The Extras - Here's Looking at You, Casablanca!

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

Warner Bros George Feltenstein and author Alan K. Rode lead us in a nostalgic discussion of the legacy of "Casablanca."Our discussion begins with a personal look at the impact this film has had on each of our guests over the years.  Then Alan K. Rode, author of "Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film" takes us on a review of the origins of the film, including the purchase of the unpublished play "Everybody Comes to Rick's"  by producer Hal Wallis.  The discussion continues with insights into the various writers, the direction of Michael Curtiz, and the relationship between Hal Wallis and studio head Jack Warner.  George Feltenstein also details some of the remastering work done on the picture and sound for the new 4K release.  Our discussion finishes with a review of the music and the score by Max Steiner, and a detailed look at the impact of the film on the legacies of director Michael Curtiz and actors Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.Alan K. Rode websitePurchase Casablanca 4KThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify Warner Archive Store on Amazon Support the podcast by shopping with our Amazon Affiliate linkDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. And today I welcome back on the show two favorites of the listeners of The Extras

to talk about one of the most beloved films of all time, 1942's Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund, Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo, and Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault. The film was directed by Michael Curtiz with music by Max Steiner. It won the 1942 Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director for Michael Curtiz, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is number two on AFI's

list of the top 100 films of all time, and is on almost everyone's list of top films of all time. In 1989, it was one of the first films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. And I can't think of two better guests to have on the podcast to talk about Casablanca than George Feltenstein and Alan K. Rohde. For listeners new to the show,

George Feltenstein has spent a career in classic film marketing, starting at MGM-UA, then Turner, and eventually Warner Brothers. Since its inception in 2009, he has been the guiding force behind the Warner Archive, the in-house boutique label which focuses on classic and cult films from the Warner Brothers Film Library. Alan K. Rohde is a film historian, cinema impresario, and as the author of Michael Curtiz's Life in Film, he is acknowledged as one of the foremost authorities on the films of Michael Curtiz.

Well, hi, George. Hi, Alan. Thank you both for coming on the podcast today to talk about Casablanca. Great to be here. What a pleasure it is. It's great to be the three of us here together again. Yeah. So couldn't be better. I mean, it's been about a year since the three of us were on talking. What was it we're talking? We're talking. Of course. How can we forget? Actually, with George and I on, it became a tour de horizon of Michael Curtiz and Warner Brothers.

And I think you ended up making two shows out of that, correct? It's true. That's true. Because I was like, well, we're going to talk about Angels with Dirty Faces, but then the tangents you guys went on were so interesting and people loved that episode just as much as the first one, if you can believe that, because you dabbled into so many great films, Robin Hood, Captain Blood. I mean, you guys touched on so many great ones there.

So I'm sure this is going to be another fan favorite because how could you not love hearing a podcast about a movie as great as Casablanca and this upcoming 4K release? But before we kind of get into that, I thought I would throw you guys a pitch a little bit out of left field here. And let's start with you, George.

But do you recall when you first saw this film and it became special to you? Absolutely. I think I was about either eight or nine because that's when my family had moved from an apartment to a house. And I knew about the film because I was reading film history books

from the time I was five, but I had never seen it. And it was on the local Metro media station in New York City, Channel 5, and it was always promoted very heavily because it was so popular. And I knew it was one of the greatest films ever made. And my experience of it was I couldn't wait to see it again. But I had to wait to see it again because there was no way you could satiate your hunger to see something again. When it had been on television, you just have to wait for the next time. That was back when, what, back in, when would that be roughly, George?

Talking about like around 1970, 71, somewhere around there. So, I mean, the only time you got to see it was when they replayed it on TV because it wasn't in theaters, was it? Well, Constant Blunt was always running in revival theaters in New York City constantly. But this was a little before I was taking my secret trips on the train into Manhattan to see movies without my parents' knowledge, which I got in a lot of trouble for. But, you know, to have your kid run away to go to the Museum of Modern Art, you know, a terrible thing. But New York was extremely dangerous at that time. And I would never want my little kid going on a train, you know. Right.

I saw an awful lot of good movies that way until I got caught. My experience with Casablanca was similar to that, except I have to date myself and go back into the 1960s. And again, I saw it on because I grew up in New Jersey like George watching movies. I came from a movie family. My mother was born in Hollywood 100 years ago this year. So we watched we all watched Casablanca on Channel 5, WNEW, because they had all the Warner Brothers films, and Channel 9 had all the RKO films, and each channel had their own kind of franchise on television releases and saw it. But then it was

a long time, although Casablanca, as George said, did play in all the revival houses, in fact, in the late 50s, what I would call the Bogart cult began by showing Casablanca and some of his other films in theaters around Boston and so forth in the late 1950s. And Casablanca became the franchise, the gift that keeps on giving long after it was made and after Humphrey Bogart sadly passed away in 1957. So I think it's been a part of all our lives. Yeah. To that point, throw yourself ahead many decades. But when i started working with the film in my early days at mgmua on video when they had the rights we were planning casablanca new 35 millimeter print running at the Chinese Theater on the weekend of, I believe it was February 14th, 1992. And I had asked the Turner people to please not show the movie on television, especially since they were the ultimate recipient of most of the money we were distributing for that. And the day that the movie opened, it was running on WTBS. And I was so upset because I said, oh, my God, we're counting on people going to the theater.

upset because I said, oh, my God, we're counting on people going to the theater. Well, I need not be upset because it rose somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 over the weekend. 30 years ago, virtually every show was sold out. And this is before the Chinese had become a multiplex. It was just the one theater when the box office was still in the front of the footprints. And it was tremendously successful. And that was in February of the year. And then we had the big video release more toward the fall.

