Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [147]
The screenwriters Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker also proposed The Russian Interpreter as a Peter Sellers project later in 1967. In fact, the three men considered forming a production company called Peter, Paul, and Larry. But neither the film nor the company ever came into being.
Peter wanted Graham Chapman and John Cleese to write a script called The Future Began Yesterday: a man uses a copying machine to duplicate his wife. Peter wanted one particular actress to play the wife.
Sophia.
Peter also wanted to do Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist Rhinoceros set in modern Hamburg; it was to be directed by The Ladykillers’ Alexander Mackendrick, but his agent, David Begelman, talked him out of it.
There was Pardon Me, Sir, But Is My Eye Hurting Your Elbow?, a collection of skits that boasted an impressive lineup of talent: scripts by Allen Ginsberg, Peter Cook, Gregory Corso, Terry Southern, Philip Roth, and others; a score by Leonard Bernstein; direction by Arthur Hiller. At one point Peter was said to be ready to play nine different roles in the omnibus film, but the picture never came together. Several of the skits, later published in book form, would have been excellent vehicles for Peter. Southern’s entry, “Plums and Prunes,” is about a Westchester ad executive named Brad, his wife Donna, and their nubile sixteen-year-old daughter, Debbie, whose sexual attractiveness dawns all too disturbingly on Brad, who proceeds to punch, choke, and beat Debbie’s boyfriend to death. Ginsberg’s “Don’t Go Away Mad” is a surreal farce about a bearded middle-aged man who gets picked up by the cops in Central Park for not having an identity. To cure him, he’s given electroshock therapy, drugs, a lobotomy, and an exploding hydrogen bomb.
Peter got as far as offering Kenneth Griffith a role in yet another picture. “Typical of Sellers,” Griffith declares, referring to their estrangement, “six months later the phone rang. ‘How are you, Kenny? Look I’m doing this film, and I’m playing two parts—brothers! Any other part in the film you want, you can play. My dad!’ (I wasn’t all that old.) ‘Anything! Whatever you want to play. Please be in it.’ So I went round and we read the whole script and then I chose my role—because it went right through the film and I would get more money. Suddenly I was told that Peter Sellers wouldn’t do it.” (Griffith no longer recalls the name of the film, but it could well be The Bed Sitting Room, 1969, directed by Richard Lester from a script by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus and starring Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore.)
In addition, there was an adaptation of Graham Greene’s story “When Greek Meets Greek,” which Kenneth Geist optioned with an eye toward producing the film. Geist wanted to cast Peter, Alec Guinness, John Lennon, and Lynn Redgrave. “I want to do it,” Peter told Geist, who asked John Mortimer to write the script. “I’ll do it,” Mortimer told Geist. Then Peter referred Geist to his accountant, Bill Wills. “It was a Waiting for Godot situation,” says Geist, who calls Wills “a great dullard.” The film never got made.
Mel Brooks approached Peter about starring in Brooks’s first film, a comedy about a failed theatrical producer and a nebbish accountant who put on a Broadway show, but Peter was too distracted to listen. Brooks describes his experience of trying to interest him in The Producers (1967): “I sent the script to Peter Sellers, and I told him about the project, and he had to go to Bloomingdale’s. So we walked around Bloomingdale’s—he was shopping, I was talking. I’d be in the middle of a very important moment—where Bialystock says to Bloom, ‘Do you want to live in a gray little world, do you want to be confined, don’t you want to fly?’—and he’d say ‘You like this buckle? What do you think of this