Casablanca

This week, everybody comes to Rick's! Chris and Lizzie head to French Morocco for a deep dive on Casablanca, the movie that no one believed in and everyone wanted credit for. Learn how a notoriously tough director (Michael Curtiz), a freshly minted producer (Hal Wallis), a frustrated starlet (Ingrid Bergman), and a truly international cast brought this Hollywood classic from an unproduced play to the silver screen in mere months. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Cut, cut, cut!

• 2:04Lizzie Bassett?

  And action!

• 2:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone what I think many would agree is one of the greatest films of all time. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you, what do you got for us today?

• 2:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Here's looking at you, kid. Here's looking at you, kid. Here's looking at you, kid. Didn't remember how many times we said, here's looking at you, kid, in this movie, but we are talking about Casablanca, as Lizzie mentioned, widely considered one of the greatest films of all time. If you watch it on HBO Max, Ben Mankiewicz does an introduction in which he calls it "the greatest studio film ever made." His opinion, he reminds you. Lizzie, had you seen Casablanca before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

• 3:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I had not seen Casablanca since I was probably pretty young, like arguably too young to really understand what I was watching and also what the kind of historical implications of it were, which I'm sure we're gonna get into today. You know, it's one of those ones that I hadn't revisited and I don't know why. And I'm really glad that I had to watch it again for the podcast. It is an incredible movie. It's, I think, unbelievably well-written, performed, directed. The thing that struck me on this viewing, though, is, and maybe it's the way Ingrid Bergman plays it, because I think she's amazing in this. To me, on this viewing, it was almost ambiguous as to how much she means what she's saying to Rick.

• 3:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I think when I was younger, the sort of dire straits that she's in weren't as clear, and it made Rick a much more complicated character in this viewing, because he almost like, kind of has her over a barrel there in the middle part of this, or in the last act, rather, of this movie. And it did, for me, kind of call into question, how much is she just trying to get those papers? And how much does she mean what she's saying? And I think that's a testament to her performance, it's a testament to the writing, and that I think they were willing to have this be maybe more ambiguous than I think we would be comfortable with now. Also, Rick's an asshole, I think. I think he's kind of a huge asshole. And he and his asshole friend Claude Rains just walk off into the sunset at the end of this.

• 4:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, you know, the, the turn of Claude Rains' character did kind of make me laugh because it comes absolutely out of left field, although I'd really enjoy him in this as well. And I just have to call out Paul Henry, who is so wonderful in this movie. It's so funny almost to pit him against Rick because it's like, my God, he's beautiful.

• 4:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Continental is how he's always described.

• 4:55Lizzie Bassett?

  He's beautiful. He's tall. He's suave. He's got like gorgeous hair. He's an actual hero. Who's, you know, spent a year in a concentration camp and is like fighting for what's right. And then there's just Rick drunk in a corner being like, I don't really care about anything. You know, it does make you wonder, did she love Rick? I think she did, but I think she's trying to get on that plane with Paul Henry.

• 5:20Chris Winterbauer?

  I know I would be.

• 5:20Lizzie Bassett?

  That's my review of Casablanca. Yeah, me too. Get me out of here. Get me on that plane with Paul.

• 5:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So first of all, the, one of the reasons I wanted to cover this movie, we're doing our Oscars coverage and it seems like Warner Brothers may garner a best picture win this year at the time of this recording with, it seems like maybe likely one battle after another, if not maybe sinners. And this is considered, if not one of the greatest studio films, certainly the greatest Warner Brothers film, you know, of all time. It won best picture, no, you know, big spoilers in 1943. It's also one of my favorite resistance films. We'll talk about the political angles of this movie, which I think ties in with a lot of movies that are nominated this year. Obviously it was just an accident in the international feature category, The Secret Agent for best picture, one battle after another, arguably

• 6:06Chris Winterbauer?

  something like sinners. And Casablanca gets a very big shout out at both the beginning and the close of Richard Linklater's Blue Moon. And also confirms my theory, or let's just say lends credence to my theory, that the real love story of this movie is between Raynault and Rick, not Rick and Ilsa. And should you need any convincing, I will point you to the same line that Lorenz Hart does in Blue Moon, when Reynold says, well, Rick is the kind of man that, well, if I were a woman and I were not around, I should be in love with Rick. But what a fool I am, talking to a beautiful woman about another man. Fool indeed. Which brings me, Lizzie, to my take, which is actually a bit different than yours.

• 6:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I love Ingrid Bergman. I think Elsa's character, I don't think they figured her out. And we're gonna get into the writing process. A lot of people consider this movie one of the greatest romances on screen of all time.

• 7:01Lizzie Bassett?

  I do not agree with that, I don't think.

• 7:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't agree either. I really struggle with the romance in this movie. My least favorite part of the movie is the Paris flashback. It really bumps me. I don't like it at all. But I love the rest of the movie. I absolutely adore it. I agree Paul Henried is the statuesque epitome of style and goodness and class. And he is so handsome. And when they play, I might say, as kind of shortly after the midpoint of the movie, and Rick gives the nod after Laszlo has called for it. I love that scene so much. I like Rick as a character. I agree he's deeply flawed. I'm a Bogart fan from the time.

• 7:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I should be clear. I love him. I think he's great in this.

• 7:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's an interesting movie where it's a movie that rests on one character finally making arguably the right decision, although I think it's complicated. I disagree. I think Renauld is actually handled very well by Cloud Rains. And I think they did a good job of changing him from, as we'll discuss, from the play that it's based on. And I actually find the turn, I think there is enough teased out at the beginning that he's kind of ready for somebody to give him a reason to go against the Gestapo by the end. That I buy it at the end of the movie. That works for me. But I might be alone. Again, Ingrid Bergman, we're gonna talk a lot about her today. She is wonderful. I don't think she gives up by any means of ad performance. It feels as if there is a plot that they require her character to either do or react in specific ways in order for the plot to happen

• 8:27Chris Winterbauer?

  and for other characters with more clearly defined perspectives to make certain choices. And so it feels like she's just kind of ping ponged between two characters. I agree with you. You could read it ambiguously in certain ways. I don't think that that's the direction they were actually going for necessarily. And I don't think that's the way that she's playing it. And so I don't read a lot of ambiguity into it, just me personally. And so for that reason, that part of the story is the part that doesn't work for me at the same level that this ensemble really comes together in so many other ways.

• 8:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Do you feel that way even when it's revealed that she thought that Victor was dead when she was in Paris? Because to me, that's the thing that clues me into her kind of entire character and that flashback is that she's basically like, she's gone through the most traumatic thing that you could probably go through at that point when she meets Rick.

• 9:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't track any of it, to be honest, very well, because I don't track who Rick is in the flashback. It feels like he's such a different person.

• 9:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree with that. That is a turn that feels sharp.

• 9:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't buy Rick in the flashback because he feels so upbeat. I wouldn't necessarily say idealistic because there's not anything idealistic that they're talking about. But he is so happy-go-lucky, almost devil may care. But then when we hear about his political background as explained by Reynold, like he had fought for the loyalists in Spain. He had done gun running in Ethiopia. I'm like, so where is this interlude where he's kind of like a hapless romantic in Paris? Those elements didn't, they don't come together. So for me, it's like when the movie is in Rick's bar, when we're in Casablanca, when we're in real time. This movie's a masterpiece. I love it. I adore, you know, again, every moment, so many scenes, so many of the supporting characters, Peter Laurie, Sidney Greenstreet, everybody's so good. To me, the flashback only confuses things.

• 10:11Chris Winterbauer?

  And then I do not understand Ilsa's character very well throughout the ending of the film. And I wonder, like you, I wonder what's her perspective? What does she mean? What's she going for? But it doesn't, I did not feel that it was in an, like in an interesting provocative way. I felt like it was in a confused, we actually just don't know, you know what I mean, sort of way. Maybe part of why I feel that way is, as we'll discuss in the play, she's very different. And she's the character that changed the most from the source material to the finished film.

• 10:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, great. I can't wait to hear about it. My take, uninformed, which may change by the end of this, because you were very convincing as always, is that she does not want Rick to get on that plane.

• 10:47Chris Winterbauer?

  You're saying she wants to go with Paul?

• 10:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 10:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, let's dive in. Casablanca is a romantic drama directed by Michael Curtiz. And I just want to mention, Curtiz, that's how his name has been long pronounced. But his original name, the non-anglicized version, Kurtz, I believe is how it's pronounced. He's from Hungary. We'll get there. The screenplay is credited to Julius Epstein. Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. Different Howard Koch from Howard W. Koch, the producer-director. This was writer Howard Koch. We'll get to him. It is based on an unproduced play, Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Allison. It was produced by Halby Wallace and it stars Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund, Paul Henried as Victor Laszlo,

• 11:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Cloud Rains as Captain Louis Renault, Conrad Weit as Major Heinrich Strasser, Sidney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari, Peter Laurie as Signor Ugarte, and a really fun Maltese Falcon reunion, Dooley Wilson as Sam, S Z Sakal, who's miscredited as S K Sakal as Carl, and many, many, many more. It was produced and distributed by Warner Brothers under Jack Warner's stewardship in Los Angeles. It was released in the United States on January 23rd, 1943, after it premiered in New York two months earlier on November 26th, 1942. As always, the IMDb logline reads, "A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco."

• 12:15Chris Winterbauer?

  That's it. That's what the movie is. He's got to make a decision. Sources for today's episode include, and guys, please, read these books. There is so much on this movie. Holy smokes. Casablanca as Time Goes By by Frank Miller. Round up the usual suspects. The Making of Casablanca, Bogart, Bergman, and World War II by Aljean Harmets. Starmaker, the autobiography of Hal Wallace by Hal Wallace and Charles Hyam. Casablanca, Script and Legend by Howard Koch. Notice how everybody involved has a different take on this movie. We'll get into that. Ingrid Bergman, My Story by Ingrid Bergman. You Must Remember This, The Filming of Casablanca by Charles Francisco. The Genius of the System by Thomas Shatz, and many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film. Now, Lizzie, you mentioned the MacGuffin of the movie already.

• 13:00Chris Winterbauer?

  The letters of transit. These are the things that will allow Laszlo and Ilsa to escape French Morocco, to escape Casablanca and make their way to the United States by way of Lisbon. They are a pair of golden tickets. They are free transit through Nazi-occupied Europe, and whose names will be printed on this fictional set of pages. Papers is the debate central to Casablanca. And as we'll learn in this episode, the central debate of Casablanca is whose names will be printed on the fictional set of papers known as the screenplay for Casablanca. So let's do a little World War II super fast history, Lizzie. Summer of 1941, how are things looking in Europe?

• 13:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Not great, Bob.

• 13:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Not great, Bob. So Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands had fallen. France was taken in a very swift six weeks, as is seen in the flashback in the film. Yugoslavia fell in April of 41. The Greek prime minister committed suicide the day after Yugoslavia fell in April of 1941. And Great Britain, as we know, is the last major European power between Hitler and complete continental control. And over in the United States, well, despite Rick-like isolationist neutrality during the 1930s, Lizzie, things were kind of coming to a head. You had two big factions, very simple isolationists like Charles Lindbergh, Father Charles Coughlin. They were saying, literally, quote, "America first. We are protected by vast oceans.

• 14:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Let the Europeans sort out their own problems."

• 14:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Lindbergh was something else, too.

