Murray Burnett

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Murray Burnett (1911 - September 23, 1997) was a high school teacher and playwright from New York City. Burnett and Joan Alison wrote the play Everybody Comes to Rick's, which was the basis for the movie Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

In the summer of 1938, while on vacation from his job as English teacher at a vocational school, Murray and his wife Frances travelled to occupied Vienna to help Jewish relatives there, for the Nazis had occupied the city in March that year. Later, the couple visited a small town in the south of France, where they went to a nightclub overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. There a black pianist played jazz for a crowd of French, Nazis, and refugees. Burnett's experiences in Vienna inspired him to write a play in the summer of 1940 about a cynical bar owner of the Cafe Americain in Casablanca, Morocco named Rick. Eventually, Rick helps an idealistic Czech resistance fighter escape with the woman Rick loves.

When Burnett and Alison 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 and Philip Epstein, who changed the title to Casablanca. Otherwise fairly little was changed from the original play. Some dialogue was left out and added, the time sequence was changed a bit, and whereas the whole play takes place in Rick's cafe, the movie has some outdoor scenes. The only major change in the characters was that of Ilsa Lund, who was made more compatible with the Hays code. (In the play she wasn't married to Victor Laszlo.) In the film Ilsa hints that they were not married. Even the song "As Time Goes By" came from Burnett and Alison's play. The song, from 1931, had been Burnett's favorite when he was a student at Cornell. The café La Belle Aurore in Paris, where some of the film's most famous scenes take place, was based on the French nightclub that Murray and his first wife (Frances) had visited in 1938, where a black piano player inspired the character of Sam, played by Dooley Wilson. The real nightclub was on Cap Ferrat, on the French Riviera, and was called by the same name as was used in the film.

After the success of Casablanca, Warner Brothers and the three screenwriters downplayed the role of Everybody Comes to Rick's in creating the movie. Although Koch and the Epsteins received an Academy Award for best screenplay in 1943, very little recognition was given to Burnett and Alison. Even the leading actors seemed unaware of Everybody Comes to Rick's. In 1974, Ingrid Bergman said in an interview: "Casablanca based on a play? No, I don't think so ... for we didn't know how the movie would end". A year earlier, Howard Koch wrote in New York Magazine that Everybody Comes to Rick's provided an exotic locale and a character named Rick who ran a café but little in the way of a story adaptable to the screen. Burnett unsuccessfully sued for $6.5 million.

Burnett and Alison also 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 had been justified.

Burnett also wrote the play Hickory Street, based on his experiences as a teacher, which opened on Broadway in 1944. He wrote, produced, and directed many radio plays, including the 1952 ABC series Café Istanbul with Marlene Dietrich as Mlle. Madou. This show was transformed into Time for Love which ran for 38 episodes on CBS Radio in 1953.

Murray Burnett's second wife was actress Adrienne Bayan. They met when she had a role in Hickory Street. Burnett was the uncle of documentary director Barbara Kopple.

Burnett died on September 23, 1997 in New York City.

[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
Obituary: Murray Burnett, 86, Writer Of Play Behind 'Casablanca', New York Times, Sep 29, 1997.
Obituary: Murray Burnett, The Independent, Oct 15, 1997.
Pay it Sam, The Weekend Australian, Jan. 31, 1998.
Casablanca, DVD, Turner 1999 with Murray Burnett interview about Cap Ferrat