1923 Hat Wallis, producer of Casablanca, is hired by Warner Bros, as an assistant in the publicity department. Í93Í The song "As Time Goes By," written by Herman Hupfield, appears in the Broadway show Everybody's Welcome, 1938 High school teacher Murray Burnett visits Europe where he observes Nazi persecution, the plight of refugees, and a French bar with a black singer, all of which would become important elements of his play Everybody Comes to Rick's. Algiers, with Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer, is a hit. movie and establishes North Africa as an exotic locale for danger and romance. Later, a major inducement for the making of Casablanca is its repetition of many of the attractive elements in Algiers. 1940 Murray Burnett and Joan Alison write Everybody Comes to Rick's. 1941 The day after Pearl Harbor, Burnett and Alison's agent submits Everybody Comes to Rick's to Warner Bros, in Los Angeles. December 28. With the approval of producer Hal Wallis, Warner Bros, purchases Everybody Comes to Rick's for $20,000. December 31. Hal Wallis changes the title Everybody Comes to Rick's to Casablanca. 1942 Warner Bros, plants a fake story in the Hol- lywood Reporter announcing that Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan, and Dennis Morgan will play the leads in Casablanca. January. Humphrey Bogart signs a seven-year contract with Warner Bros., making him one of nineteen listed "stars" at the studio. January 9. Hal Wallis assigns Warner Bros, screenwriters Aeneas MacKcnzie and Wally Kline to write the first draft of the Casablanca script. April 2. Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros, studio, sends a memo to Hai Wallis suggesting George Raft for the part of Riek. The next day, Wallis sends Warner a memo telling Warner that the Casablanca script is being written for Humphrey Bogart. April 10. A Warner Bros, press release announces that Humphrey Bogart will play the lead in Casablanca opposite Michele Morgan. April 21. Ingrid Bergman is informed by Selznick International, the studio to which she is under contract, that she is being lent to Warner Bros, to play Ilsa Lund in Casablanca. May 25. Shooting on Casablanca begins. Michael Curtiz directs Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, and Dooley Wilson at La Belle Auroře Café in the Paris flashback sequence. May 25. Paul Henreid signs a seven-year contract with Warner Bros., which will include his role of Victor Laszlo in Casablanca. June 25. Paul Henreid's first scene is shot, a full month after the beginning of production. July 3. Bogart first says one of Casablanca's, most famous lines, "Here's looking at you, kid." July 17. Curtiz begins to shoot the final scenes at the airport. July 22. Bogart and Bergman begin playing the crucial scene at Rick's apartment. August 3. The last scheduled day of shooting. August 7. Hal Wallis sends a memo that includes Rick's final line, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." August 22. The last day of shooting. A French police officer reads a teletype announcing the murder of the two German couriers carrying the letters of transit. 46 If JACK NACHBAR mi RAY MERLOCK Odober. The Bureau of Motion Pictures (BM1), a government office charged with ensuring movies presented a correct image of America and the war, praises Casablanca for communicating appropriate wartime messages. November 7. The Allies invade North Africa and within a few days capture Casablanca. Warner Bros, takes advantage of this huge publicity opportunity and decides to move up the release of Casablanca from the originally planned spring 1943 date. November 26. On Thanksgiving Day, Casablanca premiers at the Hollywood Theatre in New York where it plays for ten weeks. Í943 January. The Office of War Information's (OWJ) Overseas Branch withholds Casablanca from distribution in North Africa because of the film's pro-Free French and anti-Vichy sentiments. U.S. policy at the time was still not clear on levels of support for these opposing French governments. January 14. The Casablanca Conference, a meeting between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, begins. The public announcement of this conference on January 24, the day after the general release of Casablanca, provides the film with its second major publicity tie-in. January 23. Casablanca goes into general