“You cannot have both . . . Joke and Art,”

March 29, 2016 10:15 AM

Terry Southern, The Art of Screenwriting No. 3 Interviewed by Maggie Paley [The Paris Review]

At the time of this interview (1967), Southern was famous as the coauthor of Candy, the best-selling sex novel, and as the screenwriter behind Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar, antinuke comedy, Dr. Strangelove. Both appeared in the U.S. in 1964 (a headline in Life magazine read “Terry Southern vs. Smugness”). By 1967 he could be spotted on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, standing between Dylan Thomas and Dion. Gore Vidal called him “the most profoundly witty writer of our generation.” Lenny Bruce blurbed his books. [...] By the time this interview was conducted, Southern had also worked on Tony Richardson’s film The Loved One (1965), based on the Evelyn Waugh novel, and The Cincinnati Kid (1966), a drama about high-stakes poker, starring Steve McQueen, and had published Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967), a collection of short fiction, journalism, and occasional pieces. He would go on to write or contribute to the screenplays of Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1969), End of the Road (1969), and The Magic Christian (1969). His only other credited script to make it to the screen, The Telephone (1988), starring Whoopi Goldberg, was a disaster. By the seventies, alcohol and drug abuse had slowed Southern’s productivity. He published two more novels, Blue Movie (1970) and Texas Summer (1992), and had a short stint in the eighties as a writer for Saturday Night Live. Later, he became a devoted and much-loved teacher of screenwriting at Columbia University. In 1995, he collapsed on his way to teach a class, and four days afterward died of respiratory failure.

- Nights of Terror, Days of Weird by Will Stephenson [Oxford American]

The key here is subversion with no serious purpose, escalation with only chaotic, destructive consequences. Southern’s comedy depends on a “bedrock of reality,” as he put it in a 1961 letter to Barney Rosset, editor of the Evergreen Review. The scenarios “gradually get more outlandish and absurd” until they “reach a climax of slapstick, D-Day pratfalls, or, in short, genuine and recognizable farce.” It’s no accident that The Magic Christian would lead directly to Stanley Kubrick’s recruiting Southern for Dr. Strangelove, a film that takes “D-Day pratfalls” as its main subject. Nor is it an accident that the film ends with a Texan straddling a bomb hurtling toward the earth. Kubrick and Peter Sellers saw in Southern a writer who understood pointless, fatal catastrophe, who could make it work on the page. Southern had trained as a demolitions technician in the Army, and he periodically refers to nuclear disaster in the letters. “People in New York don’t think the end of the world is funny,” a studio executive supposedly told him on the Strangelove set, but Southern wasn’t from New York. He was from Texas; he found the end of the world hilarious.

- Stanley Kubrick Wanted a Taste of Terry Southern’s Lamb-Pit by Christopher Forsley [Vice]

And, though he was a speed freak, I believe what he said. I believe what he said because he was a speed freak. Only a speed freak could start writing at five in the morning, and only a speed freak would consider the time working with that totalitarian, perfectionist, maniac of a director ‘magical.’ Every actor, whether it’s Jack Nicholson, Malcolm McDowell, or the ghost of Peter Sellers, that worked for him agrees with what Kirk Douglas said: “Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit!” But Southern disagreed. He found his collaboration with Kubrick magical. Magical as in wizards, wands, and my pissing little ponies. Magical like your first joint or your first vagina. Southern did lose his cinematic virginity on Dr. Strangelove, so that could have influenced his word choice when describing the collaboration. It’s more likely, though, that he described it as a magical time because they wrote Dr. Strangelove in the back of that ‘grand old Bentley’ as the 50s were turning into the 60s, when despite those dark winter mornings, London was just beginning to swing.

And Southern, despite, or possibly because of, those dark winter mornings, was just beginning to throw back pills. He threw back pills like a clown throws back pies. A presidential clown, played by the hilarious Peter Sellers, that throws back pies at the officers of the Army, Navy, and Air Force who accidentally throw pies at him before the bomb, which Captain Mandrake, also played by the hilarious Peter Sellers, is unable to stop. But Kubrick cut that pie throwing scene of Southern’s from the film, and Dr. Strangelove instead ends with Slim Pickens riding the bomb, while ‘heehawing,’ as it descends to the soon-to-be inhabitable Earth. Southern could have held a grudge. He could have used the written word and a few of the rumors surrounding Kubrick (I think a Hollywood tabloid claimed that he lived in an underground fortress, talked only to his cats, and drank rattlesnake venom) to satirically dismantle the great director. But, because he was a grand guy, Southern instead tried to set up another ‘magical’ collaboration.

