Philadelphia, November 18-20

Terry Southern (1924-1995) was the hipster's hipster, the perfect icon of cool. A small-town Texan who disdained his "good ol' boy" roots, he hung with the Beats, hobnobbed with Sartre and Camus, and called William Faulkner friend. He was considered one of the most creative and original players in the Paris Review circle, yet his greatest literary success was the notorious semipornographic pulp novel Candy. For decades, the crowd he ran with was composed of the most famous creative artists of the day. He wrote Dr. Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick, Easy Rider with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and was a face in the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (the guy in sunglasses). Wherever the cultural action was, he was there, the life of every party—Paris in the '50s, London in the swinging '60s, Greenwich Village, and Hollywood. As a screenwriter, Terry Southern was an incomparable satirist and, as the films in this series will attest, one of the most genuine writing talents of this or any other age.

Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
dir. Stanley Kubrick, UK, 1964, 35mm, 94 mins, b/w

Kubrick’s cool cynicism and Terry Southern’s caustic black humor are perfectly wedded in this vision of nuclear apocalypse brought about by a mad U.S. general’s paranoia about women and Commies. Nothing is sacred as Peter Sellers (in no less than three roles), George C. Scott, and Slim Pickens set out to stop the “Russkies” from polluting America’s drinking water while trying to stave off Doomsday. Forty years since its initial release, Strangelove remains a perfect and timeless spoof of political and military insanity.

Nile Southern, Terry’s son, is executor of the Terry Southern Estate and co-trustee of the Terry Southern Literary Trust. He is the author of The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel CANDY (Arcade Publishing) and co-editor of Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995 (Grove Press). His novella, The Anarchivists of Eco-Dub, is forthcoming.

Evelyn Waugh's audacious satire on the Southern California way of life (and death) was a long-time project of Luis Buñuel's, eventually brought to the screen by British director Tony Richardson from an adaptation by Southern and Christopher Isherwood. Billed on its release as "the film with something to offend everyone," this classic black comedy concerns the sudden suicide of a Hollywood celebrity and his nephew's subsequent problems in paying the exorbitant funeral bill. The Loved One boasts a star-studded cast, including Robert Morse as the Candide-like nephew, Rod Steiger as the Oedipal Mr. Joyboy, and Liberace as a fastidious casket salesman—as well as appearances by John Gielgud, James Coburn, Milton Berle, Dana Andrews, and a host of others.

Gail Gerber, the widow of Terry Southern, met the young writer on the set of The Loved One. She was trained as a ballet dancer and was the youngest member of a French ballet company based in Montreal. She did theater and film in Hollywood and was in End of the Road. She is currently working on her forthcoming memoir based on her experience of thirty-one years with Terry Southern.

Norman Jewison's acclaimed character study of a young upstart poker player stars Steve McQueen as "the Kid," who sets out to prove he knows his way around the tables, and Edward G. Robinson as the current poker king whose reign is in jeopardy. Set in the New Orleans of the 1930s, Southern, along with co-writer Ring Lardner, Jr., fill in the contentious world of gamblers and gaming, where psychological one-upsmanship and beating the other fellow are the way of the world.

Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda make one last dope deal to finance a cross-country bike trip, in the picture that shook up Hollywood. A wildly successful generational manifesto, Easy Rider reveled in countercultural values, promoting drugs, sex, and rock' n 'roll with the fatalistic sense that long-haired freaks would soon have to fight for their lives against killer redneck straights. Shot on location by Laszlo Kovacs, Easy Rider eschewed old-fashioned Hollywood polish for documentary-style immediacy and remains one of the seminal works of the late '60s for its sharply perceptive portrait of those chaotic times.