This is the season of Hollywood's unrestrained id: the brainless summer blockbuster, the air-conditioned multiplex, the bottomless popcorn refills, the avalanche of kids emerging blinking into bright sunlight, waiting for their parental pickup. But August is also the anniversary of the movies themselves! It was on August 31, 1897 that Thomas Edison patented his first movie camera, the Kinetograph. In honor of 119 years of cinematic glitz and glamour, we've asked movie buff and Jeopardy! tough Ken Jennings to give us the "reel" truth on all kinds of old-movie misinformation.
The Debunker: Was Ronald Reagan the First Choice to Star in Casablanca?
It's one of the most storied "what if"s in Hollywood history: what if the most iconic screen role of the 1940s, the world-weary Rick Blaine in Casablanca, had been played by not by Humphrey Bogart but by a different actor? Furthermore, what if that actor had been genial future president Ronald Reagan? Reagan, according to movie lore, was Warner Brothers's first choice for the project.
To be fair, this little trivia factoid wasn't made up out of whole cloth. In January 1942, Warners announced in The Hollywood Reporter and via its own news service that "Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan will be teamed…for the third time in Casablanca." The rights to the story—then just an unproduced play called Everybody Goes to Rick's—had been purchased by the studio just a week or so earlier. So there you go: Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan were the original-recipe Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, right? Case closed.
Not so fast. That kind of press release was a common publicity ploy in those days. In fact, just a week into Casablanca pre-production, without even a script treatment ready to go, no casting decisions had been made at all. Teasing the names of Sheridan and Reagan was just a way to draw attention to the project—and, more importantly, to Kings Row, a Warners Sheridan-Reagan melodrama a month away from release. A month after Pearl Harbor, the studio knew it would be losing Ronald Reagan, a lieutenant in the Army Reserve, to World War II. Anyway, producer Hal Wallis knew that a B-movie lightweight like Reagan didn't have the gravitas for a prestige production like this one. He had one star in mind from the beginning. "Please figure on Bogart for Casablanca," he wrote Jack Warner in February. In April he reiterated, "Bogart is perfect for it, and it is being written for him." (Italics mine.) So Reagan was never seriously in the running to play the complex, cynical club owner. And America was spared eight years of "the Gipper" ending speeches by saying "Here's looking at you, kid."
Quick Quiz: Ronald Reagan became a serious political figure in 1964, when he gave a well-received speech called "A Time for Choosing" on behalf of what politician?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.