So during those subsequent six months, the new prints traveled around the country to repertory theaters. But being in the Chinese, being in a first class house, that was very, very exciting. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The Extras Podcast. And I wanted to let you know that we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers catalog physical media releases. So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. Well, I mean, this has to be one of the most beloved films. And obviously we know that it's like been ranked as high, you know, like number two on the AFI top 100, but it's perennially up there in terms of

most beloved or best films in film history. But if we go back a little bit to the beginning days, Alan, I mean, what's a little bit of the story about the origins of the film and how it got together? I mean, this is the era when Warner Brothers was cranking out movies just, you know, every week, so to speak. And it was not necessarily a special movie or anything, but it does have a pretty interesting provenance. It does. And I think to begin with that bit of history, I'll go to a Hal Wallace quote from 1975 when he was wrapping up his final movie with Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne and was at an AFI seminar. And when asked about Casablanca, he said, we just started out to make a good movie. We had no idea it would become a classic. And they didn't, and nobody did. But what's interesting

is historically, on December 8th, 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor attack and Roosevelt made his speech and asked for a declaration of war of America against Japan and got it, that day, production started on Yankee Doodle Dandy. And that same day, a Warner Brothers story analyst named Stephen Carnot read the play Everybody Comes to Ricks that Hal Wallace had purchased. And he sent a summary and a detailed 22-page synopsis to Wallace three days later. And he said, excellent melodrama, colorful, timely background, tense mood, suspense, psychological and physical conflict, tight plotting, sophisticated hokum, a box office natural for Bogart or Cagney or Raft in out-of-usual roles, and perhaps Mary Astor.

So the Warner Brothers story editor realized that they had something good. And as I wrote in my biography, Michael Curtiz, A Life in Film, when something great happens, particularly in the entertainment or the movie business, the cue forms to take post credit on who birthed this wonderful child that has brung us so much bounty and so forth. And that at the head of the line was Jack Warner and Hal Wallace, each elbowing each other, trying to take credit for it, along with a host of others. But my research indicates it was Wallace's story editor and factotum, Irene Lee, that really hipped him to this, the play, unproduced play that Wallace bought for $20,000 written by Murray Burnett and Joan Allison. And from there, she claimed that, well, I assigned it to the Epstein brothers to write, which I think is specious because no one assigned Hal Wallace's pictures to writers other than

Hal Wallace. She might well have recommended that. But it went on from there. And, you know, there's another claim by Casey Robinson that he recommended the play to Hal Wallace on a Pullman train. They were going someplace. But I really, I put more credence in the Irene Lee story. put more credence in the Irene Lee story. And I think the thing that makes Casablanca, the creation of it, I think unusual is that Hal Wallace, as he learned from Daryl Zanuck before

relieving him as head of production at Warner Brothers in 1933, Wallace always tried to start a picture with a completed script. And in the case of Casablanca, that certainly did not come close to happening. But yet it was a picture that everyone involved tried to make better to the last possible instance. And I think it was kind of a serendipitous moment where all the great things that sustained Warner Brothers and Hollywood during the war, during the 1940s, just came together with great direction by Curtiz, perfect casting. Everything just worked on that picture and made it special. And obviously, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's my thumbnail on it.

George, this is the era, this is the golden era of Warner brothers of Hollywood. Take us back a little bit to, you know, Warner brothers at that time and how Wallace, what kind of movies were they putting out and, and what were they kind of known for and is, did this fit their mold? This was actually, I would say one of the, I guess that year they released, I think, 30 movies.

This is just another one of the 30 movies that Warner Brothers was putting out that year. It was not theoretically anything special. anything special. It was all contract players until they decided to borrow Ingrid Bergman from David O. Selznick. She was under personal contract because I think they realized as they were working on it that they had something special. But the whole way it came together, and I think that Alan can extrapolate on this even further, but as they were continuing to work on it, it developed into something special. And it's famous for the fact that they didn't quite know how the proper way to resolve the character's love triangle would be figured out. And they eventually did figure it out.

George is exactly right. And I think the other thing that's key is Wallace's status at the studio had changed. And he had been so successful and so essential to Warner's success that he had signed a new contract on January 1942. And his new contract specified that although it would always be a Warner movie, it was now a Hal Wallace production. And he got his new contract, gave him access supposedly to first cut on talent and writers and all this other stuff. And he got more money and points on the gross profits and so on and so forth. although Wallace believed at the time that this was his due reward for over a decade of toil at Warner Brothers. What it did is it spelled the beginning of the end of his relationship with Jack Warner, because Jack gave him a lot of leeway as far as making pictures. But of course, Jack was a guy that was very prideful of he and his brother's name. And the stories are legion. When people would quarrel with him, he'd point to the water tower and say, whose name is on the water tower?

