Joan Alison

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Joan Alison (1902 - 31 March, 1992) co-wrote the play Everybody Comes to Rick's (with Murray Burnett), which was the basis for the movie Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

When Alison and Burnett failed to find a Broadway producer, they sold the play to Warner Brothers for $20,000. Warner Brothers handed the script to the screenwriters Howard Koch, Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, who changed the title to Casablanca. Otherwise fairly little was changed from the original play. Some dialogue was left out and added, the time sequence was changed a bit, and whereas the whole play takes place in Rick's bar, the movie has some scenes outside. The only major change of the characters was that of Ilsa Laszlo, who was made more compatible with the Hays Code. (In the play she wasn't married to Victor Laszlo.) Even the song "As Time Goes By" came from Burnett's and Alison's play.

Burnett and Alison sued Warner Brothers when the television series based on Casablanca aired in 1983, but the courts decided that they had signed away all rights to their work. Finally, when they threatened not to renew their agreement with Warner Brothers when it would expire in 1997, they received $100,000 and the right to produce the original play.

In 1991 Everybody Comes to Rick's was produced by David Kelsey at The Whitehall Theatre in London. By that time Howard Koch, who was 89 years old, had changed his mind. In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, Koch admitted that Murray's and Alison's complaints about the lack of credit they received for their contribution to the film had been justified.