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) "The Usual Suspects". Woody Allen's "Play It Again, Sam" (1972) appropriated Bogart's "Casablanca" persona as the fantasy mentor for Allen's character. The film "Casablanca" was a plot device in the science-fiction television movie "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" (1983), based on John Varley's story. It was referred to in Terry Gilliam's dystopian "Brazil" (1985). Warner Bros. produced its own parody in the homage "Carrotblanca", a 1995 Bugs Bunny cartoon. Film critic Roger Ebert pointed out the plot of the film "Barb Wire" (1996) was identical to that of "Casablanca". In "Casablanca", a novella by Argentine writer Edgar Brau, the protagonist