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) up where the film leaves off, and also tells of Rick's mysterious past in America. The book met with little success. David Thomson provided an unofficial sequel in his 1985 novel "Suspects". There have been two short-lived television series based upon "Casablanca", both sharing the title. The first, which aired on ABC as part of the wheel series "Warner Bros. Presents" in hour-long episodes from 1955 to 1956, is a Cold War espionage program set contemporaneously with its production, and starred Charles McGraw as Rick and Marcel Dalio, who played Emil the croupier in the movie, as the police chief.