Season of the Gods Epstein

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.)

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.