release in the United States. March 20. "As Time Goes By" begins a twenty-one-week run on the top ten of the NBC radio show Your Hit Parade, including four weeks—April 24, May 8, 15, and 22—at number one. The lead male singer on the show during this period is Frank Sinatra. The most popular recorded version of the song is by Rudy Vallee. As Casablanca becomes a commercial hit during the early months of 1943, Warner Bros, considers making a sequel to be titled Brazzaville, but no script is ever written. April 3. Conrad Veidt (Major Strasser) dies at age fifty. April 26. Screen Guild Players on CBS radio presents a half-hour version of Casablanca with Bogart, Bergman, and Henreid. December. Warner Bros, announces that General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, has requested that Casablanca be shown to his staff in London. Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved. A Casablanca Chronology 47 The National Board of Review names Casablanca one of the top-ten films of 1943. 1944 January 5. Variety estimates that Casablanca is the seventh highest grossing Hollywood movie of 1943, returning $3,700,000 to Warner Bros. January 24. The Lux Radio Theatre on CBS radio presents an hour-long version of Casablanca with Alan Ladd as Rick, Hedy Lamarr as Ilsa, and John Loden as Victor. Lamarr had been Warner Bros.' original choice for Ilsa but at the time was not available. The Film Daily Yearbook, in a poll of 439 critics and writers, names Casablanca the fifth best movie of 1943, behind Random Harvest, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and This Is the Army. February 7. Casablanca is nominated for eight Academy Awards: Best Picture, Actor (Humphrey Bogart), Supporting Actor (Claude Rains), Director (Michael Curtiz), Screenplay (Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein and Howard Koch), Cinematography (Arthur Edeson), Music (Max Steiner), and Editing (Owen Marks). March 2. Casablanca wins three 1943 Oscars: Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay. In addition, producer Hal Wallis receives the Irving Thalberg Award. August. A Gallup Poll of moviegoers done for the film industry shows that Humphrey Bogart has the fifth highest approval rating of all Hollywood stars, up from eighteenth in April 1942. The same poll ranks Ingrid Bergman nineteenth, up from seventy-eighth in 1942. Warner Bros.' Passage to Marseilles attempts to reproduce the success of Casablanca by starring Bogart and featuring six other performers from Casablanca, as well as director Michael Curtiz and producer Hal Wallis. 1945 The script of Casablanca is published in The Best Film Plays of 1943^14, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols. There are significant differences between this published version and the actual film. A Man Called Jordan, a daily fifteen-minute serial on CBS radio, whose story location is Istanbul but whose situation is obviously modeled on Casablanca, begins a two-year run. Fall. Casablanca is released in Paris and does mediocre business. 1946 August 12. The play Everybody Comes to Rick's premiers on stage under the title Casablanca in Newport, Rhode Island. It runs one week. Casablanca is released in Germany, but the word "Nazi" is never spoken in the film. 1949 Warner Bros, re-releases Casablanca as part of a double-feature with "G" Men (1935). 1951 CBS radio resurrects A Man Called Jordan as a half-hour weekly series Rocky Jordan, with the Rick-like Jordan running the Café Tambourine in Cairo. The new show features George Raft, who had been Jack Warner's choice for Rick. The series is broadcast for only one season. Bogart's production company Santana tries to repeat the success of Casablanca in Sirocco, with a plot closely parallel to the earlier film and a similar exotic locale, Damascus. 1952 February 9. Philip G. Epstein, co-scriptwriter, dies at age forty-two. Murray Burnett creates Café Istanbul, a half-hour series on ABC radio. Marlene Dietrich plays Mile. Madou, a character apparently modeled on Rick Blaine. 1953 Dooley Wilson (Sam) dies at age fifty-nine. 1954 January 19. Sydney Greenstreet (Ferrari) dies at age seventy-four. 1955 S. Z. Sakall (Carl) dies at age seventy-one. Casablanca begins a one-year season on ABC television as a one-hour series starring Charles McGraw as Rick Jason and Clarence Muse as Sam. The show appears every three weeks as one of three rotating shows in the series called Warner Brothers Presents. 