"The Real Doctor Strangelove"

[Oss Rae]

This past Thursday KPFK played the LA Theatre Works production of The Real Doctor Strangelove centered on a physicist thought to be Stanley Kubrick's model for Doctor Strangelove, Edward Teller. This is  not a comedy, though.

It can be heard here (in ensuing weeks and months it'll be moved to other parts of the site as it gets archived): www.latw.org/radio.html

[Brian]

Back in the 1970's, lots of people thought that the Strangelove character was based on Henry Kissinger, but in the early 1960's he was a fairly obscure Harvard government professor who also worked for Nelson Rockefeller.

As the play suggests, Teller was the personification of evil, yet I'll say something nice since I've known about him my entire conscious life.  My uncle was a renowned nuclear physicist at Princeton who died a slow death when I was 3 and 4 years old after radioactive isotopes blew out of a beaker he was moving.  The physics department later named an annual prize after him.  One of the folks who called his sister and my mother in California to offer comfort and their condolences was Edward Teller.

We appreciate your contributions to the Montrose Peace Vigil message board, Oss Rae. And thanks for assisting Nina with her post last week.

[Oss Rae]

Very interesting story about your uncle. People can be complicated. I imagine a scriptwriter, novelist, or biographer of Teller would find your story interesting as complicated characters tend to work well dramatically.

According to this documentary, the movie Dr. Strangelove was initially based on a serious book called Red Alert before it became a comedy (this is all discussed early in the doc.). If Strangelove comes from a character in that book, that would trace it back earlier than the screenplay, which would further rule out Kissinger as an influence.