Casablanca (film) right. The Jack Benny Fan Club can feel vindicated." The film was based on Murray Burnett and Joan Alison's then-unproduced play "Everybody Comes to Rick's". The Warner Bros. story analyst who read the play, Stephen Karnot, called it (approvingly) "sophisticated hokum", and story editor Irene Diamond, who had discovered the unproduced play on a trip to New York in 1941, convinced producer Hal Wallis to buy the rights in January 1942 for $20,000, the most anyone in Hollywood had ever paid for an unproduced play. The project was renamed "Casablanca", apparently in imitation of the 1938 hit "Algiers". Although an
Casablanca (film) Nazis cannot arrest him, saying, "This is still unoccupied France; any violation of neutrality would reflect on Captain Renault," Ebert points out, "It makes no sense that he could walk around freely. ... He would be arrested on sight." In addition, no uniformed German troops were stationed in Casablanca during World War II, and neither American nor French troops occupied Berlin in 1918. According to Harmetz, the usual route out of Germany, at least for people in the film industry, was not via Morocco and Lisbon but via Vienna, Prague, Paris and England. Only the film's technical adviser, Robert Aisner,