In the final scene of Casablanca, the airplane is made of plywood. The film was shot shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and California was bracing for a new attack, so movie studios were severely restricted from shooting on location and forbidden entirely from filming at airports. So the movie was shot on soundstages at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, and Soundstage #1, as it turned out, was too small to accommodate a real airplane.

So prop men built a half-size Lockheed Electra 12A out of plywood and balsa, and little people in jumpsuits were hired to bustle around it. The fog — a rarity in Morocco — helped to sell the effect.

Also: Dooley Wilson was an accomplished singer, but he couldn’t play the piano. “During the filming of Casablanca, a Warners staff musician, Elliott Carpenter, played the piano to the side of the set so that Wilson could get his bearings,” writes Jeff Siegel in The Casablanca Companion. “It’s also Carpenter’s playing that was dubbed into the film. The charade went off so well that when Wilson appeared for a nightclub gig after the movie was released, the club’s manager asked him why he wasn’t going to play the piano in his act.”