- Notes from The War Room by Terry Southern [Reprinted from the journal "Grand Street", issue #49]

We were occupying three of the big sound stages at Shepperton: one of them for the War Room set, another for bomber set and a third that accommodated two smaller sets, General Ripper's office, including its corridor with Coke machine and telephone booth ("If you try any perversion in there, I'll blow your head off "), and the General Turgidson motel-room set. The B-52 set, where we were shooting at the time, consisted of an actual B-52 bomber, or at least its nose and forward fuselage, suspended about fifteen feet above the floor of the stage. They were between takes when I climbed into the cockpit area where they were doing "character shots": individual close-ups of the co-pilot scrutinizing a Penthouse centerfold, the navigator practicing his card tricks, the radar operator wistfully reading a letter from home. Short snippets of action meant to establish the crew as legendary boy-next-door types. Conspicuously absent from the line-up was the bombardier and single black member of the crew, James Earl Jones, or Jimmy, as everyone called him. A classic thespian of high purpose, Jones was about as cultured and scholarly as it is possible for an actor to be, with a voice and presence that were invariably compared to Paul Robeson's.

Kubrick came over to where I was standing, but he remained absorbed in what he called "this obligatory Our Town character crap that always seems to come off like a parody of All Quiet on the Western Front," a movie that took an outlandish amount of time to focus on the individual behavioral quirks of every man in the regiment. "The only rationale for doing it now," Kubrick said, "is that you're making fun of that historic and corny technique of character delineation." Just as he started to go back to the camera, I saw that his eye was caught by something off the set. "Look at that," he said, "Slim and Jimmy are on a collision course." Slim was ambling along the apron of the stage toward where Jimmy was sitting by the prop truck absorbed in his script. "Why don't you go down there," Kubrick went on, "and introduce them." It was not so much a question as a very pointed suggestion, perhaps even, it occurred to me, a direct order. I bounded down the scaffolding steps and across the floor of the stage, just in time to intercept Slim in full stride a few feet from where Jimmy was sitting. "Hold on there, Slim," I said. "I want you to meet another member of the cast." Jimmy got to his feet. "James Earl Jones -- Slim Pickens." They shook hands but both continued to look equally puzzled. They had obviously never heard of each other. Somehow I knew the best route to some kind of rapprochement would be through Jones. "Slim has just finished working on a picture with Marlon Brando," I said. "Oh well," he boomed, "that must have been very interesting indeed.... Yes, I should very much like to hear what it is like to work with the great Mr. Brando."

As if the question were a cue for a well-rehearsed bit of bumpkin business, Slim began to hem and haw, kicking at an imaginary rock on the floor. "Wal," he drawled, his head to one side, "you know ah worked with Bud Brando for right near a full year, an' durin' that time ah never seen him do one thing that wudn't all man an' all white." When I asked Jimmy about it later, he laughed. His laugh, it must be said, is one of the all-time great laughs. "I was beginning to think," and there were tears in his eyes as he said it, "that I must have imagined it."

- Southern Exposure: Reading Terry Southern, Great American Satirist, Voice of His Time by Christy Rodgers [Counter Punch]

He produced a trove of freewheeling satirical (and some excellent non-satirical) pieces in a variety of genres: journalism, novels, short stories, screenplays, reviews, letters, and pre-postmodern unclassifiable mélanges of fact and fiction. As Evelyn Waugh or Noel Coward concocted artful versions of the stylized cadences of high society England between the world wars, Terry Southern gave unmistakable literary voice(s) to the world of his time, the mid-20th century US. He had an unparalleled ear for the disharmonious sounds of the Big Cold War Freak-Out, from ultra-hip Greenwich Village to congenially racist backwoods Mississippi, paranoid, gun-totin’ Texas, and beyond. Probably his best-known work is “Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” that classic Cold War farce-majeur of nuclear annihilation. Director Stanley Kubrick is Strangelove’s originating genius, of course, but Southern collaborated with him on its unforgettable screenplay. The extent of his contribution is apparently still contentious, and this may be an indication of why his career path led him to greater obscurity than many of his peers. The movies have been a cruel medium for many writers, and Southern’s later writing was almost entirely in screenplay collaborations.

- The Original Hipster: Why Terry Southern's Bad Boy Black Humor Is Making a Comeback by Dick Holland [The Austin Chronicle]

Quick: Which Texas writer or writers merited inclusion on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? (A) J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek; (B) Katherine Anne Porter and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry); (C) Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and Cabeza de Vaca; or (D) Terry Southern, looking a little stoned and wearing shades. If you guessed (D), friends, you're correct -- it is none other than that progenitor of Bad Boy Black Humor and personal leader of the early days of the sexual revolution in Paris, London, and Greenwich Village. What made him so au courant back in the summer of '67, when the Fab Four's collaged cover art made its splash? And now, six years after his death, why is Terry Southern suddenly hot again? And how did he escape from Alvarado, Texas, in the first place?

