Peter Sellers began shooting the role of Major Kong

But... The official story is Sellers twisted his ankle and couldn't work in the confined cockpit set. But I think he simply couldn't do a larger than life cowboy character.

So Sellers gave up the role (which had been offered to John Wayne,) It was then offered to Bonanza's Dan "Hoss" Blocker, whose agent turned it down -- Blocker later claimed this was done without his knowledge, and that he would have accepted the role.

So Kubrick cast a veteran western actor he'd originally cast as a heavy in One Eyed Jacks (and who remained in that cast even after Kubrick was fired by Brando).

The story goes that when Slim Pickens first showed up on the Strangelove set in his his Stetson and cowboy boots, the English crew marveled that he was already in character -- they were unaware this former rodeo clown always dressed like that.

"I been accused of bein' an actor -- but I'm a cowboy" -- Slim Pickens

This post was edited on 1/30/13 at 9:18 pm

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Posted by Kafka

I am the moral conscience of TD

Member since Jul 2007

142485 posts

Posted on 1/30/13 at 9:29 pm to Kafka

Much of the credit for Dr. Strangelove must go to screenwriter Terry Southern. The humor in the script comes from Southern (born and raised in a small Texas town South of Dallas). He set the foundation for Kubrick and Sellers.

Terry Southern interview

quote:

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. 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.