If the Hollywood studio system of its golden age had no virtues to its credit beyond producing Casablanca, that would still be an enormous credit. The movie is Exhibit A for demonstrating the alchemic nature of filmmaking under a major company in those days. With studio brass possessing something in the way of creative instincts, slotting the right contracted talent into appropriate roles, the lead of routine craftsmanship could produce cinematic gold – often on accident. There was nothing about Casablanca’s production to mark it as anything other than another Warner Bros. drama. Plenty of credit has been given out over the years for the film becoming one of America’s greatest wartime romances — Michael Curtiz for his crisp direction, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman for leading a cast full of color and passion, the Epstein brothers and Howard Koch for so many memorable lines of dialogue and a sweeping narrative, and producer Hal B. Wallis for being a canny guiding hand. But surely another cog in the studio apparatus who deserves a nod is the story analyst who recommended that the story be adapted in the first place.
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You read right — adapted. Like its fellow ambassadors for classic Hollywood, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca was not originally created for the screen. Check the opening titles again, and you’ll find Murray Burnett and Joan Alison credited for the play that inspired the movie. Of course, if that’s slipped your notice, you’re hardly alone. Everybody may come to Rick’s café, but hardly anyone has read or seen Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the play, or rated it as comparable to its illustrious progeny in another medium. And there are fair reasons for this state of affairs.

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‘Casablanca’ Beat Its Source Material to Production by Decades

Hollywood legend, at times fueled by its subjects, has shaped memories and perceptions of how Everybody Comes to Rick’s became Casablanca. What isn’t disputed is how the play came about. Murray Burnett was a young school teacher when he found himself in Vienna in 1938 and got an eyeful of Nazism’s effect on Europe. He was there to help relatives get out, but the firsthand experience shook Burnett deeply. On the way back home, he and his wife found themselves in a French café with a Black pianist full of refugees attempting to escape. The two experiences came together as an idea for a play.

Safe at home and reunited with his writing partner, Joan Alison, Burnett knocked out Everybody Comes to Rick’s by 1940. It had yet to be produced when Warner Bros. bought the rights in 1941. The story analyst who first came upon it reported that the play was “sophisticated hokum” — not the most glowing praise, exactly, and later critics of the film would offer similar assessments as backhanded compliments. But the reader meant it sincerely, and Burnett was fond of stating that the $40,000 he got from the studio was a record sum for an unproduced play.

But Everybody Comes to Rick’s remained unproduced in 1941. And 1942. And many, many years after. It wasn’t until 1991 that the play finally found a theater and an audience in London. By then, Casablanca was firmly embedded in popular culture as a classic, perceptions of who deserved credit were firmly entrenched, and Burnett had spent decades nursing grudges.

Was the Play Slandered by the ‘Casablanca’ Screenwriters?

Image via Warner Bros.

Just who wrote what, and how much they actually relied on Everybody Comes to Rick’s, was among the chief bones of contention about Casablanca for decades. The screenplay is credited to Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, but according to Aljean Harmetz’s Round Up the Usual Suspects, seven writers were assigned to the material by Wallis at one time or another. The Epsteins were the longest on the project and have typically been given the lion’s share of writing credits. But Warner Bros. staff writer Casey Robinson is known to have made uncredited contributions to the love story between Rick and Ilsa and claimed to be the one behind the decision to make the love interest European. Curtiz, Wallis, Bogart, and others weighed in with notes. And just how much Koch’s contribution made it onto the screen has remained a matter of dispute, not helped by Koch’s often faulty memory of the writing process.

In his memoirs, Koch claimed to have collaborated directly with the Epsteins on Casablanca; according to Harmetz’ book, they never did. Koch also claimed that, aside from the setting and the character of Rick, nothing of the original play was of value to a film. That was what most upset Burnett, who frequently and fiercely challenged Koch’s comments and took legal action against the writer in 1973 (he lost). Harmetz’s estimation is that Koch’s work primarily shows in expressing principled opposition to Nazism, the Epsteins in the overall structure and the wit of the dialogue, and Robinson’s in the romance. But that still leaves the question: where is the play in all this?

‘Casablanca’ Does Resemble the Play Quite a Bit…

Image via Warner Bros. 

Burnett estimated that 80 percent of Casablanca was taken directly from Everybody Comes to Rick’s, and his resentment over the years extended from Koch to Warner Bros. as the studio — who retained all rights to the material — cut him out of an 80s television adaptation, fought him on producing the play, and denied him use of the original title when it did finally make it to stage (it was rechristened Rick’s Bar Casablanca).

