Dr. Strangelove Or: How Stanley Kubrick Learned To Stop Worrying And Name His Film

Shakespeare may have said that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, but that doesn’t mean that finding the right name for something is any less an arduous task.

Take Star Wars, for instance. George Lucas at one point planned on encumbering his space opera with the rather awful The Adventures Of Luke Starkiller, As Taken From The Journal Of The Whills – Saga I: Star Wars. A decade or so earlier, one of Lucas’s idols, Stanley Kubrick, found himself in a similar predicament. He was in the midst of adapting Peter George’s Cold War thriller Red Alert into a satire about nuclear war and felt that the book’s title wasn’t sufficient to convey what his film was about. So he sat down and started jotting ideas into a notebook, the results of which you can see below. It is interesting to see him experimenting with the format and the number of permutations of words he went through to find just the right combination. I suppose that it would be more informative about his creative process if he had just written each idea down in a straight column, but then again Kubrick was really never one to let people into his thoughts on how he made his films.

I have to admit that out all of the ones seen here, my two favorites are The Passion Of Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Strangelove’s The Secret Uses Of Uranus, though I could see that second one attracting an entirely different kind of audience.

Via Lists Of Note.