• 14:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. And then there were interventionists who saw Western European democracies as a firewall against Nazi Germany. We need to help them. But within the interventionists, there was division, right? Some feel military action is necessary. Some feel that they want to support Great Britain, but don't want to put boots on the ground. It feels very similar to debates we've had recently regarding something like Ukraine, for example. But public opinion was swinging rapidly toward interventionism. So as Churchill is attempting to convince the American government to join the fight over in the United States, a young story editor for Warner Brothers was trying to convince her boss to join a different fight because she had found something incredible. Her name, Lizzie, was Irene Lee.

• 15:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And in that summer of 1941, she was in New York to scout Broadway for stories to turn into feature films. She was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. She'd come to the United States to act, and everything changed when she met director Mervyn Leroy. He was at the peak of his powers at Warner Brothers. He's a big director. He's one of their- Top name directors in the early 1930s. He'd done 23 films for Warner Brothers between 1930 and 33. He'd just done this big hit, I Am a Fugitive for a Chain Gang. He wants to cast Lee and he gives her a script and he says, what are your thoughts? And Lee says, I told him exactly what worked and what didn't. And he looked at me as if he had just discovered oil. He said, you really have a hell of a good story, mind. She said, Mr. Leroy, I want to act. And he says, darling, and I'm paraphrasing, you're not a non-genue. He actually did say that. You're 23 years old.

• 15:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Over the hill and far away. You're close to death, but there are very few women in the business who can do what you can do. So Mervyn Leroy brought her to Warner Brothers and she landed a job working for Hal B. Wallace, head of production. Now, Mervyn Leroy did not last long at Warner Brothers. He had some costly flops. He went to MGM, but Irene Lee stuck around. She became a driving force behind some of Wallace's best decisions, including The Maltese Falcon. Lizzie, have you seen The Maltese Falcon? Yes, I have. I rewatched it for the pod. Very fun movie. Love Mary Astor in that movie. We'll talk about her a little bit as we get into the original version of Ilsa.

• 16:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So this 1941 version of the film was the third attempt by Warner Brothers to adapt Dashiell Hammond's thriller. They'd done it in, I believe, 31 and 35. And it's the one that stuck. This is John Huston. It puts him on the map as a director. And Humphrey Bogart, kind of little attractive, but in an unusual way. Humphrey Bogart is vaulted to the upper echelons of Hollywood. In fact, Jack Warner's original plan was to give Bogart second billing after Mary Astor. But around the release, they realized Bogart's a star. First billing, name above the title. In New York, Irene Lee thinks, I have found another gem. I have found the next Maltese Falcon. It is an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick's. I can see why they named it that. It's a bit cumbersome. We're gonna change the name. Yeah. We're gonna change the name, doll.

• 17:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, so I doubt that Irene Lee recognized the names under Rick's name on the cover page because it was written by, respectfully, a couple of nobodies in terms of Broadway and Hollywood. Murray Burnett was a high school teacher with dreams of becoming a Broadway playwright. And Joan Allison. Was a divorcee, 10 years his senior, with three kids and some contacts in the theater world, and they had a really fun meet cute. They met at a beach club in Long Island. Burnett says she made fun of my formal attire. Allison says he came over and talked to her little boy, which she thought was sweet. Perhaps both are true, but what we do know is that she offered to share Burnett's play that he'd written, it was called An Apple For The Teacher, with a producer friend. The producer friend likes it, he options

• 18:04Chris Winterbauer?

  it, the play falls apart. But then Burnett's world opens up. His uncle presumably dies, and he inherits $10,000. And he thinks, "I'm gonna go to Europe." It's 1938. So, he finally takes that big trip to Europe. Oh, no. He and his wife go to see her family in Antwerp, and suddenly Hitler is a lot more than just a newspaper headline. Yeah. Nazi Germany had just annexed Austria, and his in-laws asked them to go to Vienna to help relatives get money out of Austria. Quote, "At that time, Jews could leave if they took no money, nothing." So Burnett went to the American consulate for a visa, and they said, "Look, if you get in any trouble over there, we are not gonna come help you.

• 18:48Chris Winterbauer?

  We are neutral." The one piece of production he had, he wore an American flag on his lapel. So the next part of this story, while in the south of France, he and his wife find themselves in a nightclub that's filled with expats from around the continent. Languages, liquor flowing, and there's a black man playing the piano. And he turns to his wife and he says, "What a setting for a play." So back in New York, he tells Joan Allison, "No one can remain neutral. God damn it, Joan, no one can remain neutral." He had to pick a side, and he decided to write a play about the Nazis. But it wasn't Casablanca. They take this play to Austrian-American theater and film director Otto Preminger, and they give him the pitch. It's a spy thriller involving a million-dollar collection taken

• 19:33Chris Winterbauer?

  up by the pro-Nazi German-American Bund. It kicks off with the mysterious death of a female courier. A beautiful and heroic look-alike replaces her, and there's a frantic counterintelligence effort to keep the money out of Nazi hands. It was called A Million To One. And Preminger says- Okay, I like it, but I want you to rewrite it under my direction. And they say, no problem. And then they keep getting distracted by this other idea. This idea about a bar somewhere in Europe where the liquor's flowing and the languages are flowing and there's romance and refugees. And Preminger's like, why are you talking about this other play? Please write the play I've hired you to write. A million to one was never produced. It's possible, Lizzie, that it wasn't neutral enough. Murray Burnett claims that Otto Preminger caved to pressure

• 20:17Chris Winterbauer?

  from the Wheeler Committee to jettison the project. Basically, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, he's a Democrat from Montana, was a leading spokesman for the non-interventionist America First movement. As we mentioned, US is officially neutral. And the Wheeler Committee was there to make sure anti-Nazi propaganda wouldn't pull the US into armed conflict.

• 20:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I ask a question?

• 20:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, please.

• 20:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I know the answer to this, but how aware was A, the general public and B, you know, maybe the entertainment industry in terms of concentration camps at this point, let's say 40, 41?

• 20:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Based on what I found online, primarily polled from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It looks like by 40, 41, the US population was pretty aware, really very aware of Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany. Even as early as like spring of 1933, there were petitions with tens of thousands of signatures protesting the Nazis' treatments, treatments of Jews. But the US government remained neutral. And in fact, a lot of Americans, 43%, had supported boycotting the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. And then in 1938, you have the Anschluss. And with this comes this huge influx of visa applications by Jewish refugees from, from Germany and Austria. And this brings me to this really interesting data point.

• 21:38Chris Winterbauer?

  There was a survey done in 1938. Do you approve or disapprove of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany? 94% disapprove. Should we allow a number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live? 71% no. Now, this is before the mass murder of Jews by German killing squads, which would start in the summer of 1941. And the, the final solution would kick off actually right as Casablanca is kicking off at the beginning of 1942. But I don't think the US population was as privy to that.

• 22:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, something I do think is interesting about this movie is that they do quite a lot of gymnastics, I think, to actually avoid saying that Victor Laszlo is potentially Jewish in this.

• 22:23Chris Winterbauer?

  We will come into that as well.

• 22:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Alrighty.

• 22:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Or my guess about why this was the case. So Otto Preminger stays neutral. A million to one doesn't get made. Burnett and Allison decide to go for it. And they write, "Everybody comes to Rick's in the summer of 1940." They write it in about six weeks at Allison's apartment. And it's built around these fictitious letters of transit, which are just completely made up. And everybody just says, "That's fine. Like, we're good with them." It's about Rick Blaine and his love interest, a fellow American named Lois Meredith.

• 22:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It's an American name, if I've ever heard one.

• 22:56Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. Now, Joan Allison is quick to say that Lois Meredith was based on her. And Marie Burnett says that he identifies with Rick. And then Allison says, "Shut your mouth, Marie. You're a country boy." And then she says, "Both of my husbands were wide-shouldered and fine athletes, and Rick was my concept of a guy that I would like: Clark Gable." We should note, Joan Allison didn't like Humphrey Bogart. Thought that was pretty bad casting.

• 23:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, if you're writing Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart does not come to mind.

• 23:25Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right.

• 23:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats. And I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&Ms, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispy Treats and Peanut Butter M&Ms. And because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot

• 24:11Lizzie Bassett?

  about our dog Q. Mars knows he needs a celebration, too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at @marsglobal, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited-time Halloween offerings. We recently moved into a new house and realized that our bedding desperately needed a refresh. So I took my own advice. And before spending all our money on a luxury bedding brand, I went to Quince. And let me tell you, we now have the crispest, coolest, most beautiful organic percale sheets and duvet covers that we've ever had. I've bought quite a bit of bedding from Quince and it's all super high quality and has lasted for

• 24:54Lizzie Bassett?

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• 25:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So let me talk a little bit about some of the differences between the play and the movie, because I just read the play. The broad strokes are very much the same. We have French Morocco, we have Casablanca, we have Rick's Bar, we have the letters of transit, we have it's Ronaldo, it's not Reynold. And there's some of the names have changed, and we'll get into why they changed, but it's Major Strasser. And the pieces on the chessboard are very much the same. Victor Looslo, I would argue, is very much the same. Rick's past is explained, and it's not political. Basically, he had a wife and two children in Paris, and he was a lawyer before he ended up running this bar in Casablanca. The big difference, though, between the play and the movie is the character of Lois/ilsa Lund.

• 26:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Lois is, you know, a free woman who pursues relationships at her leisure and very much feels in control. She walks in, and it's clear she broke Rick's heart back in Paris, because when they were having an affair, he was married, he was in a cafe, and she walked in with another man, and he couldn't handle the fact- That she was splitting her attention between two men, even though he was doing the same thing with two women, which she points out to him. And he gets a divorce and flees and ends up in Casablanca alone and brokenhearted. She's now there with Victor Lozlo. And it feels like, on the one hand, she is more of a Rick-type morally gray character at the beginning of this play.

• 27:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And Lozlo, in some ways, represents an opportunity for her to aspire to something greater or purer in some ways.

• 27:14Lizzie Bassett?

  In this version, was she married to Lozlo technically in Paris, in the same way that she is in the final product? Or she hadn't even met him when she was with Rick?

• 27:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So in the play, Lois was not married to Lozlo back in Paris when she was with Rick, although it's implied that she was seeing multiple men, or at least Henri or Henry, the person that Rick sees her with. She is now with Lozlo, although, again, it's not clear if they're married. I don't think they are married.

• 27:38Lizzie Bassett?

  OK.

• 27:38Chris Winterbauer?

  But she sleeps with Rick midway through the play.

• 27:42Lizzie Bassett?

  OK.

• 27:42Chris Winterbauer?

  And while she's with Lozlo. And again, you get something where she's going to go with Rick at first, and it plays out much as it does in the movie. And then Rick ends up saying, no, you need to go with him. And she leaves on the plane. And then Rick is actually arrested by Major Strasser at the end of the play. Ronaldo, Rinault, says, why did you do it, Rick? And he said, I did it for the bet. I did it for the 5,000 francs that I bet you that, you know, he would escape. It's a really interesting read. I think that her character feels closer to Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Mary Astor's character in The Maltese Falcon, in that she's a little more difficult to parse. She has, I feel, a little more agency than in the finished film. It feels like she's a player as well in the proceedings.

• 28:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's just a completely different character.

• 28:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very different.

