TIMELINE: WORLD EVENTS AND CASABLANCA, THE MUSICAL
|
Date |
Events |
| 1899 | January 23, Humphrey DeForest Bogart born, New York City, USA.
August 2, Michael Overfish Ward born, Halifax, England. |
| 1931 | Song “As Time Goes By” appears in Broadway show “Everybody’s Welcome”. Cornell student Murray Burnett irritates his fellow students by playing it constantly. The Great Depression has been running globally for two years. The Nazi party is number two in the German Reichstag with over 18% of the vote. Talking movies are four years old. |
| 1933 | Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany in January
Mike Ward becomes Chancellor of Keighley in August |
| 1938 | Germany annexes Austria in March. Later that year, Murray Burnett, a Jew, goes to Vienna to help relatives to escape; he is horrified by the hatred there. Mike Ward is reported to have said “if you think Nazi Europe is horrifying, you should see Keighley”. |
| June 1940 | Nazis take Paris and do a deal with the remnants of the French Government, much to the chagrin of the resistant French elements. Marshal Petain becomes head of Vichy France, in collaboration with the Nazis. General Charles DeGaulle announces plan to develop the means to liberate France from the overseas empire, primarily French Africa. |
| 1940 | Murray Burnett, in collaboration with friend Joan Alison, writes play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” about an American expat in Casablanca whose former lover turns up at his night club with her resistance leader husband, Victor, in tow. She asks Sam the pianist to play “As Time Goes By”. Love with Rick is rekindled. She wants to stay with Rick. Rick insists that she leaves with Victor. She goes. The curtain falls. |
| 1940 | DeGaulle establishes his credentials in Free French Africa, successfully breaking the Vichy stranglehold in Equatorial Africa. Strangely, the position of Ouagadougou in Upper Volta is hard to establish from the histories. The position over North Africa, including Morocco, is ambiguous and is to remain so for several years – it’s status can be vaguely described as unoccupied by agreement with Vichy France. For example, the British allow Vichy ships to pass through the straits of Gibraltar without interference. |
| 1941 | Murray Burnett struggles to place “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” until the US’s entry into the war towards the end of the year suddenly makes the property look hot. Humphrey Bogart is busy making The Maltese Falcon. |
| December 1941/ January 1942 | Irene Lee and Hal Wallis of Warner Bros buy “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” for $20,000 – then the highest ever price for an unperformed play (about £100,000 to £150,000 at today’s UK prices – why can’t Mike Ward plays raise this sort of cash?). Warner Bros immediately change the name of the piece to Casablanca and announce that Ronald Reagan is to play Rick, Ann Sheridan is to pay Ilsa and Dennis Morgan is to play Victor. |
| February 1942 | Julius and Phil Epstein set to work rewriting the script into a Warner Bros movie screenplay with humour and sparkle. Wallis decides on Mick Curtiz as director and they pick Humphrey Bogart for Rick, condemning Reagan to B-movie obscurity until he uses politics to revive his flagging career. Mike Ward also fails to get the part of Rick, condemning him to a career in public relations until the Actor’s Workshop revives his flagging career. |
| April 1942 | Hal Wallis gets Howard Koch to do some touching up work on the script to add youthfulness and agitprop. Could this be too many cooks? With hindsight – clearly not. Meanwhile the shortlist for Ilsa is now Michele Morgan or Ingrid Bergman. Michele would cost $55,000 whereas Ingrid was available on loan from Paramount for $25,000. Ingrid gets the job. US government recognises Free French administration in Equatorial Africa and swaps eight bombers for landing rights. Mike Ward swaps eight gobstoppers for some cigarette cards with famous cricketers on them (one of them of course being Len Hutton). |
| May 1942 | Dooley Wilson is signed up for Sam. He cannot play piano but he is cheap. Paul Henreid signs up for Victor’s role as long as he gets third billing above the title on the posters (no joke). Conrad Veidt signs up to play Major Strasser – Veidt was a Jewish refugee who made an acting career out of playing evil Nazis. They start filming with the Paris flashback sequence. A few days later, Claude Rains signs up as Renault, Sidney Greenstreet as Ferrari and Peter Lorre as Ugarte. |
| June/July 1942 | Script famously still being rewritten during filing. Later, Jack Warner was to use Casablanca as a case study on out of control scripts – there’s no pleasing some bosses. |
| August 1942 | August 2, Mike Ward’s birthday. August 3, last day of official filming on Casablanca. August 21 final bit of filming (new closing line). |
| November 1942 | Operation Torch: Allied Forces land in North Africa (Algiers, Oran and 8 points along Moroccan coast). Fighting ends after thousands of casualties. Admiral Darlan announces himself “High Commissioner for North and West Africa” but it is hard to work out if he is now Vichy or Free French. North African position now tense and ambiguous rather than just ambiguous. Movie Casablanca premiers same month – that really was amazing timing. |
| December 1942 | Admiral Darlan assassinated before anyone could work out whose side he was on. Mike Ward flees Keighley in both confusion and diapers. |
| January 1943 | 22nd – DeGaulle, Roosevelt and Churchill meet in Morocco to try and agree a carve up but DeGaulle and Roosevelt can’t get on with each other.
