10. bogus landscape of final scene

                

        “At the airport, the outline of the transport plane is barely visible.”

“Orderly: East runway. Visibility: one and a half miles. Light ground fog. Depth of fog: approximately 500...”

        Enter

        Chorus, a glee

        club

        of two,

        assistant director Lee Katz

& John Beckham, the Props Master, ah

sure, we

“fogged

in

the set

not so much to give it an atmosphere

but because we had to conceal the fact that everything was so phony”

for what-with-the-war-and-all

all

location

shooting

had been forbidden along the West Coast,

and you were only allowed to photograph grounded,

maimed aircrafts (their propellers

removed),

hence

we built the airport hangar on Warner Bros. Stage 1,

and knocked together, for the so-

called

“transport plane”,

a mockup,

scaled-

down

ship,

“a pretty bad cutout”,

a profile

in

depth,

“made out of plywood and maybe some balsa”

which was supposed “to match” a real one we had “borrowed from Lockheed” before,

and,

to make the fake aeroplane look bigger, and “give

it

a forced perspective”,

we hired “a bunch of midgets to portray the mechanics” [1]

Exit

Chorus. Enter

Ilsa. It was our final scene, we

        were to say, last night we said,

        but Richard, no,

no,

I,

but

what

about

us,

we’ll-always-have-Paris, here’s

looking

at

you,

kid,

and all the time a pea soup was muddying the pretend airdrome,

and a crew of Lilliputians crawled around the toy plane

that would take me away from Casablanca, and off

Casablanca

---

[1] Quoted in Harmetz (1992: 105 – 106; 237).