• 28:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm sure your read of this is probably right because you have the background on how this was made. But I still don't view Ilsa as not having agency in the final product because, to me, like, one of the most important things is why I asked that question, is that she says, you don't understand. He was my husband before Paris, and he is my husband now. Meaning, like, to me, I think that there is an underlying loyalty to Victor throughout Casablanca. For her and my interpretation was Rick is not the great love. And like, that's kind of, to me, that's an interesting element of Casablanca is that this whole movie revolves around this interaction that she had when she thought that the person she loved more than anyone else in the world was dead.

• 29:11Lizzie Bassett?

  And what does this weird blip? What does Paris mean then in that context of her greater life, greater relationship? The meaning of her life, what does this mean? And that is interesting to me. However, what you're describing is just a totally different person. And that is also really interesting is, you know, in terms of Rick being married. I would say actually the backstory and what you just described that makes more sense to me is Rick, not Ilsa. She makes sense to me either way. They're just different characters, but Rick, you're right about the turn in the movie. There's something strange about him having been a resistance fighter and then he's in Paris. And then they're just escaping Paris and now he's not a resistance fighter at all. And it, it seems like he's lived a bunch of lives that don't necessarily connect,

• 29:55Lizzie Bassett?

  but they would in terms of what you just described.

• 29:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. It's a very, very different character and perhaps agency is the wrong word. Let me rephrase it as it feels like Lois is more in control.

• 30:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Chris Winterbauer?

  When she's in Casablanca, even just self-assured than the way that Ilsa is played, you know, or the way she's written in the finished film. But again, I'm not saying it would have worked better. Like there, I think, were a lot of structural problems in the play that they fixed. So let's dive into it. So the play, which did include As Time Goes By, which was not a hit. This was a song that kind of came and went in the early 30s, but Murray Burnett had loved it when he was at Cornell. So he put it in the play. The play gets the attention of Agent Anne Watkins. She then gets it to producers Martin Gabel and Carly Wharton for Broadway. They option it and Lizzie, the big concern is Lois, specifically Lois sleeping with Rick to get the letters of transit. And they say, we can't do this.

• 30:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think Burnett, but I'm guessing Joan Allison, because she said that Lois was based on her. I'm guessing that she was like, then we don't want to do it. They basically said, we're not going to change it. And the option was dropped.

• 31:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 31:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So then Watkins sent the play to Hollywood. The United States may still have been neutral, but Warner Brothers, Lizzie, was ready for war. Now, a brief background on Warner Brothers. It was founded by Polish Jewish brothers, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack. Jack was the only one born in the Americas. He was born in Canada. And those are their Anglicized names. And Warner Brothers had been working on basically an anti-Nazi campaign since 1938. So pushed by Harry Warner, the eldest brother, who was based out of New York. The movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy was the first explicitly anti-Nazi film produced by a major Hollywood studio. And so from what I've been able to put together, Jesse specifically has put together, Irene Lee arranges for a copy of Everybody Comes to Ricks to be sent to Warner Brothers in the back half of 1941.

• 31:46Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also possible that Ann Watkins, you know, the agent had sent a copy. It's possible that Lee got it from Watkins. And to be clear, this is all pre Pearl Harbor, obviously. This is all pre Pearl Harbor, exactly. So the United States has not yet entered the war. Now, either way, despite Warner Brothers' anti-Nazi position, production head Halby Wallace didn't initially bite on the story. I don't know why. It's possible he wanted to maintain neutrality. It feels like a stage play. The play never leaves Ricks, to be clear. Yeah. Perhaps he was too busy with Warner's recent success. Warner Brothers had been a studio that had fallen apart during the Great Depression in a lot of ways, and it had skyrocketed during the 1930s. And then, Lizzie, as you mentioned, on December 7th, 1941,

• 32:27Chris Winterbauer?

  the myth of neutrality shattered when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. So following that attack, the next day, production at Warner Brothers is ceased for the day. As FDR addresses a joint session of Congress, he requests a declaration of war. And a script reader named Stephen Carnet goes back to his desk, and he plucks a manuscript from the pile. It sounds lighthearted. It's attached to a well-regarded lit agent. And on December 11th, he writes a reader's report for producers. And he says, "Everybody Comes to Ricks is excellent melodrama, colorful, timely background, tense mood, suspense, psychological and physical conflict, tight plotting, sophisticated hokum, a box office natural for Bogart, Cagney, or Raft, in, out of the usual roles, and perhaps Mary Astor." Mm-hmm.

• 33:12Chris Winterbauer?

  She makes so much sense to me. Having just watched The Maltese Falcon with, again, the original version of Lois. The report makes its way to Hal Wallace's desk and suddenly he thinks, "Well, this is great. I don't know why I didn't want to do it before, but uh, what's doing now? We're going to war." Now, the story needed work, but according to Wallace, quote, "The story of a laconic American solving the problems of Europeans would have definite appeal in those troubled times." I was like, "That's what you take away from this movie?"

• 33:35Lizzie Bassett?

  That's not...

• 33:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh, okay.

• 33:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Alright. I would argue the two Europeans are the only ones doing anything. Okay, sure.

• 33:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Yeah, this Victor Laszlo guy can't get anything done! So Wallace, though, is, at the end of the day, a studio man and you don't want to put your full weight behind something without everybody else telling you that it's good too. This was never made into a play, is my point, right? So you have to wonder, will it work? So he reaches out to a few producers. David Lewis, he was the romantic partner of Frankenstein director James Whale, if you guys are unaware, and a prolific producer. Jerry Wald, who was also a screenwriter who'd collaborated with Julius Epstein and Robert Lord, Oscar-winning writer, One Way Passage 1933. So again, these are heavy hitter, successful producers. Lewis, "I think the story needs work, but it is an attractive setup." Wald, "Could be good for George Raft or Humphrey Bogart and could be modeled after the recent hit, Algiers."

• 34:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And we should mention Algiers, which was a Walter Wanger picture, would be a bit of a blueprint for Casablanca, I think for Hal Wallace especially. You've got a fugitive in North Africa, you've got a love triangle, it was an adaptation of a French film from the year prior, and it was the Hollywood debut of Hedy Lamarr, more on her in a bit. Now, Lord wasn't so high on the project. He said, "I suspect that with enough time and effort, a picture could be got from this very obvious imitation of Grand Hotel. Somehow, most of these characters and situations seem conventional and stereotyped. If we buy this thing, I would not pay much money for it." Which I think Hal Wallace said like, "This is great, they generally like it." And they decide the story needs work, and by mid-December, he starts reaching out to potential writers.

• 35:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So Robert Buckner, who'd done Dodge City with Errol Flynn, and also Newt Rockne, All-American, a great early football movie, and how Ronald Reagan got his nickname The Gipper, if you're not familiar. He also co-wrote the upcoming Yankee Doodle Dandy, he'd get an Oscar nomination for that. He gets sent the play, and on December 30- First Wallace makes a very important decision, Lizzie. He decides to change the name. Everybody comes to Rick's is gonna be Casablanca, which is inspired by Algiers.

• 35:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Classic.

• 35:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So a week later Buckner writes back to Wallace, "Hard pass. I don't like the story. I don't like the characters. This is sheer hokum. And this Rick guy is two parts Hemingway, one part Scott Fitzgerald and a dash of Cafe Christ." To which I say, "That's kinda what I'm looking for in my movies."

• 35:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, spot on.

• 35:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I know. Who cares what Buckner thinks? Wallace sends the script to his brother-in-law, Wally Klein, and Klein's writing partner, Aeneas Mackenzie. And Wallace says that Mackenzie had a flair for writing believable dialogue for European characters. I don't know what that means, but good for Mackenzie. Mackenzie digs it, says, "Behind the action and its background is the possibility of an excellent theme. The idea that when people lose faith in their ideals, they are beaten before they begin to fight. That was what happened to France and Rick Blaine." Okay, I think he's cluing into something that may be interesting.

• 36:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I agree. And also, I love, what do they mean when they say European? I feel like it's a euphemism.

• 36:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, 100%, it's a euphemism. Wow, I can make these big waves, sophisticated on the stage, yeah.

• 36:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 36:35Chris Winterbauer?

  One of my favorite parts is when the Germans are saying how they're going to America and they say, "What watch is it? Is it 10 watch?" And then Carl says, "You'll fit right in." Like, that is one of my favorite jokes in the movie. It's a very funny movie.

• 36:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it is.

• 36:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I do like the humor throughout this movie.

• 36:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I couldn't help but think how much Inglourious Basterds borrows from Casablanca when I was watching this. In particular, yes, the whole bar sequence is...

• 36:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm sure it's inspired by it in many ways. So it's a whole treatise on language in many ways. And then Brad Pitt's Italian is one of the best jokes of Inglourious Basterds.

• 37:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Gorlami. It's just so bad.

• 37:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, so Mackenzie likes it, but he thinks that you need a big rewrite and you should hire me. Because Rick and Lois, this is dicey. And he says the same thing that Broadway had. "The action that arises between them is, quote, 'a highly censorable one.' This is a tough job for anyone who it might be assigned. This is obviously, Lizzie, in the times of the Hayes Code."

• 37:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 37:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And so Hollywood is very much under the thumb of the production code authority. So on January 7th, the trades catch wind of the project and they announce who's gonna star. And Sheridan, Ronald Reagan and Dennis Morgan to be starred in Casablanca. Lizzie's eyebrows just went to the ceiling.

• 37:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't put Ronald Reagan in this.

• 37:50Chris Winterbauer?

  The Gipper is going to Morocco.

• 37:52Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 37:53Chris Winterbauer?

  So there was, as far as we know, no truth to this rumor. In fact, some people have actually theorized that Hal Wallace slipped these names falsely to the press so that they would circulate in order to promote an upcoming Anne Sheridan, Ronald Reagan movie called King's Row, I believe, which was dropping in the beginning of February.

• 38:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 38:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So I'm pretty sure he did this to be like, go see the first one and then the next one will come later. Two days later, Mackenzie and Klein start in a treatment, and according to some sources, Wallace says, "Focus on fleshing out the love story and rework anything that might violate the Hayes Code." This is very important.

• 38:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 38:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So January 12th, Warner Brothers officially buys the rights to Everybody Comes to Ricks, and just before, the first American soldiers set off from the Brooklyn Army Terminal to cross the Atlantic to join the fight. There's also another date given, December 28th, when they buy the script. This is the most commonly accepted date. So the studio paid $20,000, which was a pretty handsome sum for an unproduced play without a big-name writer attached. Lizzie, any guess as to what that is in today's dollars?

• 38:48Lizzie Bassett?

  $20,000. Um, $300,000.

• 38:53Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a very good guess. It was somewhere around $430,000.

• 38:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 38:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So you're very close.

• 38:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, by the way, if Ronald Reagan had starred in this, it would have been five minutes long. He would have been like, "You're right, I should go back to America." He's back on the plane.

• 39:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Ah, what am I doing in this bar? Let's go home.

• 39:10Lizzie Bassett?

  He's left everyone behind immediately. Gone home, back to America.

• 39:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, the deal may have seemed generous on paper, but it also seems like Burnett and Allison may not have completely understood the terms of what they were signing. So some have said that they would later show this contract to a friend who would tell them, "This kind of contract went out with D.W. Griffith. You haven't left yourself any rights at all."

