Season of the Gods Casablanca

One Little Gem

My friend Tom sent me a link the other day. He had found a six-minute YouTube video on the topic of a particular shot in the movie Casablanca and thought I would be interested in seeing it since my last book, Season of the Gods, told the day-by-day, way-behind-the-scenes story of the creative minds who got together and spun this 1942 cinematic masterpiece. The other reason Tom sent it to me is that he made a long, successful career as a film and video editor who taught me most of what I know about the craft, and the shot in question from Casablanca involved editing at its best—or rather, the shot represented a brilliant example of editing forbearance.

At plot point one in the picture, Rick sees Ilsa for the first time since Paris. Right before that encounter, Ilsa tells Sam the piano player that she wants to hear the song As Time Goes By. He starts to play, and she says, “Sing it, Sam.” As he starts to sing the song, the camera fixes on Ilsa’s reaction to hearing it. The last time I watched the picture, which I’ve seen many times, including on the big screen, the length of the shot struck me. It’s 25 seconds long, which is an eternity of screen time, particularly for a director like Michael Curtiz, who likes to keep things moving as he pushes his story forward, ever forward. But here, nothing happens in 25 seconds—and everything happens in 25 seconds.

Ilsa listens to *As Time Goes By* and remembers her love affair with Rick in a 25-second shot.

The shot reveals that the past tortures Ilsa, but she must hear the song and dive headlong into her pain. As revelatory as the shot is, it’s also a director’s gamble since executive producer Hal Wallis might just notice the extraordinary length and fire off a memo to Curtiz to stop doing that! Or studio boss Jack Warner might send a memo along the same lines. Stop wasting film and money on these long takes!

As noted in the YouTube video, the shooting script of Casablanca didn’t mention a long, lingering close-up of Ilsa. The script simply shows Ilsa’s line, and describes Sam singing, and the stage direction has Rick walk in and see Ilsa. So, this was a Curtiz idea on the spot, and I can imagine how it came about. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson, a veteran of moviemaking going back 30 years and also a still photographer, had adjusted his lighting just right on Ingrid Bergman playing Ilsa. The setup caught a glint of light off her right eyeball and a glint of light off her left tear duct. They rehearsed the scene as written—she tells Sam to sing the song and Sam reluctantly complies. Edeson shot it over Bergman’s shoulder to Dooley Wilson as Sam, and over Dooley’s shoulder to her, and in a close-up of Bergman asking him to sing the song and then her reaction to it.

Here Curtiz or maybe Arthur Edeson noticed something special—Bergman’s inspired reaction to what she was hearing. Ingrid Bergman would create this great mythology later in life that she didn’t understand Casablanca or her character or whom she should be in love with—Victor Laszlo or Rick Blaine. But this shot reveals the big lie of all that nonsense. As crafted by director Curtiz, and shot by Edeson, and acted by Bergman, Ilsa knew exactly whom she loved. It’s written all over her face through 25 seconds. Ilsa loved Rick and Ilsa wasn’t over Rick.

Bergman had a remarkable ability to play it vulnerable her whole career, and in rehearsal Curtiz must have seen how powerfully Bergman was communicating a lost love, or Edeson perhaps noticed first, and director and cameraman would have conferred, and then for the close-up, I can hear Curtiz saying to her, “Think of something sad. Keep thinking about something sad.” He might have coached her through those 25 seconds knowing the song would be looped in separately.

After her reverie, Rick appears and she gazes up at him, her eyes moist as beautifully lit by Arthur Edeson.

Then I wonder what was her motivation; what was the sad thing she thought about? What came to mind was Ingrid Bergman’s recent exile in Rochester, New York, where she had spent an unhappy winter in deep snows waiting for the phone to ring with David O. Selznick at the other end of the line. Selznick owned her services at this time but kept not finding parts for her. So, the time dragged by for Bergman in snowy Rochester—3,000 miles from Hollywood—while her dentist husband progressed through a medical internship. She had gone into this period excited at the prospect of serving as a dutiful housewife, but then the reality hit her how out of place she was, how out of work she was, and the snow piled up, and letters to a friend revealed how deeply unhappy and then depressed she had grown during these months, feeling that Selznick had abandoned her, feeling she would never work again.

