Well, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a story... I don't if anybody knows what it is but it was about... in the early days of testing nuclear bombs, that Russia and America happened to test a nuclear bomb at the same moment at different ends of the earth.

The film was a remake of an earlier picture called Ask a Policeman released in 1939 which Guest himself had co-written. He married the actress Yolande Donlan in 1954. He went on to direct produce and script a huge number of films over the following forty years with perhaps his best known work being on the first two Hammer Films Quatermass science-fiction adaptations in the 1950s: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957).