• 39:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 39:33Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get back to it. So right around this time, Hal Wallace signs a new contract at Warner Brothers, too. He goes from being production executive, where he's basically overseeing all of the productions at the studio, but again, he doesn't have an on-screen credit, to producer. Like Jack Warner, Wallace was a child of Jewish immigrants. He'd been at Warner Brothers for nearly 20 years. I think there was a lot of mutual respect between him and Warner, but there was a power struggle, too, because Wallace had come up, I believe, as Jack's assistant. And so in 1937... Just to show kind of the way that Jack Warner was seen as synonymous with the studio, Fortune Magazine released a piece on Warner Brothers' 10-year zoom from the rank of outsider to the biggest thing in show business. And they basically say they didn't rely on a producing genius like Thalberg, Zanuck, or Lasky.

• 40:15Chris Winterbauer?

  To be clear, this would have kind of been the Wallace position. Rather, Jack Warner was described as the "supreme head" of Warner Brothers' production. So, maybe a little bit of an ego here. Now, according to Wallace, he had wanted to do this for a long time. He had no home life when he was running all of the production. He had a growing son. And his new deal was advantageous in a lot of ways. So, he would make four movies a year for four years. He gets a salary cut, but he gets backend participation, so that's nice. He gets to cut his own movies, but then Jack Warner gets final cut. And if he wanted to work with somebody not at Warner Brothers, he could hire them. And perhaps most importantly, he gets an on-screen credit, which we discussed, Lizzie, with Bob Evans.

• 40:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 40:53Chris Winterbauer?

  In, most recently, The Cotton Club. And his first project is gonna be Casablanca. So, who Wallace went to for the role of Rick Blaine varies by source, but, Lizzie, if you were not gonna guess Humphrey Bogart, there's somebody we talked about a little bit in The Cotton Club. Any guesses?

• 41:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, we talked about in The Cotton Club. Uh, can I get a hint? Can I get a phone a friend?

• 41:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Think a Bogart contemporary within, like, the crime genre, who may have been the inspiration for Richard Gere's character in The Cotton Club.

• 41:22Lizzie Bassett?

  George Raft.

• 41:23Chris Winterbauer?

  You got it, George Raft!

• 41:24Lizzie Bassett?

  "Some Like It Hot." I will always think of him in that.

• 41:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah, "Some Like It Hot," right, at the end, yeah.

• 41:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Raft said, "No, thanks." According to Wallace, he turned down parts pretty frequently, preferring to go on suspension without salary than play them. And this was a very common tactic at the time. Betty Davis had been in a lot of scuffles with Jack Warner throughout the 1930s. In fact, Raft had actually turned down a couple of movies in a row that had allowed Humphrey Bogart to really take off. So, reportedly, he turned down High Sierra, which is great. That would be one of Humphrey Bogart's breakouts. Then The Maltese Falcon. He didn't want to die at the end of High Sierra, and he viewed The Maltese Falcon as a B-picture. And all of a sudden, Bogie is up in his business.

• 42:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you may also remember George Raft, perhaps not the easiest to deal with.

• 42:09Chris Winterbauer?

  No, not at all. Apparently neither maybe was Humphrey Bogart, because Wallace went to Bogart next, but quote, "He was irritable about playing another part George Raft had rejected." They were about to be three for three. There was a bigger problem, Lizzie. Warner Brothers needed Cary Grant for a movie. He was under contract at Columbia, which was run by Harry Cone, and they needed him to star in Arsenic and Old Lace. Harry Cone says, "You can have Cary Grant if you give me Bogart for Sahara." I just assume everybody talks like this back then.

• 42:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Columbia keeps switching the dates on Sahara. I just can see Harry Cone being like, "Change the dates." "Let's fuck with him some more. Change him again." "Let's fuck with him," you know. So Warner Brothers would be casting Bogart without knowing if he'd be available for Casablanca, because if they try to pull him off of Sahara, they lose Cary Grant. Becomes very complicated. Didn't help that Jack Warner did not want Humphrey Bogart. At some point before this, Jack Warner had reportedly commented that Bogart's lisp made him sound like a fairy.

• 43:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool.

• 43:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And Bogart in turn allegedly spread a rumor that Jack Warner was gay. And it just goes to show you, men have been the same for all of time.

• 43:11Chris Winterbauer?

  According to some sources, when Wallace pitched Bogart for Casablanca, Warner yelled, "Who the hell would ever want to kiss Bogart?"

• 43:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Me! And then they both kissed.

• 43:20Chris Winterbauer?

  That's what I was gonna say. He does protest too much.

• 43:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, seriously.

• 43:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Lauren Bacall actually later said, quote, "Bogey would say, 'Of course, I did nothing in Casablanca that I hadn't done in 20 movies before that, and suddenly they discover I'm sexy. Anytime Ingrid Bergman looks at a man, he has sex appeal."

• 43:35Lizzie Bassett?

  No, sir. It's because they shot him really well in Casablanca. He looks great in this movie. He looks great in that tux.

• 43:43Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's the white tux.

• 43:44Lizzie Bassett?

  They put a nice amount of shoe polish on his hair.

• 43:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Lizzie Bassett?

  And they really filled it in, and he looks great.

• 43:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He does look good.

• 43:50Lizzie Bassett?

  They did not shoot him so favorably in the other ones.

• 43:53Chris Winterbauer?

  No. George Raft was out. Bogart was attached in mid-February 1942. And the script, well, it's in progress. So much of the movie is gonna be written to Taylor Rick to Bogie. Klein and Mackenzie were getting some help, whether they wanted it or not, because Wallace had already reached out to writer Casey Robinson, who claims he was an early supporter of the play. So in another version of the origin stories of Casablanca, Casey Robinson has said, "I read it on a train, and I suggested it to Wallace, and I wanted to produce it. And I was disappointed when Wallace decided to produce it." We could not verify that. That's just what Casey Robinson says. But what we can verify is that Warner Brothers Records do support Robinson's claim that he was the one who suggested changing the character of Lois Meredith from American to European.

• 44:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So Il Soland is born. And he had some very specific inspiration, namely, he was falling in love with a Russian ballerina named Tamara Tumanova. In fact, he said, "Why don't you do a screen test with her?" So Wallace says, "Okay." He sets screen tests for her and Anne Sheridan, notably an American. And it's at this time that Wallace reaches out to the boys, AKA the brothers, AKA Julie and Phil, AKA Julius and Philip Epstein. They were identical twins in their early 30s. Julius had started writing for Warner Brothers first. His brother joins him later. They ghostwrite for a bit. They start as a team in 1938. Julius was Oscar nominated for Four Daughters, directed by Michael Curtiz. And they were known for adding a little zip to other writers' scripts. "The Epsteins loved Casablanca. It's got a lot of juice." But they were already committed to the war effort

• 45:22Chris Winterbauer?

  because they were gonna join Frank Capra's Why We Fight. So they made a special deal. "We'll take a copy of the script with us to the East Coast. And if we ever get a break from Why We Fight, we'll work on this." So Wallace says, "Fine." And he decides to find a director. And he goes after William Wyler, who'd just done the yet-to-be-released Mrs. Miniver. And he was vacationing with his family in Sun Valley, Idaho. Wallace sends him the script, and Wyler never gets back to him. Any guesses, Lizzie, as to what he was up to? You're never gonna guess. We've covered this before, haven't we? He was playing gin rummy with Daryl Zanuck until 2:30 every morning and couldn't be bothered. Great. There's like war in Europe. He's getting scripts sent to him. And he's like, "Daryl, deal out that deck one more time, you son of a bitch." He's just can't stop playing cards.

• 46:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Wasn't he German? He's a German Jew.

• 46:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, William Wyler is. If you want to learn more about William Wyler, you can listen to our episode on Ben-Hur, which she directed. So Wallace, because he can't pull William Wyler away from the rummy table, turns to Vincent Sherman, who had directed Humphrey Bogart in The Return of Dr. X, Cloud Rains, and Saturday's Children, and he'd done a German Nazi resistance film called Underground in 1941. Sherman, I should note, also pretty young, born in 1906. He also reached out to William Keely, who had directed the Epstein-penned The Bride Came C O D, and, quote, "Neither seemed that excited about the project, so I ruled them out." That's not how Sherman remembers it. He says he was chatting in his office that January, and a writer mentions "a piece of crap that is being sent around called Everybody Comes

• 46:48Chris Winterbauer?

  to Ricks." And then Sherman was given the copy of the piece of crap for feedback, and he claims he told the Epsteins about it, and then he went to Wallace to say that the Epsteins were interested in writing it, and he wanted to help write too, but Wallace said, "No, no, no, you're gonna be too busy with your next movie." I just love how everybody claims that they found this play. Everybody found this play.

• 47:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, because it sounds like it's something that, in reality, everybody rejected and was like, "This is not the thing."

• 47:13Chris Winterbauer?

  "I am Spartacus. Everybody found this play. It's amazing." So finally, Wallace goes to Michael Curtiz. They'd worked on four movies together, and they'd actually been skeet shooting on Curtiz's ranch when they learned that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. And so weeks later, they're back at the ranch, shooting the skeet, and Curtiz agrees to join the fight to make Casablanca. On the plus side, Wallace knows Curtiz can keep these scenes moving, to add a cinematic scope to this movie that may be lacking in the play. And Curtiz had a really important, unique connection to Warner Brothers. According to one source, in 1938, Jack Warner had plans to travel to Europe, and Curtiz asked him to stop off in Hungary and convince his mother and brothers to come to the United States, and he did.

• 47:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 47:58Chris Winterbauer?

  So Wallace later claimed that Curtiz was his favorite director, a tall, flamboyant, high-living Hungarian who mangled the English language outrageously. This is true. Curtiz had a body of work that preceded Warner Brothers as a studio. By the time he came to the United States in the late 1920s to work for Warner's, he had dozens of films under his belt, out of Austria, Hungary, and Denmark. He was very accomplished, and when he got to the United States, he didn't know any English at all. He had to learn it. Same with Ingrid Bergman.

• 48:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 48:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Wallace knew Curtis was "difficult." "He was a demon for work, demanded the utmost from his actors, and he never took lunch." "In fact, he resented people who took lunch so much that if an actor blew a line after lunch, "he would scream, 'You lunch bomb!' And that was the ultimate Curtis insult."

• 48:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, I wonder how he got along with Joan Crawford on Mildred Pierce. Perhaps we'll have to cover that.

• 48:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, we will, because what's so interesting is that, yes, he has a history of being combatted, and I think some people might even say unsafe with his actors. He, I think, infamously set Lillian Gish off on an ice floe in one of his early films, and she had, you know, permanent frostbite on one of her hands.

• 49:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesus.

• 49:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And he did what he wanted, like, he would omit scenes he didn't like. He would add scenes unplanned. But his actors often received, like, Oscar nominations and some of the best reviews of their careers after working with him. So James Cagney got his only win with Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Joan Crawford got her only win, as you mentioned, Lizzie, with Mildred Pierce. Now, here's one story I found illuminating. So, as I mentioned, he didn't speak English. And so when he was gonna direct his first American film, The Third Degree, he didn't know anything about jail, or Chicago, or gangsters. So he goes to the LA sheriff and convinces him to let him spend a week in jail, and then, quote, "When I came out, I knew what I needed for the picture."

• 49:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God, okay.

• 49:47Chris Winterbauer?

