The novelization of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satiric masterpiece "Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" by Peter George must be one of the strangest novelizations in the history of that peculiar and generally despised genre. George had originally written the 1958 novel "Red Alert" (under the pseudonym "Peter Bryant"), which Kubrick bought with the intention of making it into a film. However, as is well known, he found the somber dialogue about "megadeaths" and nuclear holocaust so absurd that he realized the movie had to be done as a black comedy. So along with George and an assist from Terry Southern, Kubrick reconfigured the script into the "Dr Strangelove" we know today.
But here's where the story gets a bit bizarre. Peter George was then assigned to write a novelization of the screenplay he'd worked on with Kubrick and Southern based on his original novel "Red Alert." That must have been a strange, even humilating, endeavor for any novelist. George published his final novel, "Commander-1," another nuclear war story, in 1965, before committing suicide in 1966, just two years after the release of the film, and fifty years ago this year. He apparently suffered from that occupational hazard of so many writers, alcoholism. And he had become desperately fearful of the prospect of a real nuclear war breaking out at any moment.
George worked from an early version of the script; he didn't have access to the hilarious improvisations that Peter Sellers subsequently did during the shoot which Kubrick loved so much that he kept them in the final film. So some of the funniest lines of the movie are not in novel "Dr. Strangelove" ("You're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company," etc.). Not only that, Kubrick tended to cut the beginnings and endings of scenes that George left in the novel, along with a number of subplots which were also deleted by Kubrick. The upshot is that the novelization is filled with fascinating character bits and scenes that don't make it into film, including such details as the name of Slim Pickens's bomber plane, called "Leper Colony" in the book, or the words scrawled on one of the bombs ("Dear John" in the film, "Lolita" in the book. Given that "Lolita" was Kubrick's previous film, one would have thought it would be the reverse.
Anyone who's a fan of the movie should try to find a copy of the novelization -- it's quite an interesting addition to a brilliant film.