Whatever motivated her, the camera loved it and the director loved it, to the extent that this one shot would make it through Owen Marks’ editing booth intact at 25 seconds. Marks was an experienced hand with many Warner Bros. A-pictures under his belt, but he would not have made such a decision on his own. Curtiz must have fought for the length of this shot and Wallis must have OKed it, because 10 seconds would have been safer, 15 tops. But on it goes, uncomfortably so, until suddenly you realize you’ve strayed too deeply into Ilsa’s pain.

It’s one little gem in a treasure chest of a picture. It’s also an interesting decision by two or three or four of the gods in their season who came together to create a masterpiece.

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Season of the Gods is available in trade paperback through Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. It’s also a dynamite audiobook read by Holly Adams.

Plot point one: Rick sees Ilsa and his face hardens with contempt. She’s vulnerable; he’s contemptuous, and the story spins in a new direction.

The Big ‘However’

It’s baffling to me to think that in my lifetime, there was a thing called segregation. In my lifetime! I wasn’t old enough to actually see a restroom or swimming pool for “colored people,” so when I’m reminded that even in the 1960s things were that way, I’m stunned. All of which points out to me the twentieth century trailblazers who wouldn’t settle for the two-tier system in America, such as Warner Bros. executive producer Hal Wallis. As detailed in my book Season of the Gods, Wallis despised studio boss Jack Warner, whose narcissism clashed with Wallis’s own fearsome ego. One of the things they clashed over was Black talent.

Hal Wallis (right) with *Casablanca* director Michael Curtiz and Ingrid Bergman.

Years ago, while combing the U.S.C. Warner Bros. Archives, I came across a summer 1941 Jack Warner memo indicating he wanted some “colored people” for comic relief in the Custer biopic then in development starring Errol Flynn. Warner was an advocate of comic turns in all the WB pictures—they called them “bits of business” back in the day—always done by white character actors like George Tobias or Alan Hale, or by Black actors like Clarence Muse. In the case of the Custer picture, the Jack Warner memo resulted in the appearance of a “boy” tending Custer’s hounds at the beginning of the picture, and new scenes for housekeeper “Callie” played by Hattie McDaniel, then not far past her Academy Award win for Gone With the Wind. McDaniel’s Oscar, richly deserved for a nuanced performance as Mammy, had sent shock waves through the continent—America wasn’t ready to recognize 1) a Black character as wiser or more grounded than the white characters in the piece, or 2) a Black performer as talented as Caucasian counterparts.

Hattie McDaniel with the teacup ‘bit of business’ in *They Died with Their Boots On* (1941).

I don’t know about you, but McDaniel’s bits of business in the Custer picture They Died with Their Boots On have made me uncomfortable for decades—the bit about the fortune telling with the teacup and rabbit’s foot and the thing in the garden with the owl. Yikes. But that was Jack Warner for you, always ready to beat people over the head with painful humor delivered in person through notoriously horrendous jokes or through his pictures of the 1930s and 40s, none of which I find funny. Whether it’s Boy Meets Girl or Arsenic and Old Lace, the humor is loud, desperate, and, to me at least, painful.

But back to the Hal Wallis–Jack Warner enmity. Wallis acquiesced to Warner in the case of Custer, but times were changing. At the turn of 1942, with America newly launched into world war, Wallis bought a stage play called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” and jammed it into the production schedule, renaming it Casablanca. A key member of the cast was a gay “Negro” piano player called Sam the Rabbit, who was written as a stereotype of the times. However, in developing the characters and screenplay of Casablanca in February and March 1942, Wallis was seeing headlines like this one in Daily Variety: BETTER BREAKS FOR NEGROES IN HOLLYWOOD. Dated March 24, the article began, “Negroes are to be given an increasingly prominent part in pictures,” according to Walter White, head of the NAACP. White stated that “Darryl Zanuck and other production chiefs had promised a more honest portrayal of the Negro henceforth, using them not only as red-caps, porters and in other menial roles, but in all the parts they play in the nation’s everyday life.”

