RFI: Dr. Strangelove

It's a stanley kubrick films starring peter sellars, one of the best films either of them ever made.

Oh I don't know...

i've seen it (but maybe only in a wonderful dream)!

Haven't found a book or anything with the similar title though..

Dr Strangelove: or How I learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
Stanley Kubrick, I963. Starring Peter Sellars, George C Scott, Slim Pickens, James Earl Jones.

wot Ed said.

How I learned the secrets of success in selling.
A wheel within a wheel: how I learned to ride the bicycle, with some reflections by the way; (Frances Elizabeth Willard - no date.)
How I learned Irish.
How I learned to play chess /

that's the one! no? perhaps i'll never find out. thank you for searching worldcat, i guess it wasn't a book or i'm wrong about the whole thing.

The big town : how I and the Mrs. go to New York to see life and get Katie a husband -1957

I, candidate for governor: and how I got licked - 1935

Openings in the old trail [and] How I went to the mines - 1903

How I found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveries in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone - 1913

Practical falconry; to which is added, How I became a falconer. - 1960

There are 576 book records with "how I" .. miloauckerman is probably right - it was a common format for titling books.

thanks for putting my mind at ease at least and to everyone else SORRY FOR WASTING ALL OF YOUR TIME

on how it's faithful at the core to Red Alert:

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/doctors-orders-20090526

Indeed, on the page, Strangelove’s humor is surprisingly subtle. Throughout the first half of the film, most scenes dance teasingly on the edge of comedy, with overtly funny elements only appearing briefly. Amazingly, one can see the embryonic hints of this approach even in Red Alert itself. Consider this scene, when Howard, having heard normal local broadcasting on the radio and become convinced that the attack on the USSR is not a retaliatory strike, marches into the office of Quinten, who has just launched World War III:

“We’ve learned a lot about Communism and its adherents [Quinten says]. We also know we are liable to be attacked at any time. Alright, suppose a sudden attack knocked out all our bases except for this one. Suppose someone in high places knows the general code group of the day. Someone who is a Communist, or a fellow traveler.”
“That isn’t even a possibility,” Howard said angrily.
“You’re wrong, Paul. It is a possibility. In a world which can construct an H-bomb and put up its own artificial moons, even contemplate a break-out into space, nothing is impossible. Nothing. Oh, I agree the possibility is very slight, but it exists. Anyway, suppose things happened as I said.”

There’s a natural opportunity for comedy there at the end—one that George certainly does not take. He almost takes it two pages later, when Howard tells Quinten that “morally, we’re already in the wrong,” and his superior interrupts, “I’d argue that. But let it go for the moment.”

http://www.pbfluids.com/

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50th anniversary stuff, including why Strangelove's view of nucular command is, um, still REAL!

President John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking office, about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.” Kennedy and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the wide latitude given to American officers but also by the loose custody of the roughly three thousand American nuclear weapons stored in Europe. Few of the weapons had locks on them. Anyone who got hold of them could detonate them. And there was little to prevent NATO officers from Turkey, Holland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany from using them without the approval of the United States....

The security measures now used to control America’s nuclear weapons are a vast improvement over those of 1964. But, like all human endeavors, they are inherently flawed. The Department of Defense’s Personnel Reliability Program is supposed to keep people with serious emotional or psychological issues away from nuclear weapons—and yet two of the nation’s top nuclear commanders were recently removed from their posts. Neither appears to be the sort of calm, stable person you want with a finger on the button. In fact, their misbehavior seems straight out of “Strangelove.”

Vice Admiral Tim Giardina, the second-highest-ranking officer at the U.S. Strategic Command—the organization responsible for all of America’s nuclear forces—-was investigated last summer for allegedly using counterfeit gambling chips at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa. According to the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, “a significant monetary amount” of counterfeit chips was involved. Giardina was relieved of his command on October 3, 2013. A few days later, Major General Michael Carey, the Air Force commander in charge of America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, was fired for conduct “unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” According to a report by the Inspector General of the Air Force, Carey had consumed too much alcohol during an official trip to Russia, behaved rudely toward Russian officers, spent time with “suspect” young foreign women in Moscow, loudly discussed sensitive information in a public hotel lounge there, and drunkenly pleaded to get onstage and sing with a Beatles cover band at La Cantina, a Mexican restaurant near Red Square. Despite his requests, the band wouldn’t let Carey onstage to sing or to play the guitar.

While drinking beer in the executive lounge at Moscow’s Marriott Aurora during that visit, General Carey made an admission with serious public-policy implications. He off-handedly told a delegation of U.S. national-security officials that his missile-launch officers have the “worst morale in the Air Force.” Recent events suggest that may be true. In the spring of 2013, nineteen launch officers at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota were decertified for violating safety rules and poor discipline. In August, 2013, the entire missile wing at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana failed its safety inspection. Last week, the Air Force revealed that thirty-four launch officers at Malmstrom had been decertified for cheating on proficiency exams—and that at least three launch officers are being investigated for illegal drug use. The findings of a report by the RAND Corporation, leaked to the A.P., were equally disturbing. The study found that the rates of spousal abuse and court martials among Air Force personnel with nuclear responsibilities are much higher than those among people with other jobs in the Air Force. “We don’t care if things go properly,” a launch officer told RAND. “We just don’t want to get in trouble.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/01/strangelove-for-real.html

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-dr-strangelove-50

Criterion Blu out today, def seems worth a look at the supplements

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/dr-strangelove-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb-criterion

i don't know that i've ever heard/read a Sellers or Scott interview about this film.

from '66 SK profile in The New Yorker

“By now, the bomb has almost no reality and has become a complete abstraction, represented by a few newsreel shots of mushroom clouds,” Kubrick has said. “People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying. For this reason, most people have very little interest in nuclear war. It has become even less interesting as a problem than, say, city government, and the longer a nuclear event is postponed, the greater becomes the illusion that we are constantly building up security, like interest at the bank. As time goes on, the danger increases, I believe, because the thing becomes more and more remote in people’s minds. No one can predict the panic that suddenly arises when all the lights go out—that indefinable something that can make a leader abandon his carefully laid plans. A lot of effort has gone into trying to imagine possible nuclear accidents and to protect against them. But whether the human imagination is really capable of encompassing all the subtle permutations and psychological variants of these possibilities, I doubt. The nuclear strategists who make up all those war scenarios are never as inventive as reality, and political and military leaders are never as sophisticated as they think they are.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S6uGe7p280

My strongest reaction to that clip is that Gene Shalit was a very bad interviewer and Peter Sellers would have been much happier to be somewhere else instead of pretending to be engaged in conversation with that clown. Seems like it would be very hard work not to call him an idiot.

Saw it at a rep theatre tonight--I partied like it was 2019. Fifth or sixth time, probably.

I think my appreciation peaked last time; took a step back tonight. It's perfectly executed, but the truth is, I really only laugh (i.e., audibly) twice: Sellers' brilliant last couple of scenes as Strangelove (the kind of over-the-top humour I generally don't respond to), and some of Scott's mugging in the war room (especially when the president chastises him the one time). Hayden, Pickens, Wynn, I smile, I get it, I just don't laugh.

Sellers seems to portray--in the most common stereotype of the day--Muffley/Stevenson as gay, as least on the phone with Kissoff. Am I misreading that? I know the perception of Stevenson was that of an effete egghead--is that what Sellers is trying to convey?

Slim Pickens born on this day in 1919.

To parents who did not use the prophylactics they'd been issued in their Survival Kit.