partly on the recommendation of peter sellers, stanley kubrick asked southern to help revise the screenplay of "dr. strangelove or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb" (1964). the film was based on the cold war thriller "red alert" (1958) by peter george, the rights to which kubrick had secured for $3,000. kubrick and george's original screenplay (which was to be called "edge of doom") was a straight political thriller. they then reworked it into a satirical format (provisionally titled "the delicate balance of terror") in which the plot of "red alert" was situated as a film-within-a-film made by an alien intelligence.