  So he was very, very committed to prep. But Casablanca still didn't have a script, so let's get back into the writing, Lizzie. So it's late February of 1942. Klein and Mackenzie submit their pages. They're done. And a couple of days later, the Epsteins left for New York to join Why We Fight, a copy of the script presumably in their luggage. And Wallace, with no script, but with the director and Humphrey Bogart, searched for Rick Blaine's love interest. Now, he'd actually been pursuing Hedy Lamarr over at MGM, but she was not available. She would actually go on to play Ilsa in a radio version of the movie. And then he inquired about Ingrid Bergman. Now, Lizzie, I'm not sure how familiar you are with Ingrid Bergman, or how much of a fan of hers you are. Anything about Ingrid Bergman, like, come to mind as an actress or performer? Thoughts, anything?

• 50:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Other than that, she's very, very, very, very beautiful.

• 50:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's most of what David O. Selsnick saw in her as well.

• 50:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, very European, Swedish, and very, I don't know, is stoic the right phrase? Tell me about Ingrid Bergman.

• 50:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I would say there's a Catherine Hepburn equality to her. I think despite her features, there can be a steeliness, you know, that I really appreciate to her performances.

• 50:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Gorgeous eyebrows.

• 50:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Very gorgeous eyebrows, notably too thick, according to David Selsnick, so.

• 51:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't pluck them, they're great.

• 51:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Her transition from European to American cinema was somewhat complicated. So her breakout movie, from the perspective of the United States, was called Intermezzo. And this was a 1936 Swedish film, which I watched, and I would just recommend people watch it, especially the first 30 minutes are some of the most gorgeous 30 minutes you will see in a film. It's very simple. She plays a prodigious young piano player who gets wrapped up in a love affair with a very prominent older violinist. But the first 30 minutes, the way that they lay out the character relationships, and then you see how her character, Anita Hoffman, connects with the violinist is really wonderful. And it's just a really wonderful movie. And so Selsnick sees this movie, and he brings

• 51:43Chris Winterbauer?

  her over and signs her in the United States. And her first job is gonna just be a shot-for-shot, basically, remake of Intermezzo, called Intermezzo with Leslie Howard. So she's playing the same character again. And she doesn't speak any English, and she's really having to fight attempts to change her look and get more complex roles. And part of the problem is, I feel like Selsnick feels like he's bought this blonde Swedish beauty, and we're in the era of typecasting, and so he's trying to sell her as this one thing, and she wants to be many things. But Selsnick, at this point of his career, is kind of a de facto agent. So he owns her contract, and she can only work on non-Selsnick productions if he is willing to loan her out to other movies. And so he would actually loan her out, and like Hitchcock out, for example, at inflated

• 52:28Chris Winterbauer?

  prices, so he could pocket the difference. But he wouldn't loan her out to a movie that he would feel could be damaging to her image or brand.

• 52:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 52:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So Wallace needs Bergman, and Selsnick is ducking him. And Bergman is depressed. She's not getting the role she wants. And even critics are noticing. So this one critic writes about Rage in Heaven, her fourth American film. "Ingrid Bergman creates something of a mood of terror, single-handed. If our screen keeps overlooking her great talent much longer, it will really be a black mark against it."

• 52:57Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, it's so interesting. I never really, because I hadn't really looked at her filmography. It does feel like Casablanca becomes such a jumping off point for her. And I think that, you know, for example, her face is very inscrutable, which I think maybe is part of what you're reacting to in Casablanca. And then it works so well in Gaslight. And I feel like that, from that point forward, is where she really is making the kind of stuff she wanted to be making. Also, I love Gaslight.

• 53:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Gaslight's great. She did have one good experience in this time. She really loved working with Victor Fleming on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She loved Spencer Tracy, but then she took a break. And so she was spending a lot of time with her husband and daughter. She's waiting for an offer to play Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The offer doesn't materialize and she's really restless. Basically, she feels divided. She feels like, on the one hand, I have a great home life. I have a husband and a child. Isn't that supposed to be enough for a woman? But on the other hand, quote, "I think every day is a lost day, as if only half of me is alive." And so she writes to Selsnick. She's really frustrated. She's like, when am I going to get into a movie? He's promising her these productions that aren't coming to pass. And she would write about these roles that she wanted, like Gaslight, for example. But the only way Selsnick's going to agree to get the rights to these things

• 54:08Chris Winterbauer?

  is if she, in exchange, signs like longer and stricter contractual agreements with him. So there was very much a quid pro quo going on with Selsnick.

• 54:17Lizzie Bassett?

  And just to be clear, this child was not Isabella Rossellini, I'm assuming. It was an older one.

• 54:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think it was Rossellini.

• 54:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 54:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So Ingrid Bergman is trapped in a relationship with David Selsnick with no letter of transit. So that March, the Epsteins return to Hollywood with a whopping 40 pages of script. And two weeks later, they got 70 pages of script. And at the end of March, Wallace sends this edited version to Kurtis. And on April 2nd, Jack Warner says, "Let's throw him a curveball." On the same day that this draft is to be submitted and copied, the draft that has been written for Humphrey Bogart, Jack Warner sends a memo to Wallace. He says, "What do you think about using Raft?" He knows we're going to make this and he's campaigning for it. So apparently George Raft realized, "This movie's going to get made and it might be kind of good. So I should actually probably do it."

• 54:59Lizzie Bassett?

  That's so weird. He seems really wrong for it in retrospect.

• 55:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he sounds really wrong for it. Now Wallace claims he discreetly ignored it. Several other sources- Claim that he wrote back, basically Bogart's ideal for this. Also, we shouldn't allow Raff to just flip flop on projects like this.

• 55:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 55:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Wallace was still fighting for Bergman, so he sends in the big guns. He sends in the boys, AKA Julius and Philip Epstein. And they go in to pitch Selznick Casablanca. Here's the quote from the Epsteins. He was eating soup. He never looked at us. We were throwing him some of the details of the story. We spoke for 20 minutes. We didn't even mention the character of Ingrid Bergman. I finally looked at Selznick and said, "It's going to be a lot of shit like the film Algiers." He looked up for the first time and nodded, and we had Ingrid Bergman. That was the story.

• 55:45Lizzie Bassett?

  David O. Selznick was so weird.

• 55:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you know, again, and then Wallace says he's the one that closed Selznick, so who knows?

• 55:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 55:52Chris Winterbauer?

  But Wallace needed a backup, so he tested a different actress, French actress Michelle Morgan, but RKO demanded $55,000 for her services. Bergman comes in for 25 grand. Selznick pockets the difference, whatever that was.

• 56:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 56:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And it turns out that Bergman was available because Paramount had gone with Vera Zarena as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. So in a sliding doors moment, if Bergman had gotten that role at that time, which she would eventually get, we will get there.

• 56:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 56:19Chris Winterbauer?

  She would not have been available for Casablanca. So some people have said that Bergman was initially not excited about the role of Ilsa. That doesn't seem true because when she got the news, she wrote to a friend about how excited she was to work again. She says, "The picture is called Casablanca, and I really don't know what it's about." And then she read the script, or she learned about her role and her excitement was tempered. So just a couple other casting notes. A week later, singer drummer and actor Arthur Dooley Wilson was cast as Sam. Now, he does not play the piano in real life, so he's mocking it though, very effectively. And then they dubbed that later.

• 56:50Lizzie Bassett?

  But I would like to call out that David also pointed out, there's a shot where you see Sam playing at the piano and you're watching over the drum set. And the drummer is about a foot away from the cymbals. It is incredible.

• 57:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, as you hear the cymbals crash.

• 57:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 57:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, originally Wallace had wanted to cast a woman in the role, like Ella Fitzgerald, or Lena Horne, or Hazel Scott. Yeah, which is interesting. Now, again, we can't dive into all of the roles because it would just take too long. But I want to note, 75-person cast, at least 24 were European refugees from Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and France. Of the 14 cast members who got on-screen credit, only three had been born in the United States. And because many of the actors were on loan from other studios, their salaries were higher than usual. Unfortunately, that didn't mean they were getting paid more. It just meant the studios were pocketing the difference. So they set production for mid-May 1942. And the only problem, Lizzie, is that they've only got about half the script. So they pushed a whole two weeks to May 25th of 1942. And I have to imagine everybody's taking whatever Selsnick was taking during Gone With The Wind at this point.

• 57:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So by now, they've got another writer on the script, Howard Koch. He'd recently adapted a stage play into a script for The Letter, which Wallace produced, William Wyler directed, Betty Davis starred in. But he was best known, Lizzie, for co-writing the radio play adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. Uh-oh. So Wallace said that he'd hired Koch to write an alternative screenplay to be on the safe side. Now Koch said it was because the Epstein's pitch to Selsnick was a, quote, "feat of verbal hocus-pocus without any real substance to provide the basis for a picture." Regardless, the start date was creeping up. And even though nine women can't have a baby in one month, nine writers can definitely make a script in one month. Sure, as long as there's enough speed, and there certainly was.

• 58:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Koch has made claims over the years, like he worked on the script with the Epstein's for a week. He claims that they didn't want to be on Casablanca and that they requested to be transferred to another project because they thought it was going to be a disaster. He says that he was the one left holding the bag, and then he got writer's block. And he tried a lot of things to make it work. He thought about opening the movie with Rick and Ilsa falling in love in Paris. Then he said that's going to give away too much about Rick at the beginning. And finally, he decided to just write. He had no storyline, so he just started writing scenes as they came to me and using the Epstein material wherever it fitted in. He just hoped it wouldn't be so bad that it would end his career. We should be clear, the Epstein's dispute many of his claims. And we will get into the details at the end of this episode. Okay. I think author-

• 59:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Aljean Harmets can provide some insight here. For years, Howard Koch took too much credit for Casablanca. Now he takes too little. He reorganized the Epstein's April 2nd script to greater dramatic effect. For example, there's more excitement and tension in his version and the final film when Ugarte is captured before Rick and the Gestapo agent meet. And the Norwegian resistance fighter is used to impart vital information to Laszlo. And Koch solves the play's unworkable subplot by having Rick allow the young Bulgarian couple to win at roulette. That was a really wonky subplot that extends all the way to the end of the film and they are put on the plane with Laszlo and Ilsa. It feels really weird, like your attention is split between those two stories in the play. So he wrapped that up very well.

• 59:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's a lot.

• 59:57Chris Winterbauer?

  He rewrote the Epstein's to give the movie more weight and significance. And the Epstein's then rewrote him to erase his most ponderous symbols and to lighten his earnestness. Basically, what it sounds like is Koch gave it the drama and the Epstein's gave it a lot of the humor. Broadly speaking, so again, a couple of examples of where Koch gave it some extra heft. In the early drafts, Rick turns away an Englishman who writes bad checks from the gambling room. In the version we watched, Lizzie, he turns away a German and it hints at maybe political motivations, right?

• 1:00:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, tears up the check.

• 1:00:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. In the scene where another cafe owner tries to hire Sam Koch later added Rick's line, "I don't buy or sell human beings," to try to give him somewhat of a moral line. And his backstory was rewritten. So Lizzie, here we get to, he had a wife and children. Now he was a politically active person in his past. Gun running, fighting for the loyalists.

• 1:00:43Lizzie Bassett?

  That part does not make sense. And that's the one part of this that I wish they hadn't done. I understand that they're trying to like make him more likeable, but it's actually a more interesting story if he's just kind of a piece of shit for his whole life. Who finally makes the decision to do the right thing in this moment at the end.

• 1:00:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. For me, it works because I put more weight on the relationship with Louis Renault. And I feel like it serves that relationship.

• 1:01:05Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true, I guess.

• 1:01:06Chris Winterbauer?

  This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We're like, oh, I can buy that. Rick used to do this. But I completely agree with you that it does not feel consistent with the Paris flashbacks.