Hal Wallis embraced this controversial new approach, reasoning that “Negroes” were fighting and dying for their country in the war, spilling the same color blood as white people, so why not treat them as equals in pictures? First up was the role of Parry played by Ernest Anderson in the Bette Davis sudser, In This Our Life (1942). Parry was the young son of a household cook (Hattie McDaniel again) who was wrongly accused of a fatal hit-and-run accident. He’s cleared by the end of the picture and off to law school—and throughout, his part isn’t played for laughs. At all. And with Casablanca, Wallis considered the same approach—taking the character seriously. Wallis considered writing Sam as a woman and casting either Hazel Scott or Lena Horne until studio story editor Irene Lee and writers the Epstein twins won Wallis over that Sam must be a male to head off any thought that Rick and his piano player might be romantically involved—which would sap the intensity of the Rick–Ilsa dynamic.

Over time, veteran Black character actor Clarence Muse was considered for the part of Sam, and Hollywood newcomer Dooley Wilson was chosen. All the while, Jack Warner played rooftop sniper and argued against letting Sam be played as Rick’s best friend and confidant because the picture might be banned in the American Deep South for showing a Black man as Rick’s equal. And Wallis kept pointing to the war effort and the changing times, stuck to his guns, and gave the world a character for the ages in Sam, a role and a performance that holds up 100 percent today, going on a century later. There isn’t one false note in Dooley Wilson’s characterization, not one cringeworthy moment of the kind that mar Hattie McDaniel’s performances—bits forced upon her to reassure white viewers they were indeed superior.

Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth with Flynn in *The Sea Hawk* (1940); Robson as a Black slave with Ingrid Bergman in *Saratoga Trunk* (made in 1943; released in 1945).

Now we come to the big “However.” Just months after Casablanca wrapped, Wallis started work on a picture called Saratoga Trunk, from the novel by Edna Ferber. The lead role of Clio Dulaine in Saratoga Trunk was coveted, much as had been the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. I remember how badly Olivia de Havilland in particular wanted to play illegitimate, half-Black Clio returning from France to post-Civil War New Orleans to avenge her mother. But do you know who Hal Wallis chose for Clio in Saratoga Trunk? Fair-skinned Swede Ingrid Bergman, that’s who, her hair dyed black to “satisfy” the problem of race. And for the part of Clio’s Black maid Angelique, Wallis selected very white, British-born Flora Robson, who just three years earlier had portrayed Queen Elizabeth I in Flynn’s The Sea Hawk! For Saratoga Trunk she’s slathered in hideous dark-skinned makeup because, Wallis said, “the role was so large and important that it was beyond the range of many [Black] actresses of that time.” Um, OK, Hal. Sure. Ironically enough, Robson would be nominated for an Oscar for her take on Angelique, whereas today, viewers simply take one look at her, gasp, and go, “Wut up with the blackface?” So, sometimes Wallis challenged the norms and sometimes he didn’t; after all, Wallis straddled the line between artist and businessman. When he got it wrong, the result was Saratoga Trunk, a picture known only to die-hard cinephiles. When he got it right, the result was Casablanca with its many perfections, not the least of which is quiet, steadfast Sam, best friend of the white guy. (And I’ll bet you Rick’s Café Americain didn’t hold even one segregated restroom.)

Play it!

Note: Season of the Gods is available in trade paperback and ebook formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the independent Bookshop.org, and other book retailers. The audiobook version was read by the superb Holly Adams.

I wrote Season of the Gods with the intention of forcing people to look at the Warner Bros. classic Casablanca in a new way. I wanted to challenge you, the reader, to think about the screenplay and the plot and the dialogue and the environment in which Casablanca was created because it’s simply a miraculous motion picture, and how in the world did it come about? First of all, I needed to understand the how and the why of it myself, and then my plan was to take the results of my research and lay it out in story form. The fact that Season of the Gods is categorized as “historical fiction” is strange to me since the characters are real people, and everything they do in the book is based on research.