And those who encroached on Warner's sensibility or their perception of who was responsible for their pictures did so at their peril. And so this was the beginning of the end of the long, fruitful Wallace-Warner relationship. But having said that, he had the Epsteins work on the script, the two Epstein brothers, the two twins began work on the script. And Wallace originally wanted to get William Wyler to do this film. And that was a cautionary tale because Wyler had made the letter in 1940, and he drove Jack Warner and Wallace nuts with the endless takes and the amount of exposed film. And you didn't do that at Warner Brothers. But you couldn't argue with Wyler's results as a film director. Wyler's results as a film director. And Wyler turned it down. And then there was a discussion over perhaps William Keeley or Vince Sherman. But Wallace and Curtiz had become very, very close,

as well as associates, had become close friends. They rode horses together. And they were both totally absorbed in Warner Brothers and the movie making process. So Wallace gave the film to Curtiz and it started from there. And it ended up with a number of writers working on it. But it was basically Howard Koch and it was the Epsteins. And then Casey Robinson came along because he wrote a long memo to Wallace at one point and said, you know, you don't have any background on the love story. Why is Bogart's character, why is Rick Blaine going through all this angst over Ilsa Ingrid Bergman? It doesn't make any sense. You have no background. And Curtiz raised the same issue. And Curtiz raised the same issue. So that was when they put in the flashback of the love story in Paris, you know, the beautiful line about the Germans wore gray to handle that. And they finally thrashed it out. I mean, first off, there was no way I know Bergman has said, well, I didn't know who

I was going to go away with. Well, she might not have known that, but everyone else knew that you were not going to get past the censor's office, leaving your noble husband to go off with your saloon keeper lover out of wedlock. That wasn't going to happen. I think it was much more interesting the way that she portrayed that, you know, as a much more fascinating conclusion, when in fact it really wasn't true. Yeah, exactly. And they didn't want to kill off Paul Henry as Victor Laszlo because that would kick the guts out of it totally. So they ended up tying it to the war, which was the overarching narrative of the film, the overarching moral narrative. And, you know, Bogart's speech at the end, you know, I have things to do,

you're there, his cause, you're what he lives for, and all of that. And that really gave, in my opinion, it gave the movie a higher purpose and a sense of nobility, I think, that elevates it. I had a friend of mine, the late Stanley Rubin, say, you know how you can tell if someone's got good quality or you're in love with a woman? Do they cry at the end of Casablanca became more about a movie. It was more than a movie, a love story, Bogart, Bergman, all of that. It became what it meant to be living in 1942, 1943, and being on the right side. It was very clear what was right and what was wrong in the world at that time. And Casablanca, that was clearly on the right side of history and on the right side of what the United States was doing and on the right side of morality. And I think even though it's so

many years later, that sense of rightness and truth and morality still elevates the film to a higher level. And I'm sad to say that it's more relevant now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, because I don't think we were as worried about fascism making a return 20, 30 years ago as we are now. That's a scary time. I couldn't agree more. And we're now, we're looking at history in a certain way for those who are familiar with history, that we're seeing things come full circle. We're seeing not only world events, George, but we're seeing the movie industry that got broken up in the next decade due to the antitrust agreement. And now we're seeing the movie industry come full circle again with ownership and monopolistic and all of this stuff. So we're seeing history in many ways kind of repeat itself.

And I think you're absolutely right. Casablanca now is more meaningful now than it was 30 years ago, no doubt. Well, because the thing is, we're seeing now in other places of the world, people who are struggling to escape torture and death. And that's happening across the globe right now. That's true. And the danger of the power hungry, evil people, how that can spread. Absolutely. And one of the interesting things about that I discovered about Casablanca was that the scenes in Rick's Cafe with all the little character vernetts, Ludwig Stussel and Mr. Leuchtag and what watch, what time? And all of those people were, for the most part, those actors were Jewish refugees. And they were cast by

Curtis, who grew up under an emperor and was trying to get his family, the rest of his family, out of Hungary and sadly lost a good portion of his family to the Holocaust in 1944 in Hungary. So this was very real. And I remember the actor that played the doorman outside of the gambling den was this great actor called Dan Seymour. And Seymour said when he was there for the La Marseille scene with Paul Henry saying, play it. And then they cut to Bogart who nods his head and they sing it. And you see the tears. And Seymour said, I realized that the tears that the actors and the extras had were genuine. This was real. This was a real emotion, a genuine emotion, because it was real to those people.

And now here we are back again with the same type of situation. And we're talking about the show is called The Extras, and Tim primarily often discusses special features and extras that are on video releases. And long before the arrival of the DVD, we were involved in a special video cassette and laser disc edition of Casablanca for its 50th. And I was one of the people involved in creating a making of Casablanca documentary that Lauren Bacall hosted. And one of the people interviewed for that documentary was one of the few surviving cast members at the time

of Costa Blanca, namely Dan Seymour. He was still alive in 1992. And I think he passed away shortly thereafter. Yeah, he was an interesting fellow because he became the executor of Fritz Lang's estate. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, if you watch Fritz Lang's movies, you'll see Dan Seymour show up regularly. They were very close. And when Lang was near the end and would appear at all these film festivals, he was virtually blind and Dan Seymour would be his escort and take him there. So they were close and whatnot. But yeah, is that featurette on the new 4K release at all? Well, the 4K disc will come with the Blu-rays that were previously created for the 70th anniversary. So I'm thinking depending on what has been

carried over, because I'm not actually involved in that process on every title. So I don't know if it's there. I hope it's there. I know right now, if you go to iTunes and you buy or rent the movie there, all the extras are on iTunes Extras. Okay. And that original documentary with

Bacall and Dan Seymour is on there. Along with what we did was actually, we updated the documentary. We brought Lauren Bacall back to do additional narration and additional scenes. And I think that was for the 60th anniversary. And when we did a two disc DVD and by then Dan Seymour had long passed away. But that was actually a documentary that got expanded and updated.