• 1:01:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I like that neither of them used to do it. They're both kind of pieces of shit. And at the last second, they're like, you know what? We're gonna do the right thing. And then they do.

• 1:01:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Koch said that he wanted to center the movie on the relationship between Rinal and Rick, not Ilsa and Rick. So it is interesting. General consensus, Epstein's reworked the dialogue, comedy, Rinal's character, Koch, political elements, Strasser, Sam, Rick's background. And then Curtis and Wallace are combining all of these scripts and they are running out of time. So Wallace can't push the May 25th start or he's gonna lose Bogart to Sahara. Also, if Bergman's dates slip, David Seldon is gonna be up his ass ASAP. Plus, Conrad Weitz and Dooley Wilson have other movies that they're committed to at Warner Brothers, so they are locked in. May 6th, we are 19 days out from shooting. Wallace says to Curtis, "We're supposed to be getting Epstein's version of the second act tomorrow morning.

• 1:02:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Uh, let's meet and discuss by 11 a.m. to provide guidance on the third act." May 11th, we are 14 days out from shooting. Wallace sends a memo to Koch, who's now revising that second act. The memo just says, "Please hurry up."

• 1:02:18Lizzie Bassett?

  My god.

• 1:02:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So Koch has said that he did not love the Epstein material and suggested just use the Epsteins, but Wallace just kept using everybody. In fact, according to one source, writer Lenore Coffey, the only female contributor to the script, also wrote for a week or so, including a six-page suggested storyline involving one of Strasser's men killing Lois. It was not used, but that would have been a very different movie.

• 1:02:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:02:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Production looms. Wallace gets cold feet about the love story again and he calls back in Casey Robinson. He sends in the script. Five days before cameras are rolling, Robinson writes back, "Again, as before, my impression about Casablanca is that the melodrama is well done, the humor excellent, but the love story deficient." So five days before, another writer, Casey Robinson, gets brought back on. He's focusing on the love story. And some sources claim that it was around this time that he rewrote the final version of the Paris flashback sequence.

• 1:03:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris's least favorite part of the entire movie.

• 1:03:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And Howard Koch agrees with me. Howard Koch wanted to cut it. He said, "While they illustrated the cause of Rick's bitterness and cynicism, I felt these were sufficiently exposed in the café scene." Ilsa.

• 1:03:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I don't think you need it at all.

• 1:03:26Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. All right. Well, we fixed Casablanca. Let's get it cut out. Take that, Ben Mankiewicz. Production begins on May 25th, 1942. They're working off of what would be called the third draft. It was not the third draft, and it was far from the final draft of the script.

• 1:03:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, just to be clear, though, having 100 million writers on a movie at this time was actually super common.

• 1:03:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Totally common.

• 1:03:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:03:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I think what was a little uncommon was how tight it was in terms of like getting into the production, but having this many writers was very normal. So according to one source, all of the characters except Ilsa Lund had been shaped and polished, which I completely buy, and Bergman seems to back up a little bit. It's also reported that the movie was shot in sequence due to an incomplete script, but this is not true. Production reports show that they started with the Paris flashback, which I think that actually makes sense because you would want to allow Bogart to accomplish that character first and then transition into a very different performance for the rest of the movie.

• 1:04:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. It's also nice. That's their first meeting to have that actually be their first meeting. It makes sense.

• 1:04:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So you know what's interesting? I think that Bogart had a really hard time settling into that version of the character. He said that he didn't know what he was doing in the first days on Casablanca.

• 1:04:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's very unnatural for him. Like, it's not a good fit for Humphrey Bogart in that section.

• 1:04:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I think he had a much easier time later on in the script.

• 1:04:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's a grumpy drunk. That's what he does. That's what he does best.

• 1:04:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a grump. He's a grump drunk. My favorite grump drunk. Almost everything was shot at Warner Brothers. Soundstage backlot, also the Metropolitan Airport in Van Nuys. Apparently, according to Bergman, there was just constant arguing, constant changes. From the very start, Hal Wallace was arguing with the Epstein brothers, and every lunchtime, Mike Curtis argued with Hal Wallace, and then I'm adding this, yelled at somebody for eating lunch.

• 1:05:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Every day, they were handing out the dialogue, and we were trying to make some sense of it. No one knew where the picture was going, and no one knew where it was going to end, which didn't help us with any of our characterizations. Every morning, we said, "Well, who are we? What are we doing here?" And Michael Curtis would say, "We're not quite sure, but let's get through this scene today, and we'll let you know tomorrow."

• 1:05:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool.

• 1:05:30Chris Winterbauer?

  She wasn't alone. After the first day, Wallace wrote, "We've had a very poor day for our first day's work on Casablanca." And they did, because the overhead lights made a loud hissing sound that was so loud that all the film from that day was unusable.

• 1:05:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 1:05:42Chris Winterbauer?

  The lighting was an ongoing issue for other reasons. For the first two weeks or so, Wallace and cinematographer Arthur Edison butted heads so badly that Edison would cry. And I have a memo here where Wallace basically chews him out for taking so long on a simple setup. And he just literally says, "I must ask you to sacrifice a little on quality, if necessary, in order to not take these long periods of times for setups." And some have said that Edison was actually a little overly sensitive and that Wallace's criticism was valid, because he wanted him to make the movie darker and more shadowy.

• 1:06:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:12Chris Winterbauer?

  His style would work well for close-ups, they said, but for the wide shots, it looked like it was a set. And I also think, to your point, Lizzie, he wanted to make sure they were shooting Bogart in a way that worked for Bogart.

• 1:06:22Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the thing is, he has never looked better than in Casablanca, and I do think it's because he's not brightly lit.

• 1:06:29Chris Winterbauer?

  John Huston once said, "Bogie was a medium-sized man, not particularly impressive off-screen, but something happened when he was playing the right part."

• 1:06:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Chris Winterbauer?

  "Those lights and shadows composed themselves into another nobler personality." Very true. Bergman was struggling. It wasn't just the unfinished script, it was that she'd fallen right back to where I'd come from. David O. Selznick liked it because at last I was going to wear lovely gowns and clothes and look pretty. She didn't like that she was just an object of desire to be looked at in this movie.

• 1:06:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Fair.

• 1:06:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Interestingly enough, Wallace had actually avoided showing Selznick her costume tests. And then a couple of days into the shoot, Selznick sees them and he sends this angry memo to Wallace where he says, "The hats are ugly. The evening dress with the striped skirt and sheer blouse makes her butt look big. And she shouldn't wear white shoes because they make her feet look simply Titanic." Anyway, most of the costumes were reworked by Wallace anyway because he felt they were too extravagant for the story. And in the play, she's very extravagantly dressed, and in the movie, she looks more like she's on safari, which is more appropriate for Morocco.

• 1:07:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I just love that David O. Selznick is like, "Her feet are big. Don't let them see her big feet. Don't let us see those big old slippers that she's walking around in." Who cares?

• 1:07:35Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 1:07:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Like, one of the most beautiful women in the world.

• 1:07:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Don't pan down. Do you see those goddamn footballs on his feet?

• 1:07:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Came away from those canoes.

• 1:07:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Well, Bergman, feet aside, felt like she was being typecast. She said, "I came from Sweden where acting meant the certainty of change. You played old people, young people, nasty people, good people, but you rarely played what you looked like or what you were. You got inside somebody else's skin." Curtis, for his part, told her that Americans paid to see Gary Cooper being Gary Cooper, not the hunchback of Notre Dame. "From now on, you should simply be Ingrid Bergman. Do the same thing, play the same sort of role all the time, and you develop this one attractive side that the audience will love." Bergman later said, "I knew the things a close-up can do, sometimes invent things that are not there at all. In Casablanca, there was often nothing on my face, nothing at all. But the audience put into my face what they thought I was giving. They were inventing my thoughts the way they wanted them. They were doing the acting for me."

• 1:08:27Lizzie Bassett?

  That sounds like what I did when I'm watching it.

• 1:08:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that's so interesting. Now, I think one thing that was not helping was that Bergman also didn't really know Humphrey Bogart and had a hard time getting to know him on set. In fact, she said that she got to know him better through watching The Maltese Falcon, which was in theaters when they were shooting Casablanca.

• 1:08:46Lizzie Bassett?

  From what we know about him from The African Queen, too, like, it's not that he's unfriendly, it's just that-

• 1:08:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a little reserved.

• 1:08:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's a little reserved. I don't think he's buddying up to really anybody on set.

• 1:08:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:08:56Lizzie Bassett?

  That's not uncommon for him.

• 1:08:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So, for the first three weeks of shooting, the writers be writin'. Robinson is editing and rearranging the order of scenes involving the love triangle, and one of his suggestions was that Ilsa should come first to Rick's café alone, without Loslow, because he felt that the love story suspense and the melodrama suspense are all mixed up in a hodgepodge.

• 1:09:16Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I like that.

• 1:09:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't think this was the solution.

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• 1:10:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And then they had a new unwelcome contributor, Lizzie. Let's welcome Joseph Breen, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and the Hays Code.

• 1:10:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, great.

• 1:10:11Chris Winterbauer?

  He was a journalist and influential Catholic. He'd been appointed by Will Hayes as the head of the Production Code Administration in the 1930s. He was also a noted anti-Semite, and he at times worked with George Gisling, the Nazi representative in Hollywood.

• 1:10:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool. Glad there was one of those.

• 1:10:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. In July of 1939, Pope Pius XI denounced antisemitism, and Breen did issue a statement against antisemitism, but he had other problems with Casablanca. He said that the character of Reynold and the relationship between Ilsa and Rick were "unacceptably sex suggestive."

• 1:10:40Lizzie Bassett?

  What? What about Reynold was sexually suggestive?

• 1:10:43Chris Winterbauer?

  That he's trying to get sex out of Anina for the passport for her husband.

• 1:10:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Okay.

• 1:10:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And this scam that, you know, he would target and coerce women in Casablanca to have sex with him in exchange for transit is hinted at throughout the movie and certainly in the script, even though Reynold is, again, very clearly in love with Rick. For his part, Julius Epstein was later asked, "Did you really mean to leave the impression with viewers that Rick and Ilsa made love before developing their strategy to leave Casablanca?" And he said, "Of course we did. If we had the freedom we have today, we would have made it so clear, you would have heard the bed squeaking on the soundtrack."

• 1:11:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So, yes, Joseph Breen or not, that was the implication.

• 1:11:21Lizzie Bassett?

  It's pretty clear. Yeah.

• 1:11:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, specific lines were tweaked or cut, and it does seem like one of the MPPDA's meddling notes resulted in a change that some have argued improved the story. They could not approve the suggestion that Ilsa, a married woman, had an affair with Rick in Paris. So the compromise is what you liked, Lizzie. Ilsa thought her husband was dead.

• 1:11:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I do like it. I mean, here's the thing. It changes the whole story. It changes her story big time, but I think that that's kind of an important point.

• 1:11:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:11:49Lizzie Bassett?

  To me, it makes the love story between her and Victor, not between her and Rick. But continue.

• 1:11:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I completely agree with you. I do think the more compelling love story by a mile is her and Victor. I love the scene where he kind of gives her permission to tell him that she was with somebody else. I thought that was a wonderfully written heartbreaking scene. I love that they never make his character stoop in any ways to try to make Rick more appealing by comparison. They let Victor be great the whole time. I love that.

• 1:12:13Lizzie Bassett?

