Just watching Dr. Strangelove again, and I’ve come to the scene that always sticks out for me. It’s not supposed to, but it does because it looks wrong.
After the B-52 is nearly hit by a missile and the radioman informs the pilot that the CRM-114 is destroyed, there’s a shot of the B-52 flying low to the ground. But the shadow on the ground is not a B-52. It’s a B-17.
Kubric was known for his attention to detail. Why does he have the wrong shadow?
Also, I’ve heard that Slim Pickens wasn’t told the film was a satire. (May have read it in the booklet that came with the DVD that has the ‘liner notes’ by Roger Ebert.) True or false? If true, and Pickens was trying to play it straight, then I think he comes off as a pretty bad actor.
My WAG has always been that they couldn’t get aerial footage shot from a B-52 that would have the correct shadow. The B-52 was the top of the line bomber at the time, and it was the height of the Cold War. I doubt the USAF brass would have agreed to spare one for a movie. Especially this movie. But surplus B-17s were probably easy to get a hold of.
And don’t forget that back in the early '60s filmmakers didn’t have CGI: the shots were of a model optically supered over the background footage. They didn’t have the technology to change the shadow. Certainly not on Dr. Strangelove’s budget.
What’s always bugged me is that you can see the model yawing back and forth on its string in a way that real planes never do.
I thought that the ‘flight’ scenes were actually stock footage from the USAAF archives. Getting a reel of that would have been much easier than building/buying a fully functional B-17 (fully functional meaning airworthy.)
The shadow of this same plane was indeed used on some scenes, I think the realistic reaction of the shadow and not the shape of it, was the item that convinced Kubrick to then use the footage.
I noticed the shadow, too, but only on the fourth or fifth time I saw the movie.
I remember the NASA animations that they used to run on the news back in the days of the Apollo program. They obviously weren’t real, but they showed enough to understand what was happening. I think Kubrick knew enough to spend his money in the right places. The outside shots of the plane aren’t quite right; but the inside shots are perfectly claustrophobic, and I even remember a scene where Major Kong is walking around and unsteady on his feet, and it looks a thousand times better than the old everybody-lean-to-the-left-while-I-tilt-the-camera thing they used to do on Star Trek. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Kubrick build the B-52 interior on a moving platform, to get the right body language of a person in a moving airplane.
His next movie is still, in my opinion, the gold standard by which special effects should be judged.
And I’ve heard an interesting theory about a key difference between black-and-white and color movies. Color is specific. When you watch color film of an airplane, you think of it as that particular airplane. But black-and-white is generic. A plane filmed in black-and-white is a stand-in for every plane. In the old film noir you could forget the characters names and see them as “detective” and “villain” and “femme fatale”. It’s like a new coloring book, where each page is the abstract waiting to be turned into the real thing. And that little bit of unreality means the special effects don’t have to be perfect to keep you in the story.
The B-17 used in Dr Strangelove is actually still flying to today. It is N9363Z “Fuddy Duddy” owned by the WIngs of Eagles Discovery Center based at the Elmira New york Airport.
First, do not (repeat: NOT) trust Roger Ebert when it comes to facts. He’s always been willing to ignore facts to make a more dramatic/interesting story. Also, of course, various people make up amusing stories about the making of a movie – they’re were on some TV interview show, and they just make up some funny anecdote out of whole cloth, which then gets passed around as if it were true. So, it’s possible that Roger was innocently mislead, but my experience is that he just doesn’t pay attention to facts.
Second, I’ve seen other performances by Slim Pickins, and he’s a wonderful comedian (as well as having played some nastry villians.) I find it unbelievable that he didn’t know what was going on.
I’ve seen Slim Pickens in several films. I don’t think he was a great actor, but he certainly wasn’t a bad one. If he thought he was in a serious film and was playing it straight, then he would be a bad actor. But if he knew he was in a satire and was playing it straight, then it shows he was a good one.
It only occurred to me today that (IIRC) a B-17 was used to shoot aerials for This is Cinerama in 1955, because of the big greenhouse in the plane’s nose allowed for a nice clear forward view.