That's great. And I just I just recently watched that because I have that two disc DVD. That's the one. Yeah. And it is really good. It just it just goes through so much of the detail that you guys were talking about. George, I think you also repeated, I think it was the 70th anniversary, I was involved in a featurette with Michael Curtiz, the greatest director you never heard of.

Right. And I think that... That was my wish, that that film be made. That was your baby, yeah. And I had not finished my book. And I think I showed up on that through the auspices of my late and dear friend, Rudy Belmer, who said, you need to get this roadie guy. He knows all about Mike Curtiz. And so he put me on there. And my mother was still alive. And she had read or someone told her something.

Alan's in this documentary with William Friedkin and Steven Spielberg. So my mother called me and said, what did you and Steven Spielberg talk about? And I said, Mom, it doesn't work like that. We weren't on a set together. We didn't go out and have a drink. It doesn't work like that. But I did have I did have a lot of fun doing that with Gary Leyva, I believe, that shot that. legitimately on a video cassette right i think you know around 80 81 when the united artists film started coming out through magnetic video right before magnetic video got bought by 20th century fox right and then when that deal ended the rights reverted back to mgA. via the Turner. It was very complicated. But finally, in 1996, the pre-49 Warner Brothers Library returned to Warner Brothers ownership after 40 years of wandering the desert. And so we celebrated that by restoring the film. restoring the film. And since then, it has been upgraded and remastered, I think about four times. And what we're dealing with now with the new 4K HDR presentation, I mean, I've been through so

many iterations of this. And each time it gets better and better. But this time it is, you just can't believe you're looking at an 80-year-old movie. And very often I say, well, how is 4K HDR really going to enhance an 80-year-old black and white movie? Well, it does. And that's been proven by other films from other studios as well. If they're done right, the results are really magnificent. And thankfully, unlike previous transfers, there were actually some parts of our source element that were a little inferior to the rest of the element. So we actually borrowed a few shots from the studio's nitrate answer print, which is at UCLA.

It doesn't circulate, of course, but it's in beautiful condition. You can't tell when it switches, but this made it possible for there to be absolutely no deficiencies in any way as far as the picture or the audio. And the audio is beautiful, crisp mono. There's nothing to fiddle with there. You can't make it 5.1. You could, but that would be stupid, frankly. It was a monaural

film. There are no multi-tracks to make it anything other than it was the way it was made. There have been no enhancements here. I had to, early in my home video career, go through the humiliation

of watching the company be forced to release colorized Casablanca. Thank you, Ted Turner and his crayons. And I'm happy to say that the colorized version of Casablanca was an abject failure in the marketplace. Nobody wanted to see Casablanca in color. Black and white movies outsold the colorized when we were forced to sell the colorized. Black and white outsold the colorized four to one. Yeah. It's one thing to colorize a movie like House on Haunted Hill. Oh, sure. But it's another thing to try to colorize Casablanca. Casablanca, colorizing Casablanca is like original sin.

I think it's sacrilegious. It is, in fact, the furor over the bastardization of colorization that led to the development of the National Film Registry and the National Film Preservation Foundation because Congress put through the legislation to the National Film Registry to protect our film heritage. And the National Film Registry doesn't just protect hollywood movies it protects all sorts of films last year the registry has been around i think 30 years now last year pink flamingos was introduced into the national film registry because it's not about Hollywood films. It's about all sorts of film, both fiction and nonfiction, that need to be preserved to show what the first hundred plus years of film led to. footage of a flood and footage of a protest and experimental filmmaking. And of course,

Hollywood classics probably make up 80% of it, but it's, it's a diverse group of films and that's why film preservation is so important. But what Warner brothers, uh, home entertainment has done with this 4k upgrade of Casablanca, uh, Home Entertainment has done with this 4K upgrade of Casablanca. It is mostly a remaster,

but there has been some reconstruction work done in little places, but I would not promote it as a reconstruction or restoration, given what Herculean work has gone into true restorations. But this is a quantum leap improvement. We're going from four stars to five. It's just sparkling. And I think it probably looks as good, if not possibly even better, and sounds as good, if not better than it ever has before, including when it opened. That has to deal with the tools that we now have. And also the fact that we're very careful to not introduce anything into the image that wasn't meant to be there.

There to begin with, yeah. But HDR lights up parts of the image that you never would light up before. You know, one of the things about Casablanca is because it is so timeless and famous that there's been a number of myths that have come up about it. And one of those myths is the casting where, oh, George Raft was going to be cast in the lead. And then Ronald Reagan was going to be. And that is completely erroneous. Although, you know, back in the day when the Hollywood Reporter and Variety were having a bad day and the Warner publicity department didn't have anything, they'd let these trial balloons go on so-and-so as being considered for such-and-such movie when such was not the case. But one of the more interesting letters I came across in the Warner archives was a letter by Hal Wallace to Jack Warner.

