According to Art Miller, an independent producer who hired Southern to write the screenplay for a never-completed comic film about the bumbling Watergate burglars, Southern told him that the best example of his writing in "Dr. Strangelove" was the scene in which B-52 pilot T.J. "King" Kong, played by Slim Pickens, reads off a list of the contents of a survival kit to his crew, concluding that a man could have "a pretty nice weekend in Vegas" with some of the items. When the scene was shot, Pickens spoke the scripted line ("Dallas"), but the word " Vegas" was overdubbed during post-production because the film was released not long after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963.