cards as plot points, but the project was called Son of Strangelove and would have been set after doomsday in the underground bunkers that Strangelove describes in the film. Southern passed away in 1995, so it never happened, but Gilliam said he would have loved to have made it.

Finally… a world leader was fooled by Stanley

In 1981, having been elected 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan reportedly told his Chief of Staff he’d like to be given a tour of the War Room at some point. The bemused official had to tell him “That doesn’t actually exist, Mr. President.”

And you’ve reached the end – some huge facts about Dr. Strangelove, one of the most daring and brilliant comedies ever made. If you enjoyed this, listen to our podcast episode on Dr. Strangelove for the full story told by the team. Please share on your social media channels, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for lots of great video content.