They've been all the rage since the millennium: these lists put together by various film organizations - the AFI, AMPAS, the studios - arbitrarily ordering movies past and present into a certain numerical sequence: the 100 Best this's, the 100 Best that's.
The latest culprit is the WGA, the Writer's Guild of America, with their 100 Best Screenplays of All Time.
Naturally, there's plenty of room for argument and ire. But it's hard to make waves over the title at the top of the pile: Casablanca.
Reading it today, Casablanca remains a good script: swift pace, interesting characters, great lines. But though it's the love story that has kept it in the hearts of audiences for years, the paper version reminds us that the film is first and foremost a propagandistic allegory; the tale of an isolationist's conversion to patriot.
It's the story, then, of an unlikely hero - ironic, as the story of the evolution of the screenplay is just as populated with them.
The first was an anonymous Brownshirt, who, in the late '30s, beat up the head of Warner Bros.' German office. So upset were the bosses back home, they became the first studio to make anti-Nazi pictures. Out of this, Casablanca was born.
Next on our list of Casablanca's Top 100 Unlikeliest Screenplay Heroes: Steven Karnot. Who? The studio reader who was the first one to recognize the potential of the property, a play revered critic and author James Agee had hitherto labeled "the worst ever written."
Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers are credited on screen, but Koch had a silent partner: the tuxedoed white knight himself, Humphrey Bogart. Whenever Koch, burdened with fusing the Epsteins' amusing pieces of business into a genuine narrative, got stuck, he would visit Bogart, who would offer him a lethal mix of hard liquor and savvy suggestions.
Number Umpteen: Casey Robinson, the highest paid writer on the Warners lot, brought in by producer Hal Wallis to work on the love story. So where's his name in the credits? They were left out at his insistence; Robinson had an ego clause in his contract that forbade the appearance of his name alongside those of others.
The unlikeliest hero of all? Joe Breen, dreaded head of the censorship office. Breen - let's buckle down and give the man credit here - excised the script's clunkier double entendres, resulting in the clever, memorable lines we can all recite today.
Which then, I ask you, had the greater number of collaborators? Warners' two-face infested French Morocco, or the script that brought its spies, gamblers and gold-diggers to Rick's Cafe Americain?