The skeleton of Casablanca is certainly the original play, which is set entirely in the café. In the play, Rick Blaine is a lawyer who abandoned his family, carried on an affair with the American Lois Meredith in Paris, and was shattered when she left him. Disillusioned and drinking in Casablanca, Rick maintains an uneasy friendship with Italian official Luis Rinaldo as the denizens of the city meet in his bar to try and survive. Rick’s hollow but painless life is interrupted when Lois appears with her current lover, the Czech resistance writer Victor Laszlo. On the same night, black marketeer Ugarte leaves letters of transit, guaranteeing passage out of Casablanca, with Rick. Ugarte is arrested and later killed, and visiting German officials make it plain to Laszlo that they mean to keep him from obtaining the letters of transit and escaping them.

Except for the specifics of Rick’s past and some of the names and nationalities, this first act of Everybody Comes to Rick’s was faithfully adapted and retained throughout the writing process for Casablanca. Significant chunks of dialogue, even famous lines. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” was taken from the play. And it was Burnett who injected “As Time Goes By” into the story, the song being a favorite of his from college.

In Act II of the play, Lois visits Rick after hours to resume their affair but is exposed the next morning as a manipulator out for the letters. Rick refuses to help her or Laszlo but doesn’t impede Laszlo’s efforts to stir passions against the fascists, chiefly through the singing of “La Marseillaise.” Meanwhile, Rinaldo continues searching for the letters and places Rick under suspicion. After his efforts to coerce an affair out of a young woman to win exit visas for her and her husband are foiled by Rick, he attempts a futile search and shuts down the café. Once again, chunks of lines made it from the play to the film untouched, notably Rick’s conversation with the young woman “Rinaldo” wants to seduce.

The third act sees Lois declare that she is leaving Laszlo for Rick. He seemingly enlists her and Rinaldo in a plan to capture Laszlo, the price being the young couple’s safe conduct out of Casablanca. Once they’re in the clear, Rick betrays Rinaldo, gives the letters of transit to Laszlo, and compels Lois to go with him. Telling her, “We’ll always have Paris,” he sees them off before surrendering to Rinaldo and the Germans, likely to his death.

…But Key Details were Changed

Image via Warner Bros.

Those last two act summaries should tell you something about how much Casablanca evolved in the adaptation process and put a big question mark over Burnett’s estimate that it was almost all derived from his play. Lois and Rinaldo were completely transformed, Rick was significantly altered, and key changes in character connections were made for creative and practical reasons.

Robinson’s changes to Lois went beyond making her European. She’s unfaithful and somewhat amoral in the play. Her affairs with married men, and her trading sex for favors, would never have made it past the Hays Code. Her reinvention as the wife of Laszlo, admiring of her husband but in love with the American she knew in Paris when she thought that husband dead, torn between duty and desire, dodged any objections by the censor. But it also created a more complex and noble character, one capable of offering another perspective on the story’s themes of sacrifice and idealism.

If Everybody Comes to Rick’s could be said to have a villain, it is Rinaldo. His relationship with Rick is colder, his exploitation of women refugees for his lusts is explicit, and his closet sympathies for the Allied cause are nonexistent. But the Epsteins latched onto him early on as a vehicle for comic dialogue and moral ambiguity. His sexual escapades were only implied for the sake of the censor, and the young couple he preys upon in the play saw their parts greatly reduced. Switching his nationality offered a mild commentary on France’s situation in World War II. And the changes to Rinaldo — now Louis Renault — moved Curtiz to insist that the German official, Strasser, be developed as a suitable villain.

As for Rick — a character Burnett claimed was everything he wanted to be at the time he wrote the play, and Joan Alison claimed was her concept of an ideal man — his marriage was almost required to go. Short of massive rewrites, the Hayes Code wouldn’t have let a hero be an adulterer. The Epsteins eliminated his background as a lawyer, and anything else that could tie him down to too specific a past. While Rick is the first character to appear in the play, they delayed revealing Bogart in the part for a few minutes, building up the character’s mystique.

But Koch, a leftwing writer destined for the blacklist, provided the hints of Rick’s long history fighting fascism and injected signs that his idealism was defeated but not dead throughout the first two acts. Harmetz described script revisions, passed through Wallis, as a give-and-take, with the Epsteins keeping Koch’s politics from becoming heavy-handed and Koch keeping the Epsteins’ wit from overriding the fundamental sincerity of the story’s principles.

These changes to the core of the main cast necessitated significant alterations to the plot, particularly the ending. If Rick’s sacrifice in the play has a certain doomed nobility to it, it didn’t offer wartime audiences a rousing, uplifting note to go out and buy war bonds on. Nor did it pay off Rick, Ilsa, Renault, and Strasser as rewritten for the screen. How Casablanca’s final scene came about is its own story, but the end result was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated finales. Among those celebrating was Murray Burnett; even with all his hard feelings toward the writers and the studio, he conceded until his death that the ending — and the movie — surpassed his original play. “But it was my story,” he would add.