‘Dr. Strangelove’ Was Originally a Grim Movie, Then Kubrick Did the Research.

It's impossible to picture the 1964 Stanley Kubrick masterpiece Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as anything but the biting piece of Cold War satire that changed the course of cinema. When Major "King" Kong, (Slim Pickens) rides that atomic bomb named "Hi There!" like a bucking bronco as it drops from the B-52, it's the cherry on top of what may be the most meaningful movie that the great filmmaker ever made. This made it even more fascinating to discover that Kubrick initially had designs on making a serious and grim picture at the very height of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union based on the very serious and frightful book Red Alert by Peter George. He was poised to follow up his harrowing and heroic prior projects Paths of Glory and Spartacus with a titillating thriller about the out-of-control proliferation of nuclear arms between two superpowers that seemed ready to annihilate civilization. But when he committed himself to the research for such a film, he found the material so incredibly outrageous and laced with buffoonery, that he had no choice but to make the biting satire that altered the course of movie-making on a grand scale.