BW - EP140—005: Humphrey Bogart On The Air—Casablanca

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

In 1941, Warner Brothers story editor Irene Diamond was in New York when she discovered the script to an un-produced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s. She convinced Hal Wallis to buy the rights to the script in January of 1942 for twenty-thousand dollars. The project was renamed Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart was cast as Rick Blaine, an expatriate nightclub owner hiding from a suspicious past and negotiating a fine line among Nazis, the French underground, the Vichy prefect, and unresolved feelings for his ex-girlfriend. Ingrid Bergman was cast opposite Bogart with Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, and Dooley Wilson in supporting roles. Michael Curtiz directed. Principal photography began on May 25th, 1942. The film was shot entirely at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, California, with the exception of one sequence at Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles. As Ingrid Bergman mentioned in an interview with the CBC, no one involved with Casablanca’s production expected it to be good. It was rushed to take advantage of the publicity from the Allied invasion of North Africa and had its world premiere on November 26th, 1942, in New York City. It was nationally released on January 23rd, 1943. But Casablanca quickly became iconic. Many exiled and cause-sympathetic film actors appeared in cameos, including Helmut Dantine, Dan Seymour, Madeleine Lebeau, Frank Puglia, Jack Benny, Marcel Dalio, Leonid Kinskey, Torben Meyer, Ilka Grünig, Ludwig Stössel, and Wolfgang Zilzer. A witness to the filming of the "duel of the anthems" sequence said he saw many of the actors crying because they knew that they were all real-life refugees. The film was nominated for eight Oscars, including Bogart for best actor, and Casablanca won best picture, best direction, and best adapted screenplay at the 1943 Academy awards. On April 26th, 1943, six weeks after the awards, the Screen Guild Theater broadcast an adaptation of the film.