The hand that wrote (part of) the script for the classic 1942 film Casablanca shook my ink-stained paw. “I hadn’t the foggiest notion” that anything out of the ordinary Hollywood movie was going to result, writer Howard Koch told me.
It was just going to be another product on the assembly line, everyone figured.
As time goes by, that was many moons ago, and Koch, along with most of the cast, has passed on and into cine-history. A new book, We’ll Always Have Casablanca by Noah Isenberg, sheds light on the miracle that it got made at all — mostly by immigrants, by the way.