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) 1980s, when a colorized version aired on the television network WTBS. In 1984, MGM/UA hired Color Systems Technology to colorize the film for $180,000. When Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting System purchased MGM/UA's film library two years later, he canceled the request, before contracting American Film Technologies (AFT) in 1988. AFT completed the colorization in two months at a cost of $450,000. Turner later reacted to the criticism of the colorization, saying, "["Casablanca"] is one of a handful of films that really doesn't have to be colorized. I did it because I wanted to. All I'm trying to do is