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I'm Christopher Leiden. This is Open Source in Casablanca USA

on the Warner Brothers Lot in Hollywood, 1941.

The hope of every Oscar season is that a movie from somewhere

anywhere can do what Casablanca did in winning Best Picture in 1942.

It was a factory product and war propaganda too.

The dialogue has poetry with goose bump feeling in it and the staying power of high art.

It has more famous lines than Hamlet delivered by bit players and big stars.

There were only three American citizens in that film by and about immigrants.

It's an astonishing work of screenwriting in a story that flies blind

without an ending to the last shot.

Our guest, the novelist Leslie Epstein, is our inside authority on Casablanca.

The film critic A.S. Hamra is our Mr. Outside.

Leslie get us started. Everybody knows this movie and almost everybody loves it.

But you have lived it almost 80 years.

You've been inside this script and now you've written a novel,

a tale of beans that metabolizes Casablanca.

And you call this novel a kind of capstone for your imaginative work over a lifetime.

That's right, Chris. I've had two major themes in my life and work,

...