Stanley Kubrick Cancelled a Preview of "Dr. Strangelove" the Day JFK Was Assassinated

It was mere hours before an exclusive press screening of his next big feature film, Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, when Stanely Kubrick got word out of Dallas. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

The show couldn't go on. How could it? Strangelove is, among other things, a biting rebuke of the moral fibre of a US president gone full batshit. Kubrick pulled the plug. "NEVER HELD," he wrote on a would-be ticket to the event. "THE DAY KENNEDY WAS SHOT."

That dark day in Dallas would stick with the filmmaker. Kubrick was so rocked by the event that he made a few crucial changes to the film out of deference to the slain president. The original Strangelove cut included a line from the character Major Kong that went on about how "a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas", according to TIME. Kubrick tweaked the line to "in Vegas," for obvious reasons. Also, there was a pie-throwing sequence, which included the line “our beloved President has been struck down in his prime," that Kubrick simply could not in good conscience keep in the final cut of Strangelove.

We can only wonder what he would've done had he gotten his hands on the saddest and most expensive 26 seconds of amateur film ever made.

@thebanderson