Did you ever notice the undercurrent of tension in Casablanca? I just watched it again a couple of evenings ago and some new things occurred to me, which is always happening with viewings of the picture since there’s so much filling the frame every moment. I was watching the scene where the German officers are singing in Rick’s and an outraged Victor Laszlo storms over to the band and orders that “La Marseillaise” be played. What are we, an hour in when this happens? “Play it!” snaps Laszlo, mirroring Rick’s earlier order to Sam to play “As Time Goes By.” “You played it for her, you can play it for me,” Rick had said. “Play it!”

With Victor standing in front of the band, the musicians look to Rick for guidance, and Rick gives the nod to follow Laszlo’s instructions and they start playing. I’m not telling you anything new when I point out the power of what follows because it’s the biggest emotional payoff in the picture. But why does it work so well? Why does it make me cry every time I see it?

Well, in screenplay terms, let’s FLASH BACK TO WARNER BROS. SOUNDSTAGES, JUNE 1942. There’s a bit in Season of the Gods where Bogart and Lorre are relaxing in Bogart’s dressing room and Bogie snaps on the radio to hear the latest about the battle of Midway as if he’s checking the box score on a baseball game. At the time of Midway, the Japanese navy was at the peak of its power, its carriers a mysterious and untraceable menace on the high seas that six months earlier had taken out most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Meanwhile, Europe was squeezed ever tighter in the grip of the German Reich. There’s another bit in Season of the Gods where Hal Wallis learns that 5,000 of the best and brightest Jews in Paris had been rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps. These weren’t peasants from Romania; they were the upper class of Paris, and the Germans had pounded open their doors and ripped these Parisians from their beds. All of a sudden Wallis realizes, holy shit, that could happen here!

*Conrad Veidt had fled his native Berlin because his wife was Jewish. During his Hollywood career he gladly played Nazis to expose their evil.*

This was the world at the time Wallis and crew produced Casablanca in May and June 1942. In past columns I’ve described how Wallis and Mike Curtiz populated the backgrounds of the picture with refugees who had recently fled the German menace—all of them Jews or married to Jews and most of them big stars in their native countries who suddenly felt grateful to get a day or a week on an American picture. For these people, the story told in Casablanca was all too real and none of them needed direction in the script to understand their motivation. A year or two or three earlier, they had lived desperate moments on the point of a knife, not knowing if they would make it to freedom. Now they were reenacting those moments for the camera, for posterity, in Hollywood. It’s amazing how many Americans were not in Casablanca.

Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page were native-born Americans. Rains and Greenstreet were Brits and for them, box scores involved the latest German air raid. Bergman was a Swede and Lorre and Sakall Hungarian; both had left Europe because of the Nazis. Conrad Veidt was German and had fled Berlin with his Jewish wife. Madeleine LeBeau (Yvonne) and her Jewish husband Marcel Dalio (Emil the croupier) were newly arrived after escaping France via Portugal and Mexico. Austrians Ilka Grüning and Ludwig Stössel portrayed the couple trying to learn English so they would fit in in America. “What watch?” he asks her, meaning What time is it? “Ten watch,” she answers. Both were accomplished performers in Europe (she had worked for Reinhardt and acted with Garbo!) who had fled Hitler and—in their mid-60s—starting over in Hollywood. All of these people, all of them, had already seen family and friends rounded up and sent to camps. In fact, Austrian Helmut Dantine (Jan in the film), had been involved in anti-Nazi youth group and the Germans sent him to a concentration camp; only the quick thinking of a family member got him released and packed off to the United States.

