After buying the rights to the novel "Red Alert", Kubrick collaborated with its author, Peter George, on the script. It was originally written as a serious political thriller, but Kubrick decided that a "serious treatment" of the subject would not be believable, and thought that some of its most salient points would be fodder for comedy. Kubrick's longtime producer-and-friend, James B. Harris, thought the film should be serious, and the two parted ways, amicably, over this disagreement -- Harris going on to produce and direct the serious cold-war thriller "The Bedford Incident." Kubrick and "Red Alert" author George then reworked the script as a satire (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, but this idea was also abandoned, and Kubrick decided to make the film as "an outrageous black comedy".