Groucho Marx Clowned on Warner Bros. Long Before David Zaslav Made It Cool
Warner Bros. has been in the news a lot this week – not because they have a big new movie coming out, but because the whole studio is up for sale. Hopefully they warn any potential buyers about the pest situation in the water tower.
The sale of Warner Bros. Discovery will likely be a disaster for the theatrical movie industry. Not to mention that merging with rival companies like Paramount or Netflix could mean violating antitrust laws, as critics have pointed out. But at least it will be a big payday for David Zaslav, the Warner CEO who seems to love making movies almost as much as he loves unmaking them.
While many people have delighted in dunking on Warner Bros. ever since Zaslav took the reins, the best takedown of Warner Bros. happened eight decades ago, supposedly because the studio tried to pick a fight with Julius Henry Marx, AKA Groucho.
As legend would have it, when the Marx Brothers were preparing to shoot one of their less-memorable comedies, 1946’s A Night in Casablanca, Warner Bros. threatened to take “legal action” against the comedy family. Why? Because their new movie infringed on Warner Bros.' Oscar-winning Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Groucho fired off a series of letters to the studio, later published in The Groucho Letters, ridiculing Warner Bros. for having the gall to suggest that they could claim to own the rights to the name of a city.
“Dear Warner Brothers,” the first letter begins. “Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca."
Groucho continued, "It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.”
Groucho also jokingly threatened to countersue: “You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about ‘Warner Brothers’? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were.”
“Now Jack, how about you? Do you maintain that yours is an original name?” Groucho addressed to Warner Bos. studio co-head Jack Leonard Warner. “Well it's not. It was used long before you were born. Offhand, I can think of two Jacks – Jack of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ and Jack the Ripper, who cut quite a figure in his day.”
But as Snopes pointed out, A Night in Casablanca was originally intended as a parody of Casablanca, with character names like “Humphrey Bogus.” Warner Bros. didn’t actually threaten to sue, but they “demanded to know the details about the storyline.” The lawsuit narrative was leaked to the press by the Marx Brothers “as a means of generating controversy and garnering some newspaper coverage for their film.”
In a letter to his doctor, Groucho admitted that “we spread the story that Warners objected to this title purely for publicity reasons. They may eventually actually object to it, although I don't think so.”
So the Marx Brothers made Warner Bros. their unwitting comic foil purely to hype A Night in Casablanca. Unfortunately, Groucho's letters ended up being much more entertaining than the movie itself.