The book that inspired Stanley Kubrick masterpiece ‘Dr. Strangelove’
Over the course of his illustrious career, Stanley Kubrick mastered the art of cinematic adaptations. Ranging from Anthony Burgess to Vladimir Nabokov, Kubrick built his cinematic visions based on an eclectic collection of source materials, but he always succeeded in making the films his own.
While some authors like Burgess have been delighted by Kubrick’s interpretations, Stephen King famously voiced his objection when Kubrick made The Shining. According to King, the filmmaker failed to grasp the novel’s central themes and focused on Jack’s psychosis instead of the supernatural elements.
“There’s one great advantage taking it from literary material, and that is that you have the opportunity of reading the story for the first time,” Kubrick once explained. “I’ve never written an original screenplay myself, so I’m only theorising as to what I think the effect would be, but I suppose that if you had an idea yourself that you liked and you developed, your sense of whether or not the story was interesting would be almost gone by the time you wrote it.”
One of Kubrick’s greatest adaptations is his 1964 black comedy gem Dr. Strangelove, based on Peter George’s novel ‘Red Alert’. An incisive satire about Cold War paranoia and nuclear warfare, the film exposes the stupidity of the people who govern the future of humanity from the comfort of hilariously elaborate war rooms.
Kubrick believed: “The advantage of a story you can actually read is that you can remember what you felt about it the first time you read it; and that serves as a very useful yardstick on making the decisions that you have to make directing the film, because even with somebody else’s story you become so familiar with it after a while that you can never really tell what it is going to seem like to somebody seeing the film for the first time.”
Like most of his other adaptations, Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove a different entity from the book. While ‘Red Alert’ was structured as a thriller, Kubrick took inspiration from the book and transformed the film into a black comedy about nuclear annihilation and paranoia politics. Interestingly, ‘Red Alert’ also did not include the titular Dr. Strangelove (portrayed brilliantly by Peter Sellers).
While Kubrick was making Dr. Strangelove, he heard reports of another production called Fail Safe, which was going to deal with similar themes. Despite the fact that it was going to be a thriller, Kubrick and George sued the production for copyright infringement and were able to settle the case.