Jack Warner wrote him a letter saying, George Raft is kind of asking about Casablanca and so on. What do you think? And Wallace's reply was barely polite. Jack Warner said, this picture, Casablanca, has been developed specifically for Humphrey Bogart. Curtiz and I have discussed it. Raft is all wrong for the picture. And then he pushed a button on Warner because he knew Warner, because Raft had a reputation for turning stuff down. And if there was anything that got Jack Warner excited in the wrong way was someone under contract who was being paid for not being in a movie. He hated that. And so Wallace told him, you know, Raft hasn't been in a He knew exactly what button to push on that. And from

that time, there wasn't another memo from Jack Warner about anything having to do with Casablanca. It was really Hal Wallace's picture and Curtiz's picture. And Curtiz historically always gave credit to Casablanca to Hal Wallace. Because if you read through all the production memos, Wallace was so intimately involved in every detail of the production, including putting the parrot outside Sydney Green Street's Blue Parrot Cafe, how he wanted Arthur Edison to photograph stuff. Very, very, Wallace was a producer in the full meaning of that word. Very, very detailed and so forth. And I mean, he was responsible for what I consider to be the real golden years.

Yes. Of Warner Brothers at its peak. Yep. It's really the 1930 to 50 period. Yeah. It's called the golden age of Hollywood. Right. Well, it's really that period between, let's say, 38 and 42, where it's just this unbelievable cascade of great movies.

Oh, yeah. And half of them directed by Michael Curtiz, of course. movies oh yeah and half of them directed by michael curtis of course but how wallace was you know he had assumed the role that zanuck had previously of being like the you know the thalberg to warner's uh exactly exactly exactly and the pictures made under Hal Wallace, they're among the very best that ever came out of Hollywood, no less Warner Brothers. Absolutely. He was incredibly talented. And it was the fact that Jack Warner famously went up on the stage and took the Oscar for best picture that was supposed to be given to Hal Wallace that led to Wallace leaving the studio. You're right.

But that was the straw that broke the camel's back. There was much more before that. Relationship was deteriorating. Jack Warner's behavior to Hal Wallace, I compared it to the little boy who doesn't get picked to play on the baseball team. Sure. And Wallace was the star. And there was that. compared it to the little boy who doesn't get picked to play on the baseball team. And Wallace was the star. And there was that. And then Wallace, quite frankly, his ego and appetite for publicity had grown concurrently. And the thing, Wallace had a contract that specified first access to talent. And in his opinion, Jack Warner wasn't living up to that. And a classic example

was he wanted James Wong Howe to shoot Casablanca. And he didn't get him because Jimmy Howe had been assigned by the studio manager to shoot The Hard Way. And the studio manager wasn't going to move him. And there was nothing even Wallace could do about that. So they used Arthur Edison, who was a great cinematographer. The photography is fabulous in Casablanca. But it just goes to show you as successful and as powerful as Hal Wallace was, he did not have contractual final say over who was going to be in his movies, despite all his success. The Extras is a production of Otaku Media, producers of podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras,

and media that connects creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals at www.otakumedia.tv or look for the link in the show notes. You know, as a time note on how things have changed, I think Casablanca cost maybe about $1.2 million, something like that. maybe about $1.2 million, something like that. And the price got upped due to basically the cost of the actors borrowing Bergman, keeping Sydney Green Street on for an extra week. Curtiz filibustered Wallace into paying Cuddles Zekal the money that he wanted because his old music call friend from Hungary,

Kurtis Nuzakal from way back in the day, when his name was Jacob Giro working in Hungarian music halls, and he filibustered Wallace because he knew Zekal's humor would add so much to the film, which it did. And another exile courtesy of Hitler. Another exile from Hitler. So $1.2 million. And in 2014, Dooley Wilson, Sam's piano, sold for $3.4 million at auction. So almost the piano sold for almost triple the cost of the movie. So that gives you some perspective on the value of money in 1942 versus nowadays. I don't know what they go for now, but I'm assuming if someone has an original one sheet, Casablanca, U.S., probably North 50, 75, even 100,000.

Oh, no, it's probably, it's closer. I think now it would be closer to 200,000. As someone who collects posters, you know, some of my posters, I don't have an awesome collection, but I have some nice stuff. And some of the stuff that I bought, some of the books that I bought. I recently went to an antiquarian book fair, and they had a first edition of the Maltese Falcon with a facsimile jacket selling for $4,000. And I got my copy for $800, so I feel like I made out.

But yeah, it's the memorabilia thing. The bottom fell out on most of that stuff. Pardon? But the bottom of the market fell out the last recession. But the thing is if you had

the prime titles and the prime posters, you know a lot of things went way down in value but the great classic films the Casablanca, the King Kong the early horror films

the early horror films yeah because of the paper drives during the war so many of the posters were just used for the paper drives. So they're harder to find. But we're going up on a tangent here. Yeah, we are.

And one thing I would like to give Jack Warner credit for, because I think a lot of my comments about him were more of a negative vein, is when the film was premiered, Hal Wallace wanted to do some changes to it. And they had a, I guess they had a sneak preview and a premiere, and Selznick wrote them this telegram saying how wonderful it was, and Mike Cortese's direction was splendid, and everything was wonderful. And then they wanted to change it. And Jack Warner said, absolutely not. If we fool with it now, it'll look like a patch job. Leave it alone. And for all of Jack Warner's bluster and his faults, he did have an instinctive knowledge of what would work with an audience and could kind of smell a good picture. He absolutely did. He did. And, I mean, he was the one.

