Play It Again, Sam

Not a single frame was shot in Morocco.

The most famous film ever made about Casablanca — the one that taught the world how to say the city's name, the one that made "Here's looking at you, kid" part of the language, the one that convinced generations of travelers that somewhere in this Atlantic port city there must be a gin joint where a piano player knows all the songs — was filmed entirely in Burbank, California.

Warner Brothers bought the rights to an unproduced play called "Everybody Comes to Rick's" in January 1942 for $20,000 — the most anyone had ever paid for an unproduced script. They started shooting in May, wrapped in August, and released the film in November to capitalize on news that Allied forces had just invaded North Africa. The timing was accidental genius.

The airport scene — where Bogart delivers the line about the problems of three little people not amounting to a hill of beans — was filmed on a soundstage with fog machines and a cardboard cutout of a Lockheed Electra. The actors playing airport workers were little people, hired to make the plane look larger. The Moroccan extras were mostly contract players from Central Casting, some of whom had never been further east than Arizona.

And yet.

For sixty years, tourists arrived in Casablanca asking directions to Rick's Café Américain. Taxi drivers would shrug. Hotel concierges would explain, apologetically, that there was no Rick's. The city that had become synonymous with wartime romance and smoky intrigue and "As Time Goes By" had no physical trace of any of it.

Then Kathy Kriger arrived.

Kriger was a commercial attaché at the US Embassy in Rabat when she first saw Casablanca at a film festival in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. When she was posted to Morocco, she was baffled that no one had built the obvious thing. After September 11, 2001, she decided to leave government service and stay in Morocco — to do something that demonstrated "true American values." Building Rick's Café seemed like the way to do it.

She founded a company called "The Usual Suspects." She sent emails to friends around the world with lines from the film: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, I'd like you to buy into mine." Money arrived from investors on four continents.

She bought a crumbling 1930 riad in the old medina overlooking the port — the same view the fictional Rick would have had. She hired Bill Willis, the legendary American interior designer who had transformed houses for the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Yves Saint Laurent, to create a space that captured the film without becoming kitsch.

Rick's Café Casablanca opened on March 1, 2004. Curved arches, brass lighting, a sculpted bar, palms in the corners, a 1930s Pleyel piano where a pianist named Issam plays "As Time Goes By" every night. The film runs on loop in a screening room upstairs.

Kriger ran the place for fourteen years, usually standing at the corner of the bar with a glass of what looked like wine but was actually water until 11 PM. She wrote a book about the experience. She was known to quote the film constantly — "I'm shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here!" — when bureaucrats caused problems.

She died in Casablanca in July 2018, aged 72. Her ashes are buried in the city.

"I think I will die in Casablanca," Rick tells Ilsa in the film. "It's a good spot for it."

Kathy Kriger proved him right.