23rd – Casablanca goes on general release in US – amazing timing yet again, Mr Warner. |
| May 1943 | Unified Free French Government formed in North Africa. |
| January 1944 | DeGaulle and Churchill meet in Marrakech – they don’t get on too well even without Roosevelt |
| March 1944 | Casablanca wins 3 Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay |
| 1983 | British Film Institute votes Casablanca as best film ever. |
| June 1998 | American Film Institute rates Casablanca second greatest American film of all time (look out next for Mike Ward’s “Citizen Kane, the Musical”) |
| August 2001 | Mike Ward begins work on “Casablanca, the Musical” |
| September 2001 | “Casablanca, the Musical” is done and dusted. |
Deal Making
MIKE WARD: Where are the goddamn programme notes you promised me? We need to go to print tomorrow.
AIRPIECE: Where’s the goddamn script. I can’t write programme notes about a musical I haven’t read.
MIKE WARD: It’s all done. I’ll send it to you.
AIRPIECE: When?
MIKE WARD: When I’ve written the ending. It’ll be a couple of days.
AIRPIECE: I’ll need a couple of days after that.
MIKE WARD: It’s a deal.
Echoes
The birth of Casablanca, the Musical has many echoes with the birth of the movie. Last minute revision to the script is but one example. Ingrid Bergman was selected for the movie because she was cheap, a sentiment that the Burgers of Halifax would no doubt endorse. I was selected to write these programme notes for similar reasons; Lord Archer of Bulmarsh, who has some time on his hands, was in the frame but wanted a larger fee per word than me.
Apocryphally, the ending of the movie was in doubt right until the end of filming (much like a Mike Ward play), although some experts say that it was never in doubt that Victor and Ilsa were going to end up with each other. Spin doctoring had been invented by 1942, so you can’t treat every Warner outpouring as gospel. After all, they announced Ronald Reagan as the lead just before signing Bogart. It is that sort of movie. “Play it again Sam” is the most famous quote from the movie and it is not in the movie. “Oh shit, I’ve dropped a table on my foot” will probably be the most famous quote from the musical, although not in the script, merely irritating noise offstage. It is said that more has been written about Casablanca than about any other movie. (The movie even has its own web site, Cyberblanca.com, to which I owe a debt of research gratitude.) And oh boy do Mike Ward plays have more written about them in the programme notes than most plays. But then, I am paid by the word, you know.
Finally, while tracing these echoes, I thought I’d research what had become of Murray Burnett who wrote the play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” upon which Casablanca is based. It is well known that he earned $20,000 for the play. Less well known is the fact that he scratched out a living later as a screenwriter experiencing little success. His later stage play projects, of which there were several, were never produced. When Murray Burnett died in September 1997, his obituary in Classic Images misspelled his name as “Murray Bennett.” “Mike Warred”, on the other hand, seems somehow to get all of his plays produced. But no write up in Classic Images. And no movie rights sales as yet. Perhaps the plays are too long.
Professor Ivan Airpiece
Department of Forensic Cinematography,
The Fulbright University College of Keighley (F.U.C.K.)