*Ludwig Stössel and Ilka Grüning had been born in Austria and were forced to flee their country (where both were entertainment stars) and start over in the U.S. film industry.*

FLASH FORWARD to 2024. Here we are today, 82 years after the production of Casablanca, right around the anniversary of the shooting of the airport sequence. It’s such a different world now with our cell phones, social media, self-involvement, and short attention spans. History is a lost art and many in the audience can’t begin to understand the purity of Victor Laszlo’s actions or how important Bogart’s small head nod was to the musicians. But in summer 1942 nobody knew if what was then called the “free world” would remain free, or if the Axis Powers would triumph. This is not an exaggeration. This is fact. The limits of German and Japanese power had not been ascertained in the summer of 1942. The United States was an untested power just gearing up and a year away from putting infantry boots on the ground of Europe.

*IRL, Madeleine LeBeau meant every tear.*

To me, Victor Laszlo actually gets the two best moments in the picture, first when he leads “La Marseillaise,” and later when he shakes Rick’s hand and says, “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.” Victor might have known, but I assure you the 1942 audience didn’t. They could only hope, and it seemed a faint hope at that.

And this is why the “La Marseillaise” scene has such power even today. The underdogs, the oppressed refugees, rose to their feet and dared to drown out the all-powerful Germans. Most poignant of all, Madeleine LeBeau sings her heart out with tears streaming down her face because she knows that in another reality, she might just be locked away or dead and not making pictures in America.

Madeleine’s husband Marcel Dalio (center) portrayed Emil the croupier. IRL he and Madeleine had lived the “letters of transit” experience as they sat in Lisbon and awaited passage across the Atlantic.

Givin’ It All Away*

So you say you haven’t yet read Season of the Gods—the novel about how Casablanca came to be? Would it pique your interest if you learned that a major Hollywood production company is now attached to this story and enthusiastic about its possibilities as a feature motion picture? Would it poke you in the ribs if you learned of a sweepstakes underway on Red Carpet Crash that includes five finalist prize packs and one grand prize winner of a set of replica letters of transit and other key documents from Casablanca? I kid you not—the grand prize is the letters of transit (see photo above for a glimpse), and also Ilsa’s rain-smeared letter to Rick and other Casablanca papers.

A photo of the #Casablancalettersoftransit and other documents critical to the film. — The grand prize set of *Casablanca* documents.

Here’s the finalist prize pack:

Signed copy of Season of the Gods
Casablanca Blu-ray loaded with special features
Casablanca t-shirt
Rick’s Café Americain matchbook
Season of the Gods bookmark

And the grand prize winner gets all that PLUS the set of replica Casablanca documents, including the letters of transit.

To enter, visit Red Carpet Crash today—the sweepstakes ends Friday, February 2.

Just as a quick reminder, Season of the Gods is 100 percent fact-based and tells the story of Irene Lee, Warner Bros. story editor (the only female executive in the company) who finds an orphan stage play and engineers its purchase by the studio’s executive producer, Hal Wallis. Irene’s a plucky one, five-foot-nothing and holding her own in misogynistic Hollywood. She serves as a de facto producer of Casablanca even though Hal Wallis won’t give Irene, a mere female, that title. She works with the crazy brother screenwriting team of Phil and Julie Epstein to craft the story and then with other writers brought in—Howard Koch and Casey Robinson. And she finds love along the way, or rather doubts she has found love when she considers her “junkyard of a love life.” I have such great fondness for the characters in the book, not only empathic Phil Epstein and his edgy brother Julie, but also Dooley Wilson, Hollywood novice in a white man’s world and dreaming of buying his wife a house; Claude Rains the easy-going roué; Conrad Veidt the elegant German expat eager to play Nazis and expose their evil; dark and cynical morphine addict Peter Lorre; gentle giant Sydney Greenstreet; Aaron Diamond, the New York carpet buyer who’s crazy about Irene; and Joy Page, Jack Warner’s stepdaughter who sees a role in Casablanca as a potential escape route from her difficult life at the Warner mansion, dubbed “1801” for its street address on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. And the backdrop. Oh, that backdrop. The dark months after Pearl Harbor when U.S. coastlines braced for invasion and defeat after defeat of Allied forces blasted across the headlines.

