Dr. Strangelove’s Lost Ending
Penguin June 25th, 2009
It’s always a blessing to be able to peak into the master’s process. And Kubrick is one of the great masters. In this snippet, Glen Kenny talks to Anthony Harvey, who edited Strangelove, about the ending over at The Auteurs’ Notebook.
Harvey, who had also cut the director’s prior film Lolita, recalls the press screening, which happened to occur on or around November 22, 1963, the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “There we are. I was showing it to the press, I remember, around that time. We canceled everything and we all trudged on to Grosvenor Square, stood in shocked silence as the news unfurled. That’s the date. And some weeks after that, I believe, the film was going to be released.
Columbia Pictures were very nervous about anything to show the president—any president—in that state, as it should be…That ending, how it started, the George Scott character threw a custard pie to the Russian ambassador, and it missed and hit the president. And then all hell broke loose. And it was like there was about two minutes when, after this brilliantly constructed film, it devolves into a kind of silent Mack Sennett sort of thing, with everybody getting hit by custard pies.
[S]omehow they were very worried, the studio, about releasing it. They found it might be offensive or something. So Stanley took it out for the moment, and then the film opened and he just didn’t feel like putting anything back. So that remained in the cutting room floor. But it was a brilliant piece of work. Who knows? I certainly thought it was. But I think when you get to a point in working on a film for almost a year, and this sort of sudden pressure comes in as a result of what happened to Kennedy, it’s a sort of clear-cut situation. So that was removed. And it never went back.”
While stills of the footage exist, it’s still unclear as to whether the scene survived the loss of the original negative, or exists in Kubrick’s archive. Despite the hopes of some cinephiles, it is not, finally, included on the new Blu-ray disc of Strangelove.
I find it interesting that the serendipitous cut was what made the Strangelove ending the way it is. Usually, the work of masters is meticulous with every detail being purposeful and reasoned. Granted, there was a reason behind the cut, but not to serve the work.
Via: In Contention
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