Where to watch Casablanca (1942)

Trivia & production notes

• Warner Bros. paid $20,000 for the rights to the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's in January 1942, the highest price Hollywood had ever paid for an unproduced script at that time.
• The Epstein twin brothers left the project early in 1942 at Frank Capra's request to work on the Why We Fight documentary series in Washington, D.C.
• The iconic line "Here's looking at you, kid" was not in any of the draft screenplays but has been attributed to a comment Bogart made to Bergman as she played poker between takes.
• Julius Epstein came up with the famous roundup of "the usual suspects" line while driving with his brother Philip, after which the major plot details fell into place.
• In the original source play, Ilsa was an American character named Lois Meredith and Rick was a lawyer, changes significantly altered by the screenplay.
• Bogart's final line "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" was selected by Hal Wallis in a telegram to the film editor and was dubbed a month after shooting wrapped.
• The film was shot in sequence because only the first half of the script was ready when production began on May 25, 1942.
• Ingrid Bergman was two inches taller than Bogart, so director Michael Curtiz had Bogart stand on blocks or sit on cushions during their scenes together.
• The airport final scene used a cardboard cutout plane and little person extras to create the illusion of scale, with fog added to mask the model's unconvincing appearance.
• The Production Code Administration forced extensive changes to remove all direct sexual references, including implications that Captain Renault extorted sexual favors and that Rick and Ilsa had slept together.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Casablanca (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.