We'll Always Have Casablanca by Noah Isenberg

Author:Noah Isenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

A DAY AFTER the first PCA report arrived, Hal Wallis received “Notes on Screenplay Casablanca,” the detailed commentary prepared by Casey Robinson. The best-paid writer at the studio, and someone whose talents Wallis especially prized, Robinson was known for adapting love stories, frequently emotionally wrenching melodramas, and for handling controversial, otherwise untouchable themes in ways that were palatable to the censors and to mass audiences. In the case of Kings Row (1942), an adaptation of Henry Bellamann’s bestselling novel—with Claude Rains in a supporting role as the deranged, possessive Dr. Alexander Tower—Robinson had managed to convince Geoffrey Shurlock of the Hays Office that the litany of hot-button issues addressed in the novel (incest, sadism, terminal illness) could be adapted and revised in an acceptable way for the screen. “ ‘Look, the sin is punished,’ ” he and Wallis had argued to Shurlock. “And that,” Robinson later told an interviewer, “took care of that.” That same year, in Now, Voyager, Robinson prepared a script that, despite its patently taboo subjects (insanity, adultery), proved to be a terrific hit for the studio and a major vehicle for its stars, Bette Davis and Paul Henreid. Robinson served as more than a writer on that film; he was also Wallis’s technical consultant, his confidant regarding the rushes prepared by director Irving Rapper, and a general fixer of sorts.

Born to Mormon parents, and raised in a college town in rural Utah, Robinson was politically and socially more conservative than the three principal writers assigned to Casablanca, the Epstein twins and Koch, all of whom were born and raised in New York City and embodied various shades of liberalism. Although Robinson’s father taught in the theater and music department at Brigham Young University, young Casey went east to attend Cornell—a decade before playwright Murray Burnett arrived there—and had been working in Hollywood for fifteen years by the time Wallis tapped him for three weeks’ work on Casablanca. Robinson had started his career writing subtitles for silent pictures (“as good a way for a new writer to begin as any,” he later recalled) and sold his first story to Columbia before following producer Harry Joe Brown to Warners in the mid-1930s.

When Wallis contacted Robinson about Casablanca—he had already begun sketching the script for Passage to Marseille (1944), another Hal B. Wallis production that, with much of the same charmed ensemble cast and Curtiz as director, would prove to be an unanticipated sequel or a cinematic reunion—it was again in something of a fixer’s capacity. Robinson wasn’t so much expected to write new material for Casablanca as to prop up the sagging romance and to do so in a tasteful way that would elude the wrath of the PCA. Harmetz suggests that Robinson may have drafted a complete version of the flashback, though Julius Epstein repeatedly disputed that claim. For his part, Robinson insisted to Joel Greenberg, in a 1974 interview, that it was Bogart, by then disillusioned with the existing script, who had approached him during the production.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.