Plucky, little-documented Irene Lee, the real hero of *Casablanca*.

I guess you can tell … I like this book. And I’m not alone. Season of the Gods has gotten some great ink, from Publishers Weekly BookLife (an Editor’s Pick), from Kirkus Reviews (which called it “EPIC”), and most recently from Annette Bochenek’s website, Hometowns to Hollywood. The Historical Novel Society interviewed me about the book, as did Grace Collins for her True Stories of Tinseltown podcast. I always felt that I wasn’t going to take the world of fiction by storm and that this would be a marathon; not a sprint. Fiction is a place bulging with seasoned talent and passionate readers who know what they want and what they like, and who am I but a nonfiction author daring to cross over with an idea that came from who knows where?

The fact that Hollywood likes the book is a potential game changer. No kidding, they signed me up as soon as they received and devoured the copies sent over. That said, this company-that-must-not-be-named now controls the film rights and it’s up them to announce the deal or not, and to make a movie or not. We shall see what we shall see, but all I can say to these great people is: Thank you for believing in this story.

To order Season of the Gods, visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or if you favor the independent booksellers (and want a discount), Bookshop.org.

As always, thank you for checking in. See you at the movies—the golden age movies, that is. And please let all your friends know about the sweepstakes!

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*Givin’ It All Away was the greatest song by a solid 1970s band called Bachman Turner Overdrive. When I typed this for the title, I thought OMG, remember that song? I’ve got to go listen to that song, which I hadn’t heard in ages. And, wow, what a blast from the past. “You took my heart/And you went away/We said goodbye/And we’re givin’ it all away.” Still a great song—all the fury of love gone wrong. (Just so you don’t think I’m a Johnny One Note who only writes about wartime Hollywood. Rock on, my friends.)

Playing It Safe

The first choice of Hal Wallis: Hazel Scott.

I was watching Turner Classic Movies (U.S.) yesterday and heard Dave Karger’s introduction of Show Boat, MGM’s 1951 adaptation of a Broadway musical based on a 1926 bestselling novel by Edna Ferber. The plot of Show Boat concerns a traveling troupe of entertainers on the Mississippi River, one of whom is singer Julie LaVerne, part Caucasian and part Black. Karger explained that Lena Horne was originally penciled in as Julie because she had performed a number from Show Boat in the 1946 MGM musical, Till the Clouds Roll By. But MGM executives worried about putting a Black actress in such a pivotal role in a theatrical release and opted instead to cast Ava Gardner, all white, in the role. And at that moment I exclaimed to Dave Karger on the TV, “Why, those chicken shits!”

It’s difficult today to comprehend a United States in 1951 where Black people couldn’t be seen as equals in Hollywood productions. U.S. culture of the time still had white restrooms and “Colored” restrooms, white swimming pools and Colored swimming pools. It was the time of the Green Book and would stay that way for another generation!

But, to me, Louis B. Mayer and his MGM brethren were chickenshits because Hal Wallis, executive producer at Warner Bros., had already stormed this beach, had already claimed this ground, had already planted the flag of equal rights by daring to show a Black character as equal to white when Wallis had said “Screw it” and cast Dooley Wilson as Rick Blaine’s best friend in Casablanca a whopping nine years before Show Boat entered production.

Wallis then deferred to up-and-coming Lena Horne.

As detailed in Season of the Gods, Wallis and his team had bought the stage play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” which featured “Sam the Rabbit” as a key character, a flamboyant Black entertainer at Rick’s nightclub in Casablanca, French Morocco. Originally, Wallis’s inclination was to play up the flamboyant part by switching the Sam character to a Black female and his two choices for Sam were Hazel Scott, gorgeous multi-talented 20-year-old sensation then taking New York by storm, or the aforementioned Lena Horne, then beginning her career in Sunset Strip venues.