1957 January 14. Humphrey Bogart dies at age fifty-seven. April 21. Casablanca plays for the first time at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard University, initiating a cult both for Bogart and the film itself. 1959 In Jean Luc Godard's movie Breathless, the film that launched the French "New Wave," as an important development in international cinema, Jean-Paul Belmon-do salutes Bogart on-screen by imitating some of Bogart's gestures and whispering, "Bogie." 1962 April 11. Director Michael Curtiz dies at age seventy-three. 1964 February 7. Time magazine reports on "Bogey Worship" at the Brattle Theatre. Thousands of students attend regular Bogart film festivals and repeat lines from the films. Among the students' favorites is Casablanca. March 23. Peter Loire (Ugarte) dies at age fifty-nine. 1967 May 30. Claude Rains (Captain Renault) dies at age seventy-eight. 1969 Woody Allen's stage comedy Play It Again, Sam opens in New York. 1971 Max Steiner (film score) dies at age eighty-three. 1972 The film version of Play It Again, Sam begins with the airport scene from Casablanca and ends with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton repeating it. 1973 August 25. The Los Angeles Times reports that in a nationwide poll it commissioned, Casablanca is "Warner Brothers' most popular film in fifty years." The international Motion Picture Almanac includes Casablanca for the first time in its annual list of "The Great Hundred" motion pictures. 1974 RCA releases the LP Casablanca: Classic Film Scores for Humphrey Bogart, by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, featuring an 8M-minute "Casablanca Suite" based on Max Steiner's film score. As part of Avon's Film Classics Library, Richard J. Anobile edits a frame-by-frame re-creation of Casablanca in book form. 1977 A TV Guide poll of TV station program directors from all parts of the United States names Casablanca the most popular and most often shown movie on television. November. After polling its membership, the American Film Institute announces that Casablanca has been voted the third greatest American film of all time, behind Gone with the Wind (1939) and Citizen Karce (1941). 1978 Casey Robinson (uncredited co-scriptwriter) dies at age seventy-six. September 9. Jack L. Warner dies at age eighty-six. 1980 You Must Remember This: The Filming of Casablanca, by Robert Francisco, is the first of several book-length histories of the production of Casablanca. Caboblanco is a blatant imitation of Casablanca in both title and plotline, with Charles Bronson as the sullen owner of a nightclub on the coast of Peru. Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved. 48 JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television 1981 Bertie Wiggins's hit single "Key Largo," a song about the ideal love between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacali, includes several references to Casablanca. May 20. A television special Muppets Go to the Movies: Play It Again includes a parody of the airport scene in Casablanca, with Kermit the Frog as Rick and Miss Piggy as Esa. November 15. Harry Reasoner narrates a segment of the CBS television show 60 Minutes devoted to Casablanca entitled "The Best Movie Ever Made." 1982 In a well-known hoax, Chuck Ross mails the script of Casablanca under the title of Everybody Comes to Rick's to over two hundred agents. Of the eighty-five who respond, thirty-eight reject it as an unworthy film project, and only thirty-three recognize it. Ingrid Bergman dies at age sixty-seven. 1983 April 10. A second attempt at a Casablanca TV series, this time an hour-long version on NBC featuring David Soul as Rick, is canceled after only three episodes. Joseph Biroc wins an Emmy for outstanding cinematography. The British Film Institute votes Casablanca the greatest film ever made. 1984 CBC/Fox copyrights a videocassette black-and-white version of Casablanca for public sale. 1985 January. Robert Coover's short story in Playboy "You Must Remember This" is mainly a long, explicit, sex scene between Rick and Ilsa. The story is reprinted in 1987 in Coover's book A Night at the Movies. In his novel Suspects, David Thomson imagines the post-movie lives of eighty-five characters, including Rick, Ilsa, and Victor. 