Writing Sample 2

WRITING & REWRITING CASABLANCA (EXCERPT)

The path from the original story—an unproduced stage play entitled Everybody Comes to Rick’s—to the final script of Casablanca is almost as roundabout and complicated as the refugee trail from Paris to Casablanca that opens this classic film. By the time Casablanca was completed in August 1942, at least seven contracted writers at Warner Bros. had penned portions of the story. Many lines were preserved from the original play and more were added by producer Hal Wallis, director Michael Curtiz and ad-libbed by the talented cast. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences® only awarded Best Writing (Screenplay) Oscars® to Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, but the debate continues today about who deserves the credit for some of the most memorable moments in the history of cinema.

In December of 1941, only a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Warner Bros. reader, Stephen Karnot, finished reading the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. “A boxoffice [sic] natural,” he wrote in his notes. Karnot clearly had an eye for potential.

Everybody Comes to Rick’s was inspired by Burnett’s recent trip to Nazi-occupied Europe. Horrified by his experience and the atrocious treatment of Jews there, Burnett told his writing partner, “No one can remain neutral, God damn it, Joan. No one can remain neutral.” Together, Burnett and Alison crafted a play that structurally was not much different from the film it inspired: A cynical, mysterious expatriate named Rick reunites with his long-lost love (when his piano-playing confidante plays “As Time Goes By”), and he eventually helps her to escape from Casablanca with a resistance leader. In spite of the increase in patriotic film production from all of the Hollywood studios at that time, no one had faith in the project. Luckily, Irene Lee, head of the story department at Warner Bros., did.

Lee encouraged Wallis to buy the play from Burnett on December 28, 1941. Apparently, Burnett didn’t consider the contractual agreement with Warner Bros. very carefully, and when he signed it, he forfeited his rights to the story and to the characters—thus having no claim to either the film’s future financial success or its cultural prestige. Burnett would spend years of his life regretting that decision.

Two days later, Wallis sent the play to a few of the studio’s contracted writers. Already, Wallis had changed the name from Everybody Comes to Rick’s to Casablanca, hoping to recall the recent success of United Artists’ film Algiers (1938).

Excerpt From: The Editors of Warner Bros. Digital Publishing. Casablanca: Inside the Script.