I’ll rely on you to read the debates in Season of the Gods and move on to the next plan, which was to cast Clarence Muse, dependable Colored stereotype, as Rick’s more-or-less second banana, this when early script drafts of Casablanca by Phil and Julie Epstein relied more on humor and less on romance. But Muse didn’t fit the evolving storyline, and Muse had been seen and seen and seen in this one type of role. Overseen. Wallis wanted more out of what was rapidly becoming a Very Important Picture as the world unraveled and Northern Africa hit the headlines. In the opinion of Hal Wallis, if young Black men were willing to go and die fighting the Axis powers in the name of freedom, then Black people could be seen as equals in Warner Bros. pictures.

Sam #3, the safe choice: character man Clarence Muse.

Cue more debates in Season of the Gods, as Wallis was warned he could “lose the South,” a critical market for box office returns, if he dared cast a Black man as equal to whites. Southern audience members could get up and walk out, demand their money back, and tell all their friends to stay away. This was the same American South that protested the working title of a George M. Cohan biopic then in production at Warner Bros., Yankee Doodle Dandy, because it dared to include the word “yankee” in the title! This, my friends, was the screwed up world of 1942: Americans were fighting racist authoritarianism overseas while ignoring their own racism at home.

Wallis saw it, and Wallis made a stand. He eschewed the stereotyped Clarence Muse and cast a well-worn, globetrotting entertainer named Dooley Wilson as Sam. I attempted to try to see the world of that time through Dooley’s eyes in the narrative of Season of the Gods and that in itself proved a surprising experience. Dooley just wanted to get by, so he looked away from the racism, figuratively and also literally, as he avoided eye contact with the people he met at Paramount and Warner Bros. But oh, the surprise in store for Dooley when he began production of Casablanca. You want me to WHAT? Underplay? He couldn’t believe it as his first couple of roles in Hollywood had been as a porter and a butler, doing the usual wide-eyed comic takes.

Casablanca holds up so well today because of the truth it presents. The people crammed into the lifeboat called Rick’s Café Americain—whether terrified Jews fleeing Hitler, a world-weary Black piano player, or a Czech freedom fighter and his wife—are just people trying to survive, trying to find peace. Wallis had gambled and won; his picture became everything envisioned and much, much more. I don’t know how many people walked out in the South, but that number was offset many times over by box office in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. Casablanca scored big on release in 1943, then again in 1949 and 1956 reissues, then endured on television.

The real Sam: new-to-Hollywood Dooley Wilson.

Yes, Show Boat “played it safe” in 1951 by casting Ava Gardner in a leading role instead of Lena Horne. And yes, groundbreaking Warner Bros. (minus Hal Wallis, who had moved on) would also play it safe in 1957 when time came to cast for Band of Angels, an antebellum story set in Louisiana. In the role of half-Black heroine Amantha Starr, Warner Bros. cast Yvonne De Carlo instead of, say, Dorothy Dandridge in the part because the world wasn’t ready for Clark Gable to be kissing Dorothy Dandridge. What if they walked out in the South?! (I will acknowledge progress made by 1957 in casting Sidney Poitier in a key role.)

So, sure, the world has changed, and yet the world hasn’t changed. There’s still hate because of the color of your skin or your ethnic heritage or the god you worship. And there’s still a burning need for courage like that displayed by Hal Wallis, who dared to do the right thing back in 1942.

Season of the Gods: A Novel is now available from Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Bookshop.org, and other booksellers.

Taking it to a higher plane

A good friend and colleague of mine picked up a sign on the WGA picket line in Hollywood the other day. That sign read on one side: AI WILL NEVER GIVE YOU and on the other side: CASABLANCA. He sent me a video showing the two sides of the poster because he knows how much I’ve been into Casablanca lately due to my new novel, Season of the Gods—which he had read in draft form months ago, offering key feedback for improvement.