Hal Wallace was going to change the title from the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon to The Gent from Frisco, if you can imagine such a thing. And Warner said, no, don't do that. Leave it. The Maltese Falcon, that's the name of Hammett's book. That's the title of the movie. Leave it. The Maltese Falcon. That's the name of Hammett's book. That's the title of the movie. Leave it alone. Plus, he remembered being burnt the Warners and they all put their legs out to block him from going to the stage. So Jack Warner ran up and took the Oscar

from Jack Benny, who was the host of that ceremony. And I believe that was in 1944 and did that. When Jack finally left the studio and he had sold it two, three years before, but he was still here. And when he finally left and the new management that Steve Ross at Guinea had brought in, that Ashley was running the studio, it was the end of 1969. And in the audience was Hal Wallace. So they had obviously mended fences by then. Yeah. Although I will say Jack's very fanciful memoir, My First Thousand Years in Hollywood, that I have a signed copy of, by the way, from him. The name Hal Wallace does not appear once in that entire book. That's surprising. A lot of people have called that book, you know, fiction.

Yeah. It is highly fictional, going back to where both he and Wallace told this story of Mike Curtiz's arrival on July 4th, 1926, and his ocean liner was coming from France and came into New York and the Hudson River and all these fireworks are going off and so forth. And Curtiz was supposedly met on the pier by Harry Warner, and Curtiz was in tears saying, you did all this for me? And it was the 4th of July, which was a great story. Unfortunately, he got there two weeks prior to that. There was no fireworks. There was no parade. Harry Warner was out of town, but it made a great story. And I think it got repeated so many times that Curtiz himself came to believe it, but it wasn't true. Well, you guys have talked about the importance of Hal Wallace, Jack Warner, the script, Michael Curtiz. But one thing we haven't really talked about, and I think why so many fans love this movie, well, there's two things. Well,

one is the chemistry between the two lead actors. And the other thing I want to bring up is the music. And yet the Oscars went for, you know, the trifecta of the Oscar, the best picture, best director and best script. That obviously shows the importance of the film itself. But the actors didn't win. The music didn't win.

But I think that is a long lasting reason for this being such a beloved film. Would you agree? I don't believe that they were even nominated. I think Bogart was nominated, wasn't he? I'm not sure. We should check that. Let me check that. I thought he was nominated. But I mean, the beautiful shots, the close-ups. Oh, my God. I mean, their performances. I think that is without question one of his best performances. Yeah.

Not just through his dialogue, but also his facial expressions. He was so great. Bogart was nominated for Best Actor for Casablanca. He was. He was nominated. I wasn't sure of that. Yeah, but he, you're right, the close-ups, the expression, and the whole character of Rick, the world-weary thing, and how it balanced out between his broken heart, his love for Elsa, and then his patriotism. You know, you ran guns to Ethiopia. You did all of these very patriotic, democratic things. And that was Howard Koch's writing.

And that's very strange because then he lost out to Paul Lucas in Watch on the Rhine. Yeah, that's right. Which is very... Weird. It's strange. Very weird. It's wonderful in Watch on the Rhine. Yeah.

But it's not exactly a performance that people think about. And, you know, how quizzical. Unless it was patriotism or... I don't really get that. But I do think Casablanca, Bogart was already a star with High Sierra, the Maltese Falcon, and I believe all through the night. He was already a star. But Casablanca consecrated him as a romantic leading man. Oh, yeah. That began his golden period.

That's right. He had never been a romantic lead. And he spent 10 years at Warner Brothers, usually getting gut shot in the last reel and grimacing and falling over, going all the way back to the Petrified Forest in 1936, I believe. So, you know, with High Sierra and with the Maltese Falcon and so forth, he had become a star, but Casablanca elevated him to territory occupied by people like Clark Gable and really elevated him. And as Bogart said, well, you know, anyone playing opposite Bergman, any man's going to look romantic, you know, and he said something like that. And in fact, Bogart had lifts on because Bergman was taller than him. And he had, there's a candid shot of

Bogart sitting on the set of Casablanca, waving his feet that have these wooden lifts strapped to his shoes when they're having a two shot of him and Bergman to make him look, you know, just a tad taller. And Bergman in her later years, you know, she kind of had this attitude. Well, you know, I've done a lot more than Casablanca. And it was kind of like, she never thought she was sexy or good looking. In fact, she saw the picture and she said,

I look like a milkmaid, which I find baffling, but actors and people are very self-critical. And I get that, but I think they were just perfect together. And you obviously understood the characterization of this world-weary, cynical, tough guy going absolutely batty over this woman and getting drunk because she comes back and shows back up in his life. And somehow they take that improbable scenario that I think would have devolved into cliche with a pair of lesser actors or an actors of not their consequence. And they make it real for you every time you see the movie. Yep. And to Tim's other point, there is another star you never see. There is another star you never see.

That is Max Steiner, because the genius of his underscoring, yet again, the fact that he was able to use As Time Goes By, which he did not write. It was written in the early 30s by Herman Huppfeld. And it was not a huge hit song, but it was a song Warner Brothers had the publishing rights to. And they just threw it in there. And he wove his original themes and underscoring around that song in a genius, brilliant way that he did with other things. You know, I think of the score to Gone with the Wind is just astounding. But all the way through it, he has, you know, Dixie and various other, you know, southern songs of the period of the 1860s that he puts in a minor mode and leaves his Taras theme and everything else around it. He was just remarkable.

