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) thirty-eight rejected it outright, thirty-three generally recognized it (but only eight specifically as "Casablanca"), three declared it commercially viable, and one suggested turning it into a novel. Many subsequent films have drawn on elements of "Casablanca". "Passage to Marseille" (1944) reunited actors Bogart, Rains, Greenstreet, Lorre and director Curtiz in 1944, and there are similarities between "Casablanca" and another later Bogart film, "To Have and Have Not" (also 1944). Parodies have included the Marx Brothers' "A Night in Casablanca" (1946), Neil Simon's "The Cheap Detective" (1978), and "Out Cold" (2001). Indirectly, it provided the title for the 1995 neo-noir film