Murray Burnett

Everybody Comes to Rick's is an American play that was bought unproduced by Warner Brothers for a record figure of $20,000. It was adapted for the movie Casablanca (1942), starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Written by Americans Murray Burnett and Joan Alison in 1940, prior to the United States' entry into World War II, the play was anti-Nazi and pro-French Resistance. The film became an American classic, highly successful and ranked by many as the greatest film ever made.

Feeling they had not received full recognition for their contributions, Burnett and Alison tried to regain control of the property, but the New York Court of Appeals ruled in 1986 that they had signed away their rights in their agreement with Warner Brothers. Under their threat not to renew the agreement when the copyright reverted to them, the film company paid them each $100,000 and the right to produce the original play. It was produced in 1991 at the Whitehall Theatre in London, where it ran for six weeks.

In the summer of 1938, while on vacation from his job as English teacher at a vocational school, Murray and his wife Frances traveled to Vienna to help Jewish relatives smuggle money out of the country occupied by the Nazis since March of that year. Later, the couple visited a small town in the south of France, where they went to a nightclub overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. A black pianist played jazz for a crowd of French, Nazis, and refugees.

Burnett returned to the USA via the UK, staying a few weeks in Bournemouth. While there he started to make notes for his anti-Nazi play. In the summer of 1940, the 27-year-old teacher completed the play in six weeks with the collaboration of Joan Alison. They featured Rick, an American bar owner of the Cafe Americain in Casablanca, Morocco, whose European exiles and refugees frequent the cafe. Eventually, Rick helps an idealistic Czech resistance fighter escape with the woman Rick loves.

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