He was, you know, my friend Stephen C. Smith has written the essential biography of Max Steiner. And I encourage everyone who has HBO Max to watch Diana Friedberg's documentary on Max Steiner, which is currently streaming on HBO Max. It's terrific. But interestingly, Steiner had just finished the score of Now Voyager, which he would win the Oscar for as he was assigned Casablanca. And when he got this assignment, he went home and complained to his wife saying, they want me to use this lousy song written by Herman. He was highly irate about it, but he had to do it. And it was brilliant, as you said, and the orchestration was done by the great Hugo Friedhofer, who himself would win the best scoring Oscar for Best Years of Our Lives in 1946. But I mean, the Warner Brothers music

department stood head and shoulders, I think, with Steiner, who composed the Warner Brothers fanfare in 36 or 37. But Steiner had a very puckish sense of humor. And on the final page of his Casablanca music score that he passed to Friedhofer for orchestration, Steiner wrote, Hugo, thanks for everything. I am very pleased with you. Yours, Herman Hupfeld. He had a sense of humor about it. And in the beginning, when they show the globe and everything, Steiner repurposed some of his score from 1934 and John Ford's The Lost Patrol, which is in the beginning of that movie. Some of that was repurposed for that. But Steiner was, in terms of both being prolific and being great, I don't think there's another Hollywood composer that can match him

in those two categories. I would agree with you on that. And that's an incredible statement when you think of all the Golden Age composers. Right, right. Even just here at Warner Brothers, think of all the golden age composers, right? Right. Even just here at Warner brothers, but crossing all the studios and all the great composers, I would put Steiner at the very head of the crowd with apologies to many others whom I adore.

Max Steiner was in a class by himself, really, as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. I had a question for you, really, as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. I had a question for you, Alan, about the rest of the cast. Obviously, we focus on Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, but the rest of the cast, I mean, every note is hit. It's perfect.

I mean, Claude Rains, the Epstein brothers thought originally that he was going to be all wrong for Captain Renault. Claude Rains is really the spine of the movie. And he gets all the best lines. He does. He says, you know, if that's true, we'll all end up in a concentration camp. Isn't that right, Louis? I'm afraid Major Strasser would insist. You know, he has all the great Epstein brothers throw away sarcastic, pithy lines, and he's portrayed as nothing less than a corrupt lech that in the end has the patriotic heart of gold as he and Bogart head on the soundstage of Warner Stage One to Brazzaville and disappear into the night as the movie ends. And by the way, the last line from Bogart, Louis, I believe this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, I'm paraphrasing, that was dubbed in by Bogart

after the fact. And that line was written by Hal Wallace. Right. That I knew. Bogart was out on his yacht and they had to get Bogart back in to dub that wild line. And at the at the end of the film, I mean, in addition to Reigns, Sidney Greenstreet, I mean, Sidney Greenstreet in a fez with a fly swatter. You know, I talked about Cuddles Zekal, Peter Lorre, just everybody in this movie. Madeline LeBeau's weeping during the close up of La Marseille. Conrad Veidt who was a virulent German anti-Nazi who came to Hollywood fleeing the Nazis

so he could play Nazis in movies all the different people Ludwig Stussel who I'm related to very distantly who was in that there's just so many great character bits and actors

we've already talked about Dan Seymour and so many others. And let's not forget Dooley Wilson. Dooley Wilson, who Curtiz insisted on casting over Wallace's objections, who was perfect. And let's not forget Paul Henreid. Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo. He is. He is. But, you know, they have equal billing. They have equal billing. And Wallace had to give that up to get him because he had to pay off. I believe he paid off RKO to get him and he guaranteed him equal billing because Henreid read the script and goes, well, hell, I don't get the girl.

What you know, what what's the deal here? And was very reluctant. And Wallace gave him enough to make it worthwhile. And I think Henry's portrayal of Victor Laszlo adds that sense of nobility to his character. And I don't think the movie would have worked as well as it does without Paul Henry. Yeah. And I was just rewatching the movie and he's a really dashing looking fella. He was. And yet that really helps, I think, the love triangle because he also has that nobility and that really adds into the tension for that love triangle and add so much to the movie. Absolutely. Well, looking back, obviously the movie itself, there's no question about the legacy of Casablanca. I mean, it's just going to be one of the most beloved films of all time. But I did want to ask you a couple

questions about where does it stand in the legacy of Michael Curtiz, Alan? Well, I think that Casablanca is like the whale shark of movies. And Curtiz is the remora attached underneath, getting the little bits. And what's interesting historically is that people forget about that Michael Curtiz directed this film. And it's very different than like Alfred Hitchcock's movies or John Ford's movies where you say it's Hitchcock or it's John Ford. You don't see Casablanca and say, oh, that's a Michael Curtiz movie. People don't think that way. Some people don't think that way.

Some people don't think that way. Some people don't think that way. Obviously, I think that way and so do I. George thinks that way, but a lot of people don't. And I think as I wrote in my book, that's due to a lot of different reasons. I think one of it was timing. Curtiz died in 62, just as the, what I would call the renaissance of appreciation for a golden age Hollywood directors pioneered by people like Peter Bogdanovich and Richard Schickel was beginning. And so he missed out on that. I think Curtiz also was very circumspect about publicity. His publicity was directed on him only to promote his films, you know, with emphasis on his mangling of the English language and being a character. And he had a sign on his set at Warner Brothers, Curtiz spoken here and all of that stuff. But he kept his private life very, very low key because he didn't

want people knowing that he had, you know, all these children out of wedlock by women that weren't his wife and all this other stuff. So he was very low key. And then I think the other thing was, is in the late 60s, the whole auteur theory of direction pioneered, I think, by Caches de Cinema and Andrew Sarris' Directors and Directions, which every cineast and film student had under their arm at one time. And he dismissed it, Curtiz, as lightly likable. And he ascribed Casablanca as a happy accident of Curtiz's career. So I think all of those things, and I think Casablanca was more of an accident on purpose, quite frankly, than a happy accident. But I think all of those things have conspired to give Curtiz a kind of short shrift.

