Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [87]
Necessarily, Peter came on to Mai Zetterling during the shoot, but she gently but firmly fended him off in favor of her husband. Still, she offers a sympathetic assessment of her costar in retrospect: “He was a very insecure man, and a very frightened man who felt very small, and unloved, and ugly, and all that kind of thing. With all the success he had it’s very difficult for the public to understand.”
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In March 1962, Launder and Gilliat announced their new film production—an adaptation of Aubrey Menen’s The Fig Tree starring Peter Sellers. The plan was soon scuttled and they never worked with each other again.
The break may have occurred because there was a financial issue after Only Two Can Play was completed but before it was released. As Graham Stark puts it, “Peter took such a dislike to it that he sold out his share of the profits.” According to Roy Boulting, after Peter saw the final cut, “He was despondent, he had no faith in it, in fact he really hated it.” The Boultings are said to have paid him £17,500 for his share; the film turned out to be such a hit that Peter’s share alone eventually earned over £120,000.
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Even before Vladimir Nabokov published his novel, Lolita, in 1955, the casting of Peter Sellers as Quilty in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation had suggested itself fantastically in the novelist’s own handwritten manuscript. Humbert Humbert describes the preteen object of his passion, the fire of his loins, his sin, his soul: “the Lolita of the strident voice and the rich brown hair—of the bangs and the swirls at the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary—‘revolting,’ ‘super,’ ‘luscious,’ ‘goon,’ ‘drip’—that Lolita, my Lolita.” Humbert proceeds to lose Lolita to Quilty; Nabokov always appreciated a cosmic joke.
In 1958, Kubrick and his associate, James B. Harris, placed a telephone call to the Production Code office in Hollywood. They were thinking about buying the rights to Lolita, they said, and they were wondering how the boys at the Code would react to the idea. Geoffrey Shurlock, the longtime head of the office, responded: “I suggested that the subject matter, an elderly man having an affair with a twelve-year-old girl, would probably fall into the area of sex perversion.” But by 1960, the dark and dynamic Kubrick—who in the meantime had tossed off Spartacus (1960)—had actually succeeded in convincing Shurlock that the film would not in fact violate the Code. Kubrick’s argument was specious but effective: Young girls could legally marry in certain Appalachian states, and what was legal could not be immoral. Kubrick also had history on his side; enforcement of the Code was becoming increasingly lax and dismissable.
With Shurlock’s provisional green light, Kubrick struck a deal with Nabokov to write the screenplay, the erudite author being represented by Swifty Lazar. Nabokov turned in a draft in June. It was four hundred pages long. Kubrick responded by telling the novelist that such a picture would run for seven hours. “You couldn’t make it,” James Harris once said; “you couldn’t lift it.” Nabokov turned in a shorter version in September, but Harris, uncredited, ended up revising it, leaving Nabokov to comment later that, for him, watching Lolita was like “a scenic drive as perceived by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance.”
For the role of the pervert Humbert, a series of stellar men were approached: James Mason (couldn’t schedule it); Laurence Olivier (sorry, no); David Niven (yes, but then no); Cary Grant (“I have too much respect for the movie industry to do a picture like that”). But then, suddenly, James Mason became available after