However, as time went on, his concept started to take on a life of its own, mutating into the darkly satirical comedy that became Dr. Strangelove.
Taking the serious plot of a US bomber accidentally locked into an attack run on Russia, Dr. Strangelove gets more absurdly funny as it marches towards its poignant finale.
When director/writer Stanley Kubrick started adapting Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s novel Fail Safe into a motion picture, he started out making a serious adaptation of the sobering nuclear war thriller.