  And he also, I love the scene where, you know, he's basically trying to get her to go without him. And she says, like, would you really have left me? And he's like, yes. And you know, the answer is no. And she does too. And I just, I think that that scene is so beautiful. And they, to me, have better chemistry, honestly.

• 1:12:31Chris Winterbauer?

  They have way better chemistry, 100%. Yes. Humphrey Bogart has great chemistry with Renault, in my opinion. Like, that's why, to me, that two-hander works so much better. All right, a couple of other things. They also insisted that Rick could only shoot Strasser if it was in self-defense. So Strasser has to pull a gun on Rick first. And then there were other people weighing in, too. Warner Brothers had a foreign publicity, wanted to avoid offending specific countries. So the pickpocket in Ugarte needed to be Italian, not Spanish. Shout out, Peter Lorre, who's great in this movie.

• 1:12:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Always great.

• 1:12:59Chris Winterbauer?

  The king of the black market was Martinez. Let's change that to Signor Ferrari, more Italian.

• 1:13:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:13:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Basically, let's make everyone Italian.

• 1:13:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Anybody who is vaguely bad is gonna be Italian.

• 1:13:11Chris Winterbauer?

  And basically, they cut any references to Islam in the script. They just cut anything there. So Robinson was gone by early June. Koch has taken off the project shortly after. A week after that, the Apsteins are out. And there's a June 1st dated script that some sources, or one source claims, that's where "here's good luck to you" is replaced with "here's looking at you, kid." Now, other sources claim that line doesn't appear in any of the mimeographed scripts, only the Cutter script, and was likely thought up in July. But according to the unit publicist notes, Bergman would play poker when things were slow on set, with her hairdresser and English teacher using hairpins as chips. And it was Humphrey Bogart who taught her the slang phrase "here's looking at you" while she played. And that's the story I choose to believe.

• 1:13:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah.

• 1:13:53Chris Winterbauer?

  So by June 5th, this is only two weeks into shooting, they're delayed because they don't have a script. But good news, on June 24th, the final version of the script is sent out. Bad news, Jack Warner thinks it sucks, so the Epsteins get called back in. This is also when super handsome superstar Paul Henry joins the shoot. He'd just been finishing up Now Voyager. According to Wallace, he then immediately got sick and then decided he didn't want to do the part. Henry's daughter Monica later said that basically Now Voyager, where he's opposite Betty Davis, and he very famously lights two cigarettes in his mouth at one point and gives her one, and it's a very romantic moment. It had transformed him into a romantic lead, and he worried that audiences were going to root for Bogart over him, and it would undo what he'd just accomplished in his last movie.

• 1:14:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And I just want to do a quick background because it's so cool and how it ties into this movie, Lizzie. So Paul Henry, I will say right now, it seems like just as cool as he is hot. So his father converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the early 1900s due to antisemitism in Austria-Hungary. And then Paul Henry was discovered by Otto Preminger. Oh. He performed in stage productions, applied for membership in the Nazi-run National Socialistic Reich Film Chamber, but was rejected because his father had been born a Jew. And then he started to become fervently anti-Nazi. He even starred in an anti-Nazi play in Great Britain, The Madman of Europe. He helped a Jewish comedian friend escape from Berlin. And according to the LA Times, for that and other anti-Nazi actions, Henry was designated official enemy of the Third Reich.

• 1:15:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Hell, yeah. And all of his assets were seized. So Henry and his wife, and by this point, he'd acted in a few movies, both back in his home country, but also in Great Britain, moved to the United States in 1940 with 20 British pounds to their names. So they had to start over completely. So I would imagine he might feel like Casablanca's a step back after working really hard to get Now Voyager. Sure. Wallace said he felt the role of an underground leader who appeared in a white tropical suit and a hat in a famous nightclub and talked openly with Nazis was ridiculous and redolent of musical comedy. I promised to build up his part, and Casey Robinson handled this. Henry joined the cast. And I do think in the finished film, he comes off. It's an interesting character who is performed incredibly well.

• 1:16:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. He's honestly, I think, my favorite performance in this movie.

• 1:16:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Him and Cloud Rains. I love Cloud Rains in this movie.

• 1:16:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Chris Winterbauer?

  But it's hot, Lizzie. And on July 1st, they bring the Epsteins back in, and Koch, because they have no idea how to end the movie. And as Koch later said, every day that we're here, where we don't know how to end this, is costing the studio $30,000. So it's often reported that Wallace, Curtis, and the writers were struggling with whether or not Ilsa should choose Rick or Victor. And Bergman has said that they were going to shoot two endings. So the first ending, she would say goodbye to Bogart and fly off with Henry. And then they'd walk off and everybody would say, you know, it's a beautiful friendship. But then they were going to do another ending where she was going to stay, according to Bergman.

• 1:16:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Hell, no. You're getting on that plane.

• 1:16:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Or she was going to leave with Rick. So some authors and film historians say that that was probably never considered. Because the MP PDA would never approve a married woman leaving her husband for an unmarried man. In the original play, Ilsa says she wants to stay with Rick, but ultimately leaves with Victor, just like we've discussed. Rick pulls a gun on Strasser, ultimately does not shoot, and gets arrested. So it seems like the real issue was how do we show Ilsa leaving? How much should Rick push? How easily should Ilsa give in? How should the scene end? Like, how do you make that calculus all work? And they considered a bunch of ideas. Strasser and Rick get shot. Only Rick gets shot. Victor gets shot. Strasser never shows up.

• 1:17:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Rick and Reynold play chess. Ilsa isn't there at all. Rick sends her to the airport alone. It's basically every possible version. All of the early ideas, up until the June 1st draft, took place at the café, not at the airport. Which is such a less cinematic. I love the fog and the runway.

• 1:17:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 1:17:46Chris Winterbauer?

  So finally, they decide Strasser shot by Rick. Rick convinces Ilsa to leave by talking about her role in Victor's important work, and that Rick should shoot Strasser. We'll do that. We don't know who came up with that ending exactly. Julius Epstein later said Warner had 75 writers under contract, and 75 of them tried to figure out an ending. They all say they came up with the ending. Howard Koch says he did the ending. Casey Robinson says he did the ending. Regardless, there is still some loose ends, like the debate about whether or not Rick and Ilsa should kiss. On the runway before they say goodbye. Curtis said yes. Humphrey Bogart and Wallace said absolutely not. And that was the right call.

• 1:18:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:18:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And that's what they went with. End of July, 1942, they are behind schedule. Michael Curtis explodes at a bit player. Bogart, Henry and Rains walked off the set as a result. They lose another day when they realized the real plane that they were supposed to shoot with had a different number of windows than the model plane that had been seen earlier in the scene. There was another delay caused by Curtis's accent. He kept asking for a poodle, a black poodle. Everyone waited while one of the crew members went off to find a black poodle. When he returned with a dog, Curtis said, I wanted a poodle in the street. A poodle of water, not a goddamn dog. He wanted a puddle. Couple more fun facts. Peter Laurie liked to pull pranks on sets, like using an eyedropper to put out Curtis's cigarette. And Dooley Wilson, as I mentioned, did not play the piano.

• 1:19:03Chris Winterbauer?

  The real pianist Elliot Carpenter was actually there on set playing for the sound recording. All right, the final line, Lizzie, was dubbed. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. So they had a few weeks to decide and I'll give you four options. And you can tell me which one they should have picked. Option one, Louis, I began to see a reason for your sudden attack of patriotism. While you defend your country, you also protect your investment.

• 1:19:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, I fell asleep halfway through that.

• 1:19:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie's face was like, what a conker. Option two, if you ever die a hero's death, heaven protect the angels. Option three, Louis, I might have known you'd mix your patriotism with a little larceny. And option four, Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

• 1:19:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, there's a clear choice and three real stinkers in there.

• 1:19:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And Wallace wrote the one that they went with. That was Hal Wallace, who wrote, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

• 1:19:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Great ending.

• 1:19:55Chris Winterbauer?

  So shooting wraps on August 3rd, 1942, 11 days over schedule, $75,000 over budget. But post-production is going to be easy, Lizzie. We got the luxury of time. We're not releasing this movie until the spring of 1943. And they've got an amazing composer, the father of film music. 24 time Academy Award nominee, three time winner and another Austrian Jewish transplant to the United States. The incredible Max Steiner. Who hated the main song as time goes by. It was boring. He was nominated for 24 Academy Awards and he won three, but they had to keep the song in the movie because it has so many scenes with Bergman saying, "Playtime goes by, play as time goes by." Yeah, you cannot change that. They thought about it. They thought about reshooting Bergman's scenes with a different song being asked for,

• 1:20:40Chris Winterbauer?

  but it turns out she'd gotten that dream job after all, Lizzie. She replaced Vera Zarena as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and for that role, she had just cut her hair. So, the song stayed and audiences loved it. On September 22 of 1942, the movie was screened for the first time. One executive said, "Change the name. The audience is gonna think Casablanca is a Mexican beer." Is that so bad? Is it so bad? According to Wallace, "The audience seemed to like it, though they didn't rave, and indeed, several cards suggested we should show Rick and Louis escaping Casablanca, as it looked as if they would be arrested when they got back to town." But you can't do two escapes, one after another. No. They had an unexpected fan. Joe Breen and the publicity department loved it.

• 1:21:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So, uh, Hays Code says, "Two thumbs up." Julius Epstein did not. He wrote, "When we previewed it for the first time, I thought it was a big flop. We wrote a note to Hal Wallace telling him so. Thereafter, he kept that memo in his desk. Whenever we have an argument with him about anything, he would open his desk, take out that memo, and give it to us." So, they got all the time in the world, and then on November 8, 1942, US troops land in North Africa. And all of a sudden, Morocco and North Africa and Casablanca are on the minds of Americans. And executives at Warner Brothers, specifically Jack Warner, think, "Oh my god, this is a great opportunity for our studio to capitalize on the war." So they pull the release in, but executives at Warner Brothers go a step further.

• 1:22:07Chris Winterbauer?

  They say, "Let's add an epilogue to show the Allies routing the Nazis in North Africa." And Jack Warner, to his credit, says, "No way! It's impossible to change this picture and make sense with the story we told originally. It's a great picture as it is." Also, Jack Warner knew if they added any scenes, they wouldn't be able to release the movie fast enough after the landing at North Africa. Right. So, the execs pushed back. They said, "You gotta do it." And Wallace started preparing- For the scene and then there were issues getting a plane ticket for Cloud Rains. So they couldn't add any scenes to the end of the movie. Which I'm like, did they maybe lose the ticket on purpose? Did they do a reverse letters of transit? Did they stick it in the piano? I don't know. David Selsnick saw a preview of the movie on November 11th and he says, I loved it. You never see your feet.

• 1:22:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Don't change a thing. So Casablanca premieres on November 26, 1942. It released wide two months later, as we mentioned, on January 23rd, 1943. And again, has a bit of a fortuitous release. It's just as news leaks about a 10 day conference between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in.

• 1:23:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Casablanca.

• 1:23:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Casablanca.

• 1:23:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:23:15Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Casablanca was a hit. It was not a runaway train, but it was a hit. It generated $3.7 million, putting the studio well in the black. It was a roughly $1 million budget. The New York Times wrote, in short, we will say that Casablanca is one of the year's most exciting entrenched films. It certainly won't make Vichy happy, but that's another point for it. I believe it was the seventh highest grossing film of the year. Many who worked on it still couldn't see it for what it was. Howard Koch later said, in January of 1943, when the picture opened at Warner's Hollywood Theater, I wondered what all the excitement was about. I was still blind to the virtues of the film and saw only what I considered its faults. When a year later it received the Academy Award, I was by that time inured to miracles. So Lizzie, this movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards.

