Casablanca's Ending

"We'll always have Paris." "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she has to walk into mine." "Round up the usual suspects." "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." "Play it, Sam." -- Has there ever been a movie with as many iconic lines as Casablanca? By the way, no one in movie ever says, "Play it, again, Sam." Both Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa and Humphrey Bogart as Rick say to Dooley Wilson as Sam, "Play it" meaning their signature song, "As Time Goes By." According to several books about the movie and biographies of the stars, Bogart and Bergman played the movie without knowing how it was going to end. Would Ilsa go off with Rick, or with her husband, the noble resistance fighter Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid? One reason the audience was unsure, was that the actors were unsure. The writers were still working on the script during shooting, and wrote two different endings. Ingrid Bergman said she asked the director and writers who she would end up, and they said, "We don't know. Play it in between." Her uncertainty increased the audience's anxiety,and made this love triangle romantic and mysterious. Even though two endings were scripted, Director Michael Curtiz only shot one -- the famous ending we have today where Rick sends Ilsa off with Victor, and reminds her "We'll always have Paris... If that plane leaves and you're not on it you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life." It makes me wonder if Curtiz knew how he wanted the movie to end all along, but didn't tell Bergman to make sure she played it the way he wanted. You can do that when you're directing actors in a movie. You just need to capture the result you want once, and it lives forever. Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and many film historians consider it one of the greatest movies ever made. How is that possible, with the amount of rewrites in production and uncertainty about the ending? Sometimes, creative chaos produces the best results. I don't mean total chaos -- after all, the movie did get shot even though the script was being rewritten. All that off screen creative uncertainty has a way of feeding the on screen energy. On the Casablanca set that uncertainty about the ending probably helped keep the performances fresh throughout. It helped that the ensemble cast was one of the deepest and finest assembled for a Warner Brothers, film. It was so good that Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet played only small (but crucial) parts. The reasons why one piece succeeds and another doesn't remain mysterious. If they weren't mysterious, then anyone could create a successful film, and no movie would ever fail. That's why it's important for content creators to keep going and finish their pieces despite the chaos. There will always be chaos. Don't let that stop you from making your content the best it can be.