And I hope my work on him has helped change a lot of that perception because I think it's false. And I also think applying the auteur theory as a kind of be-all litmus test on the ability of a director, particularly during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and even now, is really ridiculous. 30s, 40s, and 50s, and even now, is really ridiculous. And filmmaking is a collaborative art, and particularly at Warner Brothers during those days with Hal Wallace and Edison and everybody else that participated in that. And Curtiz was such a versatile Swiss army knife, if you will, of directors that he wanted to have many colors in his cinematic palette. And he did that. So I think all of those reasons, but, you know, Curtiz won his Oscar after being nominated for Captain Blood and Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters. So it was finally his turn to win. And what better picture for Michael Curtiz

to win the Best Director Oscar than Casablanca? Without question. George, what do you think in terms of the legacy of this film for Warner Brothers? I think if you only could take one film to summarize what a studio's DNA was in the golden age of Hollywood, you could only pick one. And this is very difficult. I think without question, the first film that comes to my mind is Casablanca, without question.

of my mind is Casablanca, without question. You know, and if you were to say, well, what film of MGM's is theirs? It becomes a little more difficult because there are some contenders.

And then you get to like Paramount, you know, A studios, not B studios like Universal or even Columbia was a B studio, basically. It made an occasional A picture. But when you go to the other studios, I don't think there really is one film that sums up everything they were about during that 20 year period does the way Casablanca does. does, the way Casablanca does. And you couldn't have a film representing the studio unless it was directed by Michael Curtiz. I can't really add anything to George's summation of that other than to say that Casablanca and Warner Brothers are indistinguishable from one another. Exactly.

They are one. And that's it. And it'll always be that way as long as film is still around and people are watching Casablanca and watching movies. Warner Brothers is Casablanca and Casablanca is Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers is Casablanca and Casablanca is Warner Brothers. And if you find someone who says, well, I don't like

old movies and I've dealt with people like that, or then they say, well, I can't watch a black and white movie, just put them down in front of a beautiful 4K disc of Casablanca where there's no scratches, there's no smudges, you're seeing absolute

pristine presentation, black and white photography, the highest technical quality and the best sound, even if it's 80 years old, it sounds remarkable. But the story, the actors, the direction, the art direction, the music all coming together. I defy that person not to be moved. And then what else do you have like this? What else can I see? You know, I always wondered, how can a movie be old if you haven't seen it? Well, it's good to you.

Exactly. Yeah, it's not old if you haven't seen it well it's good to you exactly yeah it's not old if you haven't seen it i mean what is the meaning of the word old i i don't well it doesn't make a lot of people have a prejudice like that with music and uh you know it was like i'm not that that knowledgeable who I am about certain kinds of music on classical music. But many years ago when I was in college I got turned on to Mahler and

Rachmaninoff and I became obsessed. And then moved on to Brahms and other composers. But you just need to have someone lead you. And fortunately, Casablanca has never gone away. No. It's never been suppressed.

It's been accessible and available since it first was sold into syndication in the 50s. It's always been around. It's never been suppressed or put on a moratorium or whatever. And it's always been there for people to see. And we want to keep it that way. Well, I think we're all here to comfort the afflicted and to crib from Spencer Tracy and inherit the win. Afflict the comforted. There you go. Well, if there's one movie that I think it's worth buying every time it comes out and you can watch Casablanca on streaming services, which I did recently to check it out. But the package

of seeing it in the pristine with the great sound to get all the extras, to me, it's one you own. It's one of the few no brainers maybe for physical media, even if you have the older copies and you want to hold on to those. So I am looking forward to having it. And I highly recommend it. And I hope that our conversation today has just reminded people of what a great film this is. Well, I just ordered my copy. There you go. You did it while we were doing the podcast, which is amazing.

That is amazing. Yep. Yep. Well, Alan, George, I can't think of two better people to have on the podcast to talk about this amazing film, one that we all love. And that is just one of the finest examples of filmmaking that I can think of. So thank you. Thank you, Tim. It's been a pleasure. Tim, George, it's been a pleasure. I think we need to continue this at Rick's Cafe at a time to be announced. Sounds good to me. Sounds good to me as well. Round up the usual suspects.

Absolutely. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode with two tremendous film historians who just know Casablanca inside and out. I know that I learned a lot just listening to them talk about the film. And I also enjoyed the bonus discussion about the history of Warner Brothers as well. If you're interested in purchasing the 4K of Casablanca, it releases on November 8th. I'll have links in the podcast show notes and on our website at www.theextras.tv. So be sure and check those out. If this is the first episode of The Extras you've listened to and you enjoyed it, please think about following the show at your favorite podcast provider. And if you're on social media, be sure and follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at The Extras TV or Instagram at The Extras.TV to stay up to date on our upcoming guests and to be a part of our community. And for our long-term listeners,

don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast provider. Until next time, you've been listening to Tim Millard. Stay slightly obsessed. The Extras is a production of Otaku Media, producers of podcasts, behind the scenes extras, and media that connects creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals at www.otakumedia.tv or look for the link in the show notes.