Taking it to a higher plane

A good friend and colleague of mine picked up a sign on the WGA picket line in Hollywood the other day. That sign read on one side: AI WILL NEVER GIVE YOU and on the other side: CASABLANCA. He sent me a video showing the two sides of the poster because he knows how much I’ve been into Casablanca lately due to my new novel, Season of the Gods—which he had read in draft form months ago, offering key feedback for improvement.

Only through a historical novel could I get as close as I needed to get to the story of how Casablanca came to be. I wanted to understand its writers, Julie and Phil Epstein—that’s where this project started. Who were these guys who have already been lost to history except for a few well-worn anecdotes that have been spun into implausibility over the decades? Once, the Epsteins—“the boys” as everyone on the Warner Bros. lot knew them—were young, vital, ambitious, and living by their own code—and I needed to travel back there and walk around Hollywood with these guys to grasp the evolution of a masterpiece day by day.

Read the September 23 article in Air Mail.

Why can’t AI ever give you Casablanca? You’ll find all the reasons in Season of the Gods. A high school teacher named Murray Burnett wrote the stage play on which the film was based. On Broadway it didn’t need to contend with Hollywood’s morality code, and Warner Bros. story editor Irene Lee, nicknamed “Renie,” looked past the code when she purchased the play, figuring her writers would simply adapt key parts of the story and junk the rest.

Cue the hand-wringing.

Two veteran studio writers were assigned to the project and hit a brick wall because of the illicit sex that formed the foundation of the story. But the Epstein brothers, twins then age 32 and ready to conquer the world, all but begged production boss Hal Wallis for the assignment when the first two writers failed. Wallis granted the Epsteins’ wish and then they too got stuck. A third writer, political idealist Howard Koch, came aboard for new angles, and then a fourth writer, studio Cadillac Casey Robinson, stepped in and offered critique on the work of the other three. And still these four highly skilled craftsmen couldn’t figure it out.

Julius Epstein (left) and his twin brother, Phil, ready to take on the world.

Cue the ticking time bomb.

Irene Lee had sold Hal Wallis on the timeliness of a story set in North Africa, where Montgomery was battling Rommel. Wallis wedged the property he had retitled Casablanca into an already crammed production schedule. He couldn’t find actors—they were already booked on the other productions. He couldn’t build much in the way of sets or use real airplanes—wartime restrictions. All he knew was he had to make a movie and get it cut and release it, and the goddamn writers were holding him up! He gritted his teeth and started shooting a movie based on a partial script and kept a gun to the backs of his writers to figure out the ending!

Warner Bros. Story Editor Irene Lee, who championed development of Casablanca.

Imagine you’re a fly on the wall of those story conferences, particularly the last one when Renie and her four writers had literally reached the end of the runway and would shoot something in the morning to represent the end of the story. They had filmed everything but the airport climax, and it had to make sense for the German to die, the freedom fighter to escape, the freedom fighter’s wife to leave the hero, and the hero to walk away free and clear.

As my WGA screenwriter friend said yesterday, “One of the things I find so interesting about your book is that it really is a celebration of the writing process—Casablanca, with its myriad contributors, seems like an early, unintentional example of the value of the writers’ room that is so much at issue.”

Could AI have reasoned out the ending to Casablanca? Could AI have written all the great lines the Epsteins created, lines that everyday people around the world have repeated on the job or at the dinner table for 80 years and counting? These zingers charm your pants off because you can’t see them coming. They’re human, revealing, self-deprecating, and ironic.

Ludwig Stössel, Ilka Grüning, and S.Z. Sakall, three famous European actors who had been driven to America by the Nazi regime. All were taken into the production at the urging of director Michael Curtiz.

Season of the Gods takes you inside studio walls, inside the writers’ room, inside the soundstage. You will meet the Epsteins, Renie, Wallis, Koch, Robinson, Bogart, Bergman, Lorre, and a dozen others who made this masterpiece come together despite the odds. You’ll walk a mile in the shoes of Dooley Wilson, watch refugees from Europe join the cast and weigh it down with loss and sadness, and learn how the Epsteins’ secretary saved the day at the very last moment. You will relive fateful months at the beginning of World War II, and you will understand for the first time exactly why we all love Casablanca so much—because of those who rose to a higher plane and brought it to the world.

Season of the Gods: A Novel, from GoodKnight Books.