Much of Southern's recent acclaim appears to have to do with a particular story in Stanley Kubrick's obituaries. When the filmmaker died a couple of years back, Southern's name came up over and over again as the secret weapon in Kubrick's production of his most perfect film, the darkly hilarious Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The story goes like this: Kubrick had paid English writer Peter George $3,000 for his novel Red Alert, a thriller about an American air base commander who defies fail-safe protocols and sends B-52s under his command to bomb the USSR, thus initiating world-ending retaliation. The financing for the film was based on Peter Sellers playing multiple roles, and after Sellers passed on a copy of Southern's comic novel The Magic Christian to Kubrick, Southern was brought in to "lighten" the script a bit.

- Terry Southern – [The Official Site] [Maintained by his son Nile Southern]
- Terry Southern Interviews Henry Green, The Art of Fiction No. 22 [The Paris Review]
- Twirling at Ole Miss: Adventures in Dixie. by Terry Southern [Esquire, February 1963] [Longform]
- An Impolite Interview with Terry Southern [The Realist]
- "Pure pornography": Terry Southern's FBI file. by JPat Brown [Muckrock]
- A Reefer Runs Through It: The Making Of Easy Rider, Fonda, Hopper and Southern Reveal How Their Counter-Culture Opus Changed the Face of Modern Cinema. by Richard Luck [Sabotage Times]

posted by Fizz (9 comments total)

This is great! How the hell has that name avoided my attention so far? Without being aware of him, I've loved his films very much. Barbarella is probably my favorite trash film, ever. And nothing extra needs to be said of Dr. Strangelove ... Which of his books should definitely be read, you think?
posted by sapagan at 12:19 PM on March 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've not read anything by Terry Southern but both Candy and Blue Movie seem to be referenced quite a bit within these articles and interviews. Seems like a good place to start.
posted by Fizz at 12:55 PM on March 29, 2016

"I learned not to care too much and would write wholly for an imaginary reader whose tastes were similar to my own.

And this is, of course, is the only way to work well."

A great read. I read his two "raunchy books" when I was young. I loved the humor in them.

"Tell me you can't feel that you..."
posted by Oyéah at 2:15 PM on March 29, 2016

Thank you for this post! The Kubrick stories are awesome. I can't wait to read the rest.
posted by vibrotronica at 2:19 PM on March 29, 2016

they have quite a few other interviews for free online, too!
posted by thelonius at 3:50 PM on March 29, 2016

I keep forgetting I have a copy of 'Red Dirt Marijuana' sitting on my unread pile of books, bought on a whim after reading a reference to Southern's name in a Lester Bangs essay collection. I have so much unproffered culture sitting on that table, and yet I waste hours clicking away on Imgur. Slim Pickens needs to drop that bomb on my goddamn head, I swear.
posted by spoobnooble II: electric bugaboo at 4:50 PM on March 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

One bit I found most fascinating is from the Oxford American article regarding his relationship with Dennis Hopper and the money made from Easy Rider:

The greatest indignity of his career involved the making of Easy Rider. Conflicts over the movie’s authorship have been fought in print and in court for decades. It’s generally agreed that Southern supplied the film’s title, and he was originally its sole credited writer, but when asked by costars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, Southern agreed to petition the Writers Guild to divide credit among the three of them. Later, Hopper (who also directed the film) began to claim he himself had initiated or improvised most of the movie. This type of dispute was fairly common in the industry—Kubrick had also tried to downplay Southern’s contributions to Strangelove, telling the New York Times his role had been “icing on the cake.” (Southern would chalk this up to “Stanley’s obsession with the auteur theory.”) But in this case, the argument transcended the realm of ego, because, while Hopper and Fonda made millions from Easy Rider’s success, Southern earned something in the range of $3,500. Journalist Mark Singer wrote about the controversy in 1998 and found that most of the people who worked on the film were sympathetic to Southern’s version of events. Cinematographer László Kovács remembered Southern’s script, and Bill Hayward—a producer on the film, and Hopper’s own brother-in-law—said, “I always thought this thing never would have got written without him.” But Hopper denied even the existence of Southern’s screenplay for the rest of his life.

Pretty heart-breaking and if we're to believe Southern's account of the story, then Hopper was a bit of an asshole about it all.
posted by Fizz at 5:05 PM on March 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

For first-time Southern readers, I'd recommend The Magic Christian which is maybe not even a hundred pages and is completely fucking hysterical. Blue Movie has some very, very funny bits, but also has some very problematic content including racism, sexism and sexual assault all played for laughs. It's been a long time since I've read Candy but I seem to remember it crossing some kind of line from raunchy fun to horribly problematic for similar reasons. Terry Southern's work is really a very mixed bag. I'm a fan, but only of about half of it.
posted by Cookiebastard at 7:20 PM on March 29, 2016

Coincidence. I'm currently up to the Fuzz Against Junk chapter of Nile Southern's book, The Candy Men -- an account of the writing of Candy and the legal struggles between Southern/Hoffenberg and Maurice Girodias.

I highly recommend it. Despite not being finished yet, it's still one of the best accounts of that whole Paris Beat/Olympia Press milieux that I've read to date.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:40 AM on March 30, 2016