1986 Producer Hal Wallis dies at age eighty-six. March 25. The Turner Broadcasting System pays $1.2 billion dollars for the MGM studio along with its 3,500-title MGM, RKO, and pre-1950 Warner Bros, film and television library, including Casablanca. May 13. The opening of the Smithsonian's exhibit "Hollywood: Legend and Reality" features Sam's piano and other props from Rick's Café Americain and the film's production. July. Billboard magazine's weekly chart of the best-selling videocassettes lists Casablanca as number four, its highest position. 1987 A poll of 113 film critics and historians taken for the Hollywood Centennial names Casablanca the third greatest American movie of all time, behind Citizen Kane and Gone with the Wind. May 30. Billboard reports that from 1983 to 1987 Casablanca is the fifth best-selling videocassette "classic" as determined by Billboard's weekly charts. 1988 In John Kobal's book The Top 100 Movies, a panel of film experts from twenty-two countries selects Casablanca ninth on the list, just behind The Gold Rush (1925) and one ahead of Rashomon (1951). March 14. The popular ABC television comedy-detective show Moonlighting presents a full-hour parody of Casablanca. November 9. The colorized Casablanca premiers on Ted Turner's cable Superstation TBS. December 16. Sam's piano is sold at auction to a Japanese trading company for $154,000, at the time the second largest sum ever paid for a piece of movie memorabilia (the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz were auctioned off for $165,000 the same year). 1989 The romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally elaborately compares the relationship between Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan to that of Rick and Ilsa. November. Casablanca is among the first twenty-five movies to be named to the National Film Registry. 1990 The movie Havana, set in revolutionary Cuba in 1958, closely parallels the characters and plot of Casablanca. Robert Redford, Lena Olin, and Raul Julia play updated equivalents of Rick, Ilsa, and Victor. 1991 April. Murray Burnett combines his play Everybody Comes to Rick's and the movie Casablanca into a new drama, Rick's Bar Casablanca, which opens for a one-month run in London's West End. 1992 March 29. Paul Henreid dies at age eighty-four. March 30. Joan Alison, co-author of Everybody Comes to Rick's, dies. April. The beginning of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the original release of Casablanca. Several books are published, the film goes into limited re-release, and a new videotape of the film hits the top-ten bestseller lists with sales of half a million copies. The Casablanca Cookbook: Wining and Dining at Rick's by Sarah Key, Jennifer Newman Brazil, and Vicki Wells features such recipes as "Yvonne's Spicy Tomato Rolls," "Ugarte's Tangy Chicken Wings," and "Rick and Ilsa's Apricot Pistachio Cake." 1993 January. Casablanca, Morocco, celebrates the semi-centennial of the release of the movie Casablanca and the Casablanca Conference of World War II. 1994 In the Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made, the editors select Casablanca as the fifth greatest drama. 1995 A Warner Bros, cartoon Carrotblanca parodies Casablanca and features Bugs Bunny as Rick. Co-scriptwriter Howard Koch dies at age ninety-two. 1996 The futuristic action film Barb Wire recycles the plot of Casablanca with the buxom Pamela Anderson Lee in the Rick role. 1997 Murray Burnett, co-author of the play Everybody Comes to Rick's, dies at age eighty-seven. 1998 A novel by Michael Walsh, As Time Goes By, is a sequel to Casablanca. Its public reception is disappointing. June. A poll of 1,500 film industry professionals, film historians and critics, and a few politicians, conducted by the American Film Institute to name the one hundred greatest American films, ranks Casablanca second, behind only Citizen Kane. 1999 Tens of thousands of people who are regular voters at the Internet Movie Database, in a monthly updating of its Top 25 Movies list, consistently place Casablanca in the top ten. June. An American Film Institute poll to select the fifty greatest "Screen Legends" names Ingrid Bergman the fourth greatest woman star and Humphrey Bogart the number one male star. Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.