Only through a historical novel could I get as close as I needed to get to the story of how Casablanca came to be. I wanted to understand its writers, Julie and Phil Epstein—that’s where this project started. Who were these guys who have already been lost to history except for a few well-worn anecdotes that have been spun into implausibility over the decades? Once, the Epsteins—“the boys” as everyone on the Warner Bros. lot knew them—were young, vital, ambitious, and living by their own code—and I needed to travel back there and walk around Hollywood with these guys to grasp the evolution of a masterpiece day by day.

Read the September 23 article in Air Mail.

Why can’t AI ever give you Casablanca? You’ll find all the reasons in Season of the Gods. A high school teacher named Murray Burnett wrote the stage play on which the film was based. On Broadway it didn’t need to contend with Hollywood’s morality code, and Warner Bros. story editor Irene Lee, nicknamed “Renie,” looked past the code when she purchased the play, figuring her writers would simply adapt key parts of the story and junk the rest.

Cue the hand-wringing.

Two veteran studio writers were assigned to the project and hit a brick wall because of the illicit sex that formed the foundation of the story. But the Epstein brothers, twins then age 32 and ready to conquer the world, all but begged production boss Hal Wallis for the assignment when the first two writers failed. Wallis granted the Epsteins’ wish and then they too got stuck. A third writer, political idealist Howard Koch, came aboard for new angles, and then a fourth writer, studio Cadillac Casey Robinson, stepped in and offered critique on the work of the other three. And still these four highly skilled craftsmen couldn’t figure it out.

Julius and Philip Epstein, who appear in Season of the Gods, a novel about Casablanca by Robert Matzen — Julius Epstein (left) and his twin brother, Phil, ready to take on the world.

Cue the ticking time bomb.

Irene Lee had sold Hal Wallis on the timeliness of a story set in North Africa, where Montgomery was battling Rommel. Wallis wedged the property he had retitled Casablanca into an already crammed production schedule. He couldn’t find actors—they were already booked on the other productions. He couldn’t build much in the way of sets or use real airplanes—wartime restrictions. All he knew was he had to make a movie and get it cut and release it, and the goddamn writers were holding him up! He gritted his teeth and started shooting a movie based on a partial script and kept a gun to the backs of his writers to figure out the ending!

Irene Lee, who appears in Season of the Gods, a novel about Casablanca by Robert Matzen — Warner Bros. Story Editor Irene Lee, who championed development of *Casablanca*.

Imagine you’re a fly on the wall of those story conferences, particularly the last one when Renie and her four writers had literally reached the end of the runway and would shoot something in the morning to represent the end of the story. They had filmed everything but the airport climax, and it had to make sense for the German to die, the freedom fighter to escape, the freedom fighter’s wife to leave the hero, and the hero to walk away free and clear.

As my WGA screenwriter friend said yesterday, “One of the things I find so interesting about your book is that it really is a celebration of the writing process—Casablanca, with its myriad contributors, seems like an early, unintentional example of the value of the writers’ room that is so much at issue.”

Could AI have reasoned out the ending to Casablanca? Could AI have written all the great lines the Epsteins created, lines that everyday people around the world have repeated on the job or at the dinner table for 80 years and counting? These zingers charm your pants off because you can’t see them coming. They’re human, revealing, self-deprecating, and ironic.

Season of the Gods, a novel about Casablanca by Robert Matzen — Ludwig Stössel, Ilka Grüning, and S.Z. Sakall, three famous European actors who had been driven to America by the Nazi regime. All were taken into the production at the urging of director Michael Curtiz.

Season of the Gods takes you inside studio walls, inside the writers’ room, inside the soundstage. You will meet the Epsteins, Renie, Wallis, Koch, Robinson, Bogart, Bergman, Lorre, and a dozen others who made this masterpiece come together despite the odds. You’ll walk a mile in the shoes of Dooley Wilson, watch refugees from Europe join the cast and weigh it down with loss and sadness, and learn how the Epsteins’ secretary saved the day at the very last moment. You will relive fateful months at the beginning of World War II, and you will understand for the first time exactly why we all love Casablanca so much—because of those who rose to a higher plane and brought it to the world.

Season of the Gods: A Novel, from GoodKnight Books.