Author aims to uncover genocide's screen link
Posted on Mon, Jul. 11, 2005
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
MORAGA - As a child in the 1930s, Ed Minasian often found refuge in the movie theater across the street from the three-story tenement where he grew up in Massachusetts.
[...]
The 80-year-old Moraga resident, who lost siblings during the mass killings, has spent 24 years researching the [...] 1930s Hollywood. His findings, which he hopes to publish in a book, detail how the Turkish government managed to squelch repeated attempts by MGM studios to make a movie about the genocide.
[...]
He was 10 when the book that piqued MGM's interest -- Franz Werfel's "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" -- came out in 1934. It quickly topped the bestseller charts, but it was another 10 years before he finally sat down to read it.
[...]
Werfel's novel is a fictionalized account of the following events: Having heard about the soaring death tolls on the forced "death marches" to the Syrian desert, the villagers of Musa Dagh decided to resist Turkish forces. Nearly two months later, the survivors were rescued by the French, who spotted their distress banners from nearby ships.
[...]
But the book, written by an Austrian Jew as Hitler was gaining influence [...] was embraced with particular enthusiasm by Jews who saw it as an inspirational tale, and Germany quickly banned the book.
[...]
When MGM bought the rights, intending to bring the story to the screen with the help of Hollywood greats like producer Irving Thalberg and Armenian director Rouben Mamoulian, Armenians everywhere were ecstatic, he recalled. "That wonderful book is going to be made into a movie, and that movie will play all over the world, and finally our story of the genocide will get out."
The celebration was short-lived.
MGM soon dropped that project, and several subsequent attempts over the next few decades. It was widely rumored that the deal collapsed under pressure from the Turkish government, and in 1981, Minasian decided to find out exactly what had happened.
[...]
In his quest to document who dealt that blow, Minasian was granted rare access to MGM's archives by the studio's story editor, Samuel Marx, and he spent more than a week sifting through four grocery carts filled with files on the Musa Dagh movie. He dictated the interesting bits into his tape recorder. It took nearly three years after that to transcribe the recordings into notes.
Over the years, he also read through Werfel's papers housed at UCLA and the scripts kept by the American Film Institute.
To cap it off, he used the Freedom of Information Act to get the State Department's file on MGM and the Musa Dagh movie.
Minasian knows he faces a few publishing hurdles. To begin with, he's an unknown author with no agent, and also, he's been told his subject is "esoteric" and "passé." He figures he may end up self-publishing the book.
Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
MORAGA - As a child in the 1930s, Ed Minasian often found refuge in the movie theater across the street from the three-story tenement where he grew up in Massachusetts.
[...]
The 80-year-old Moraga resident, who lost siblings during the mass killings, has spent 24 years researching the [...] 1930s Hollywood. His findings, which he hopes to publish in a book, detail how the Turkish government managed to squelch repeated attempts by MGM studios to make a movie about the genocide.
[...]
He was 10 when the book that piqued MGM's interest -- Franz Werfel's "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" -- came out in 1934. It quickly topped the bestseller charts, but it was another 10 years before he finally sat down to read it.
[...]
Werfel's novel is a fictionalized account of the following events: Having heard about the soaring death tolls on the forced "death marches" to the Syrian desert, the villagers of Musa Dagh decided to resist Turkish forces. Nearly two months later, the survivors were rescued by the French, who spotted their distress banners from nearby ships.
[...]
But the book, written by an Austrian Jew as Hitler was gaining influence [...] was embraced with particular enthusiasm by Jews who saw it as an inspirational tale, and Germany quickly banned the book.
[...]
When MGM bought the rights, intending to bring the story to the screen with the help of Hollywood greats like producer Irving Thalberg and Armenian director Rouben Mamoulian, Armenians everywhere were ecstatic, he recalled. "That wonderful book is going to be made into a movie, and that movie will play all over the world, and finally our story of the genocide will get out."
The celebration was short-lived.
MGM soon dropped that project, and several subsequent attempts over the next few decades. It was widely rumored that the deal collapsed under pressure from the Turkish government, and in 1981, Minasian decided to find out exactly what had happened.
[...]
In his quest to document who dealt that blow, Minasian was granted rare access to MGM's archives by the studio's story editor, Samuel Marx, and he spent more than a week sifting through four grocery carts filled with files on the Musa Dagh movie. He dictated the interesting bits into his tape recorder. It took nearly three years after that to transcribe the recordings into notes.
Over the years, he also read through Werfel's papers housed at UCLA and the scripts kept by the American Film Institute.
To cap it off, he used the Freedom of Information Act to get the State Department's file on MGM and the Musa Dagh movie.
Minasian knows he faces a few publishing hurdles. To begin with, he's an unknown author with no agent, and also, he's been told his subject is "esoteric" and "passé." He figures he may end up self-publishing the book.
Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.
posted by Vahe Balabanian at 7:34 AM
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