Peter Sellers, Stanley Kubrick and the battle to stop Dr Strangelove from bombing

How a control-freak director and his maniacal star defied terrified studio executives and onset injuries to make comedy gold from Armageddon

This week, Steve Coogan will emulate his hero Peter Sellers in the new West End adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated Cold War farce Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, devised by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley.
Playing four roles – the disabled ex-Nazi scientist of the title, dapper RAF officer Lionel Mandrake, the limp US President Merkin Muffley, and B-52 commander Major TJ “King” Kong – Coogan theoretically pips even Sellers, who wound up playing only the first three of those.
However, it is unlikely that this stage production had any of the incendiary chaos of Kubrick’s shoot.
Before agreeing to make it, Columbia Pictures had just backed Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), a highly risky adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel which saw Sellers taking on various identities in the supporting role of Claire Quilty, and which repaid them in spades at the box office. Still, they weren’t at all convinced that the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the right moment to make light of nuclear apocalypse.
As with all his films, Kubrick viewed a successful Dr Strangelove as a military campaign, or chess match, he needed to play perfectly. Outfoxing his chief opponent at the studio – executive producer Mo Rothman – was vital.
Rothman, according to screenwriter Terry Southern, was “the bridge, the connection, the interpreter, between the otherwise incomprehensible artist and the various moneybags incarnate who were financing the film.” The executive’s message to Kubrick, which Southern was told to relay, was that “New York does not see anything funny about the end of the world!”
It was Columbia’s view that Lolita’s success had come down to Sellers, because of his multiple performances. The studio only agreed, then, to finance Dr Strangelove if Sellers would appear in “at least four major roles”. The demand infuriated Kubrick because of the underlying assumption that a film’s success was wholly down to the participation of a single actor.
He complied all the same, lamenting to Southern that “such crass and grotesque stipulations are the sine qua non of the motion picture business.” So, Sellers was offered the same four roles Coogan is playing, for a fee of $1 million, ie 55 per cent of the film’s $1.8 million budget.
While Kubrick’s propensity for shooting most of his films near London, wherever they were supposed to be set, would become well-known, he claimed in a 1969 interview that the Shepperton shoot for Strangelove was dictated purely by having Sellers in it, who “could not leave England for an extended period, so it was necessary to film there.” The reason was that Sellers was bound up in legal proceedings because of his first divorce, from Australian actor Anne Howe; he would marry Britt Ekland the following year.
The first roadblock in giving Sellers half the script to play was announced by telegram. “Now hear this,” he cabled. “There is no way, repeat, no way, I can play the Texas pilot, ‘Major King Kong.’ I have a complete block against that accent.”
The message caused Kubrick no small amount of anxiety: having banned cigarettes from the production office in an effort to quit, he demanded a pack pronto from his assistant.
He then spent hours pleading with Sellers by phone, and tried to propose a fix: the Texas-born Southern would record all of Kong’s dialogue on a tape, and Sellers would use that on set as his learning guide. He arrived with a highly newfangled bit of equipment which had ultra-sensitive headphones that were so oversized, “they resembled some kind of eccentric hat”.
The plan worked, and Sellers managed to master the Texan twang. Alas, that night, the star went to a posh Indian restaurant on the King’s Road and tripped when getting out of a cab. This caused a mild ankle sprain, or possible hairline fracture. The following morning was written off, but it wasn’t yet serious – after lunch, shooting was still able to continue in the B-52’s cockpit.
Accounts diverge here on what exactly caused the on-set tumble that worsened the injury, preventing Sellers from completing his most physically taxing scenes as Kong – who, after all, has to convincingly mount a nuclear bomb when it’s dropped from the plane. Southern, in his 1994 article Notes from the War Room, says that Sellers merely slipped while halfway down an 8ft ladder to the floor of the bomb bay.
But Shane Rimmer, who played the co-pilot Ace Owens, said that Sellers and Kubrick were “engaged in an awful row” during that sequence, and that Sellers got so overheated he fell out of the cockpit, which was suspended 15 feet high. “That’s when he broke his leg, and that’s when he ended up in the wheelchair,” his co-star explained in a behind-the-scenes featurette.
It would be classic Kubrick to cover up on-set friction as the cause for any such calamity. Equally, though, it was classic Kubrick to seize on the opportunity to recast Major Kong and make the insurance company pay for it.
His logic was that Sellers shouldn’t be replaced with an actor of similar gifts, but “something like the real thing”. Supposedly John Wayne was approached, but never responded, and the big-boned American TV actor Dan Blocker (Bonanza) refused because he thought the script was “too pinko”.
The call went out to western veteran Slim Pickens, who, according to his scene partner James Earl Jones, “was Major Kong on and off the set.” At 54, he had never previously left the United States.
After hurriedly obtaining a passport and flying over, he reported to the set howdying everybody in his own cowboy hat, boots and fringed jacket, which everyone simply assumed was his costume.
The chips fell Kubrick’s way there. It seems hard to imagine Sellers providing quite the iconic visual of Pickens riding down to Earth with that bomb between his legs. But the rest of the production was far from smooth sailing. Kubrick had an even testier relationship with George C Scott, as the hawkish Buck Turgidson, than he did with Sellers. They had clashing conceptions of the role, and Scott was only beaten into submission by Kubrick’s skill at chess, which they played avidly between takes.
Then there was the infamous cream pie fight, a descent into extreme farce between branches of the US military in the War Room, with which the film was supposed to end. They were only allowed to film one take of the melee – it would have been too costly to reset – and it was shot and then screened with “considerable trepidation”, according to Southern. He accused Kubrick of a “major goof”, in not telling all the 60 or so military extras they were supposed to be furious with each other. Instead, they seemed in absurdly high spirits, killing the whole point of the sequence. Kubrick would call it “a disaster of Homeric proportions,” and cut it forthwith.
Dr Strangelove remained anything but sure-fire until it came out: it could very easily have been a mortifying flop. Rothman and Columbia chief Abe Schneider never turned up at screenings, as if preparing to distance themselves from it. When word got out that the anti-military theme was in danger of tipping towards anti-Americanism, they sent a spy to the set to take pictures and secretly record conversations. The marketing department had no clue how to promote it.
While not an instant smash, the film started to be hailed as something special a year later, when the Oscars nominated it for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor for Sellers.
Production bedlam, in this instance, helped yield an edgy comic masterpiece that crackles with unpredictability. It’s unstable – and that’s why it works.
Dr Strangelove is at the Noël Coward Theatre, London WC2, until January 25