• 1:24:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Any guesses as to what it was nominated for aside from Best Picture?

• 1:24:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it best actor for Humphrey Bogart?

• 1:24:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, his first nomination.

• 1:24:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Best actress for Ingrid Bergman?

• 1:24:09Chris Winterbauer?

  No, Cloud Rains, best actor in a supporting role. He was nominated, he did not win.

• 1:24:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know, do they have costumes?

• 1:24:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Cinematography.

• 1:24:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:24:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Arthur Edison, so The Crying was worth it. Best editing, Owen Marks.

• 1:24:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:24:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And Max Steiner, best music, despite having to include a song that he really, really, really didn't like.

• 1:24:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Perfect.

• 1:24:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It won for director, Michael Curtiz. It won for screenplay, The Apsteins and Howard Koch.

• 1:24:31Lizzie Bassett?

  And 100 million other people, yes.

• 1:24:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And it won for Best Picture. Hal Wallace, who was also receiving the Irving Thalberg Award that year for his position as head of production at Warner Brothers, stood to. Accept the award for Best Picture when Jack Warner ran to the stage ahead of him and took the award. Wow. Wallace was stunned. Quote, "Casablanca had been my creation. Jack had absolutely nothing to do with it. As the audience gasped, I tried to get out of the row of seats and into the aisle, but the entire Warner family sat blocking me. I had no alternative but to sit down again, humiliated and furious." Whoa. Now, apparently, this was pretty common at the time. Studio heads would often collect the trophy for Best Picture, but it seems like Wallace expected, "This is my first, you know, big producing effort." Yeah.

• 1:25:17Chris Winterbauer?

  "I was the man behind this. I'm getting the Irving Thalberg Award." Apparently, there was some press about a supposed rift between the two of them that was published the next day, and Warner Brothers pressured him into sending in a letter saying, "There's no problem. We all expected Jack to go collect the award. Everything's fine." And then he nursed a grudge until he died. Yeah. So, this was apparently, it was a pretty big blow. Curtis reportedly told his friends that Wallace was the only one who had faith in Casablanca, that Warner thought the movie was gonna be a disaster. But what's really interesting and kind of tragic is that Wallace was a lot more like Jack Warner than maybe he realized. So, back at Warner Brothers, Irene Lee, who is credited by many as discovering this property, asked for a raise.

• 1:26:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "Hal always took total credit for discovering Casablanca. He barely mentioned me in his autobiography. When Casablanca came out and was that tremendous hit, and I had bought it for so little money, I spoke to Hal and said, 'Don't you think I ought to have a bonus?'" And he said, "That's what you're here for." Wow. "I was in a meeting one day, and I said that I would like to be a producer, and you would have thought I should be taken out and shot." End quote. Casablanca's popularity grew over time, annual screenings at universities, film houses, a lot of showings on television. And in fact, in 1977, Lizzie, it was reportedly the most frequently shown movie on television that year. Julius Epstein has said he just didn't understand it. At the time, every studio made a picture a week, an assembly line. This was just one of the pictures at Warner Brothers.

• 1:26:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It was an assembly line. It really became a cult classic when Bogart died in 1955. It's possible he did die young, you know, shortly after the African Queen. There were a couple of TV series built off the film. One in the 50s, one in the 80s, but the lingering legacy of the film has been credit over the screenplay. Again, in 1973, Koch downplayed the contributions of the original playwrights. He wrote, "The play provided an exotic locale, a character named Rick who ran a cafe, but little in the way of an adaptable story to the screen." I strongly disagree with this characterization.

• 1:27:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that doesn't sound right.

• 1:27:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Having just read the play, I think the writers on the film did marvelous work in adapting something that was very clearly a play, but to suggest that there was little there

• 1:27:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Chris Winterbauer?

  does not feel accurate to me. Murray Burnett sued Koch and New York Magazine for libel. He lost. He sued Warner Brothers for the rights to his characters, and he lost again. In 1985, Howard Koch apologized, but not to Murray Burnett. He apologized to Julius Epstein for the other claims he'd made in his book, that they'd collaborated in person and that the Epsteins had requested to be taken off the movie. In 1989, Casablanca was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry. It was one of the first batch of 25 movies that was added to the registry in the first year of its existence. And in 1991, Koch, at 89 years old, wrote to the LA Times, "Having read the play more recently, I believe that the complaint," meaning Burnett's complaint, "was at least to some extent justified." After 50 years, memories can be faulty.

• 1:28:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So credit to Howard Koch for, before he died, coming around. That same year, the play was finally staged. It's called Rick's Bar Casablanca because Warner Brothers wouldn't let him use the title Casablanca. And by that point, Joan Allison and Murray Burnett had fallen out and hadn't seen each other in years. Joan Allison in 1989 said, "Murray's concept of sophisticated was me." And I think she means Lois. "Lois was based on me, and he should see me now. I'm in the process of dying.

• 1:28:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:28:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe this week, maybe next. The thing that sustains me a great deal is The Jeopardy! Show, when I can yell out more answers than the contestants." She died in 1992, within a few days of actor Paul Henried. 10 years earlier, in a 1982 article for Film Comment, writer Chuck Ross retyped the screenplay and changed the title back to Everybody Comes to Rick's. He then submitted it to 217 agencies. 38 rejected it, 33 recognized the story, 8 said that it sounded suspiciously like Casablanca, 3 said they could sell it, and 1 suggested that he turn it into a novel.

• 1:29:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:29:12Chris Winterbauer?

  And that is the story of Casablanca.

• 1:29:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow. That was great.

• 1:29:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that. The script readers.

• 1:29:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:29:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, gosh. I think what went right for me is our heroic story editor Irene Lee, who was able to pick up the material, recognize what it could be, and stood by it when so many others passed. And it's especially disheartening to hear that it seems like she never got her credit. So I hope she's satisfied with a what went right. She deserved much more.

• 1:29:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I think this is a great choice. I really love this movie, and I think you could give it to any of the writers. All of they all made actually such crucial contributions. Jesse and I were talking, my sister, our researcher, about the movie. And, oh, we I love this thing that Koch did. And this always clearly Epstein's wrote this line. And it's so funny, or the way Casey Robinson, you know, cracked the romance, or you go back to the original play. And there are full stretches and sequences that are verbatim, as you will later see on screen, that Murray Burnett and Joan Allison clearly came up with. I think all of that's amazing. And I love Humphrey Bogart. And I just did a tear of watching a bunch of his movies. But I, like you, I have to give mine to Paul Henreid in this movie, who that character, if played

• 1:30:27Chris Winterbauer?

  wrong, I think could come off as such a fantasy, who doesn't feel real. I was very moved when the scene between him and Ilsa, when he asks about if she was lonely, like, I just thought his performance was amazing in that moment. And I thought it was a very well written scene. It's more complex than what is in the play, to be fair. And while I felt, I think Bergman was doing something very in keeping with the style of the time, which was a somewhat bigger, like, don't look at me, you know, I mean, sort of reaction to him. I liked how small Henreid felt, comfortable playing that scene in an era when it was very easy to go big, a lot.

• 1:31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  He feels very

• 1:31:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Very modern.

• 1:31:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Very modern. I agree.

• 1:31:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I think Bogart does, too, actually, in a lot of ways, the two of them, for sure.

• 1:31:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:31:15Lizzie Bassett?

  It's interesting that you mention that character potentially coming off poorly, because there's almost a version of this where he could veer into Ashley Wilkes territory from Gone with the Wind, which, of course, intentionally is written to be kind of a drip, which you realize by the end. But I think that totally, in the wrong hands, this could have gone that direction.

• 1:31:34Chris Winterbauer?

  He never loses his dignity, but he also shows you the humanity behind it, too.

• 1:31:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think that's really hard and he does it with aplomb.

• 1:31:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 1:31:42Chris Winterbauer?

  So Paul Henry, I need to watch now Voyager. I watched a couple of scenes from it, you know, just to see it and it looks interesting.

• 1:31:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I haven't seen it. The only thing that I will say is young Betty Davis is not old Betty Davis.

• 1:31:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. This was her in her women's pictures run. You know, it was a different Betty Davis. I know. I still, I put it on my list. So.

• 1:32:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Guys, I hope you enjoyed this brief journey into Casablanca. Really, please check out the books we recommended. They are all so wonderful. There's so much about this movie that is out there. Lizzie, if they're enjoying the podcast, how can folks give us a little support?

• 1:32:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you could tell a friend or family member that you enjoy it. You can send them an episode, your favorite episode, perhaps. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on. We always appreciate that. You can, if you want to go a step further, you can subscribe on Apple or in Spotify. And if you do that, you will get one extra bonus episode a month. Or you can go even one step further and you can become a patron on Patreon for just $5 a month. You too will get at least one bonus episode every single month, as well as an ad free feed and more. And then if you really want to go the extra mile, you can get a shout out for $50, just like these extra special kid patrons here.

• 1:33:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie's Sean Connery impression is so good and my Humphrey Bogart impression is so bad that I decided to write a song for this outro instead of do the Bogart impression. So I hope you enjoy a little tune called A Walk to Brazzaville.

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

  They say it's the greatest screenplay written. I watched Casablanca and I was smitten. Rick's the kind of man, well, if I were a woman, what a fool I am.

• 1:33:39Speaker 03

  Howard Kotz was right, you gotta cut that flashback. You'll always have Paris, I could give a crap about that. This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We're gonna take a walk to Brazzaville. We're gonna take a walk to Brazzaville.

• 1:34:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Adrian Pangkorea, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Liel, Chris Zaka, David Friskalanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Schiavel, Ellen Singleton, M. Zodiac, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, Grace Potter, Half Grey Hound, James McAvoy, Jared Ugg, Jason Franco, JJ Rappido, Jory Hill Piper, Jose Emiliano Salto del Giorgio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Olga Schlagler McCoy, Lazy Freda, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Merry Poses

• 1:34:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Knife, Nathan Centeno, Rosemary Southward, Rural Jur, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Solman Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, and There Is No Spoon.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  So who gets credit for the movie Casablanca? Jack Warner stole the Oscar and he didn't say thank you. I hope they know that in the end, the only thing that matters is everybody comes to Rix. Is everybody comes to Rix. Thank you for having us at Rix.

• 1:35:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Thanks so much for listening, guys. Please tune in this Friday on our subscription feeds for our fourth conversation in the Best Picture Race, where we're talking all things international. That's right. Casablanca has teed us up perfectly to talk about the two international submissions into the Best Picture Race, sentimental value and the secret agent. We're very excited to talk about those two movies. And then next week, we are continuing with our Oscars coverage with Lizzie's favorite movie of all time, Forrest Gump. We are so excited for Lizzie to tell you all about how that movie just keeps her going. She just can't stop running after she watches it.

• 1:36:04Lizzie Bassett?

  You might be surprised by how much I enjoyed Forrest Gump upon this viewing.

• 1:36:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I think Forrest Gump is a blast, so I'm excited to talk about it. Don't think, just enjoy it.

• 1:36:14Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, we will see you next time. Bye.

• 1:36:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Bye.

• 1:36:21Speaker 04

  To support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website, whatwentwrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.