The “Fictional Characters You Associate with One Actor” thread includes LOTS of sanctimonious posts about how Casablanca should never be messed with, never be re-made, never colorized, etc.
Now, I’m in total agreement with all these posters. I bow to none in my respect for Casablanca. But the eagerness of everyone to state the obvious (and to bestow the cinematic equivalent of sainthood) started the Devils In My Head to whispering…
I’d like to invite everyone to join in, imagine themselves as clueless Hollywood moguls looking for the next sure-fire big-bucks thing, and
SCREW UP CASABLANCA!!!
Okay, the first thing we’ll do is remake it. And I say we pay Keanu Reeves fifteen million dollars to take on the role of Rick Blaine.
Set it in modern-day America (cf. the Ethan Hawke version of Great Expectations). This would, of course, render the plot entirely meaningless, but one could fill in the gaps with nudity and explosions.
Make it a screwball comedy, where the letters of transit keep ending up in someone else’s luggage and Rick and Ilsa get into all sorts of zany scrapes trying to get them back.
Okay, okay, so we set it in this futuristic post-apocalypse-world, and we switch all the genders around, and we get Pamela Anderson to play Rick.
What? Been done?
Okay, how about this- we actually move it to present-day California, except instead of being about resistance to Nazi oppression, we make it loose-cool beach dudes surfing aganst “The Man”. We get Pauly Shore to play Rick and Jim Carrey to play Louie in sort of an Ace Ventura thing. Love interest, love interest- hey, why not combine the roles of Ilsa and the piano-player, and we’ll get Madonna to play the part! It’s perfect!
Then, let’s see, it’s a comedy, so the part of the California Health Authority guy trying to close down this beach house will be… Gilbert! Gilbert Godfried!
Excellent ideas, folks! I like the cut of your jib!
Obviously, we have to go for the Youth Market here. Teenagers are the only ones who go see the same movie over and over, so it’ll need to appeal to them. I think we might be able to get Eminem for the part of Sam…
And we can’t have Nazis. Teenagers don’t know from Nazis. What can we have instead of Nazis?
Luke Perry as Rick Blaine
Molly Ringwald as Ilsa Lund
Anthony Michael Hall as Victor Lazlo
OJ Simpson as Captain Louis Renault
Howard Stern as Major Heinrich Strasser
Tommy Chong as Signor Ferrari
Quentin Tarantino as Ugarte
Kid Rock as Sam
Worse, Ike. Aliens. In our teenage version, Rick is played by Freddie Prinze, Jr., and Ilse is played…in a darling cinematic debut…by Britney Spears. In fact, she is so moved by DJ Sam’s beat bustin’ version of “You Must Remeber This, yo yo yo,” that she herself breaks into her newest hit “song.”
And instead of not getting on the plane and regretting it, Ilse will consider not getting on a space shuttle, as the planet is under attack by the aforementioned aliens. She will, as we all know. But there’s something the writers of the original never considered: sequel potential. We set that up by having Ilse’s final words to Rick be, “I’m pregant,” as the space shuttle taxis away. We’re talking BILLIONS here.
With the perfectioning of computer graphics, we can have a digitally rendered teenage Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergmen, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.
The vilain du jour being of course the Muslim terrorist, the setting doesn’t even have to be changed! The nazis will now be USA-hating musims with turbans and fancy beards. The teenage Humphrey Bogart will have some gnarly tattooes on his well-developped biceps, and the teenage Ingrid Bergman will wear short tank tops revealing her well-toned midriff, with a pierced belly button. We will have something that was sorely lacking in the original, a long scene showing Ingrid Bergman undulating over Humphrey Bogart’s naked supine body, while they both moan in unison with unbearable sexual ecstasy. Sydney Greenstreet’s bar will turn into a rave with glowlights and pounding dance music. Instead of singing “La Marseillaise”, a crowd at the rave will sing a hip-hop version of “America the Beautiful” or some other patriotic crowd-pleaser. The young Humphrey Bogart will of course have mucho guns and other weaponry at his disposal, and the path to the airport will be eased by plowing their way through a ton of mangled and exploded bodies thanks to the prowess of Rick, while Ingrid Bergman happens to be a martial arts expert who will knock down a few plug-uglies. Thankfully, one thing remains constant in Hollywood movies, and Sam can remain the token black character, except, as mentioned above, that he will have two turntables and a microphone instead of a beat-up analog music-making device.
I submit that this new Casablanca may very well prove superior to the original in terms of box-office grosses.
Well, the ending just has to go. I’m sorry–it’s good, but it just not flying with the test audiences. The public wants a happy ending for Rick, so instead we’ll have Laszlo killed by Strasser, Ilsa shoot Strasser in revenge, and Rick single-handedly kills the rest of the Nazis/Muslims/Aliens with his outstanding martial arts skills, ending the menace once and for all. That way we can have a happy ending and Rick ends up bedding his girl.
Won’t that be great? By the way, I think Jean-Claude Van Damme was an excellent choice for Rick…
(Just between you and me, Strasser isn’t really dead, and neither is Laszlo, so we can bring them both back for CASABLANCA 2: Strasser’s Revenge. But don’t tell anybody…)
Rick (Keanu Reeves) takes out the entire German occupation force using Matrix-style slo-mo kung fu.
Ilsa (Callista Flockhart) leaves Rick to rejoin her lover, Yvette (Janeanne Garofalo) in the French underground. A devastated Rick is forced to make love to an apple pie instead.
casdave, by ‘replacing’ Sydney Greenstreet do you mean we should go to his grave, dig it up, and stuff a Spice Girl in there? I’m all for that. (the wierd thing is that I just did a search on ‘Sydney Greenstreet’ on google and the first thing that came up was findagrave.com)
Some sci-fi show – probably Outer Limits – within the last couple of years did a Casablanca remake with aliens substituting for the Nazis. I remember distinctly that it was a syndicated show, since I don’t have cable.