“That was a documentary!”
I finally managed to snag Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on the TiVo, and had opportunity to watch it while E was out of town last week. I was captivated; it wasn’t ha-ha funny nearly as often as it was oh holy shit funny, which is, I suppose, sort of an acquired taste. (The same could be said of Peter Sellers. About being an acquired taste, I mean.) Good stuff.
By pure coincidence, the New York Times published yesterday a short piece on the prescience (omniscience?) of the film, entitled
Truth Stranger Than ‘Strangelove’. If I may, I’d like to spoil the final graf for you:
Daniel Ellsberg, who later leaked the Pentagon Papers, was a RAND analyst and a consultant at the Defense Department when he and a mid-level official took off work one afternoon in 1964 to see the film. Mr. Ellsberg recently recalled that as they left the theater, he turned to his colleague and said, “That was a documentary!”