Joan Alison
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Joan Alison (1902 - 31 March 1992) co-wrote the play Everybody Comes to Rick's (with Murray Burnett), which was the basis for the movie Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
When Alison and Burnett failed to find a Broadway producer, they sold the play to Warner Brothers for $20,000. Warner Brothers handed the script to the screenwriters Howard Koch, Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, who changed the title to Casablanca.
Otherwise many items were tweaked from the original play! (There is the simple nuance of who signed the infamous "letters of transit". In the screen play it was the French Marshall Weygand (paired with the infamous Vichy regime), in the motion picture General Charles deGaulle.
Yet the foundation of the play remained intact ... site Casablanca; the tension between Major Strausser and Victor Lazlo; but Rick seems more benevolent in the screenplay than in the movie.
In reading the original play made available from the Arts Library of the University of California - Los Angeles, the shocker is the ending - "viva la difference" between what was offered in the screenplay - and the movie!"
Some dialogue was left out and added, the time sequence was changed a bit, and whereas the whole play takes place in Rick's bar, the movie has some scenes outside. There are two major changes of the characters. Fist there was that of Ilsa Laszlo, who was made more compatible with the Hays Code. In the film Ilsa hints that she and Victor are not married. (In the play she wasn't married to Victor Laszlo.) Even the song "As Time Goes By" came from Burnett's and Alison's play. But, again, it's the difference in the ending!
Burnett and Alison sued Warner Brothers when the television series based on Casablanca aired in 1983, but the courts decided that they had signed away all rights to their work. Finally, when they threatened not to renew their agreement with Warner Brothers when it would expire in 1997, they received $100,000 and the right to produce the original play.
In 1991 Everybody Comes to Rick's was produced by David Kelsey at The Whitehall Theatre in London. By that time Howard Koch, who was 89 years old, had changed his mind. In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, Koch admitted that Murray's and Alison's complaints about the lack of credit they received for their contribution to the film had been justified.
[edit] References
- Harmetz, Aljean. Round up the Usual Suspects: The Making of "Casablanca". Bogart, Bergman, and World War II, New York: Hyperion, 1992
- The Creator of Rick's Cafe Seeks Rights to 'Casablanca' Characters, New York Times, Oct 10, 1985
