33 Rare Behind the Scenes Photos From the Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Film “Dr. Strangelove”

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (known simply and more commonly as Dr. Strangelove) is a 1964 political satire black comedy film co-written, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Originally, Kubrick intended Dr. Strangelove to be a serious political thriller based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert. However, as he delved deeper into the subject of nuclear warfare, he found the scenarios so absurd that he decided satire would be a more effective approach. Collaborating with satirical writer Terry Southern, they transformed the script into the black comedy we know today.

“My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay,” Kubrick later said. “I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question.”

Columbia Pictures agreed to finance the film on the condition that Peter Sellers play multiple roles, capitalizing on his success in Lolita. Sellers ended up portraying three characters: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove. He was also slated to play Major T.J. “King” Kong, but a leg injury and difficulty mastering a Texan accent led to Slim Pickens taking over the role.

Dr. Strangelove was filmed at Shepperton Studios, near London, as Sellers was in the middle of a divorce at the time and unable to leave England. The sets occupied three main sound stages: the Pentagon War Room, the B-52 Stratofortress bomber and the last one containing both the motel room and General Ripper's office and outside corridor. The studio’s buildings were also used as the Air Force base exterior.

The film’s set design was done by Ken Adam, the production designer of several James Bond films. The black-and-white cinematography was by Gilbert Taylor, and the film was edited by Anthony Harvey and an uncredited Kubrick. The original musical score for the film was composed by Laurie Johnson, and the special effects were done by Wally Veevers. The opening theme is an instrumental version of “Try a Little Tenderness.” The theme of the chorus from the bomb run scene is a modification of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Sellers and Kubrick got along well during the film’s production and shared a love of photography.

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. Adam next began work on the design that was used in the film. It was an enormous concrete room (130 feet (40 m) long and 100 feet (30 m) wide, with a 35-foot (11 m)-high ceiling) suggesting a bomb shelter, with a triangular shape. One side of the room was covered with gigantic strategic maps reflecting in a shiny black floor inspired by dance scenes in Fred Astaire films. In the middle of the room there was a large circular table lit from above by a circle of lamps, suggesting a poker table. Kubrick insisted that the table would be covered with green baize (although this could not be seen in the black-and-white film) to reinforce the actors’ impression that they are playing “a game of poker for the fate of the world.” Kubrick asked Adam to build the set ceiling in concrete to force the director of photography to use only the on-set lights from the circle of lamps. Moreover, each lamp in the circle of lights was carefully placed and tested until Kubrick was happy with the result.

Lacking cooperation from the Pentagon in the making of the film, the set designers reconstructed the aircraft cockpit to the best of their ability by comparing the cockpit of a B-29 Superfortress and a single photograph of the cockpit of a B-52 and relating this to the geometry of the B-52’s fuselage. The B-52 was state-of-the-art in the 1960s, and its cockpit was off-limits to the film crew. When some United States Air Force personnel were invited to view the reconstructed B-52 cockpit, they said that “it was absolutely correct, even to the little black box which was the CRM.” It was so accurate that Kubrick was concerned about whether Adam’s team had carried out all its research legally.

In several shots of the B-52 flying over the polar ice en route to Russia, the shadow of the actual camera plane, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, is visible on the icecap below. The B-52 was a scale model composited into the Arctic footage, which was sped up to create a sense of jet speed.

The film is considered one of the best comedy films and one of the greatest films of all time. 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. In 1989, the United States Library of Congress included Dr. Strangelove as one of the first 25 films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”