Terry Southern Literary Archives Go to New York Public Library

[pynchonoid]

Terry Southern Literary Archives Go to New York Public
Library
By MEL GUSSOW

[...] More than 40 boxes of manuscripts, screenplays,
sketches, letters, contracts and other private papers
are now in the library's Berg Collection, along with
Southern's eyeglasses, typewriter and whiskey flask.
It is, to use one of the writer's favorite words, a
"monstro" collection and should offer a complete
portrait of Southern, revealing, his son Nile said,
"the secret histories" within his work.

Many of the treasures in the archives deal with "Dr.
Strangelove." Stanley Kubrick and Southern once talked
about turning that 1964 movie into the first part of a
trilogy, with two related satiric films, "Turgidson's
Mother, or Into the Shaft!" and "Muffley Strikes
Back." That's Muffley, as in President Muffley, played
in the original by Peter Sellers (who also played
Strangelove and a British group captain).

Writing to a journalist, Southern denied that Henry A.
Kissinger was the model for Strangelove, saying that
he was not a known quantity to him or Kubrick when
they wrote the film in 1961 and 1962. The character,
he said, was more or less a composite of Werner von
Braun and Edward Teller, but, he added, the physical
resemblance to Mr. Kissinger was "quite remarkable and
a bit scary" because of his "ultra-hyper-super
detached `logic' that can allow one to speak in terms
of megadeaths."

And among the many unproduced Southern screenplays is
"Grossing Out," about a toy manufacturer who makes a
Faustian pact with the Pentagon to produce weapons of
mass destruction. [...] 

continues:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/books/03SOUT.html>

...enjoy!

-Doug

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