Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove has lost some of its fun in recent months, when things like “war with Russia” and “the complete nuclear annihilation of the Earth” stopped seeming like cautionary tales of a bygone era, and started seeming like potential headlines on tomorrow’s newspapers. Still, that sudden increase in relevance has had at least one weird real-world payoff: The revelation that director Oliver Stone just screened the film for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who’d never seen it before.
Per The Washington Post, Stone was in the process of filming The Putin Interviews, a four-part series for Showtime, when he showed Putin the film. Sadly, The Post doesn’t have Putin’s reaction to the movie, in which bumbling, gamesmanship, and an obsession with mutually assured destruction on the parts of the U.S. and Russia consign the planet to an unavoidable doomsday scenario. (We’ll have to tune into the series, on June 12 and the following three nights, to see whether he thumbsed mass human extinction up or down.) Meanwhile, it’s not clear whether Stone—who’s said that, “If Vladimir Putin is indeed the great enemy of the United States, then at least we should try to understand him” in a press release for the special—will face any consequences for showing the former KGB officer so many pictures of the Big Board.