SYLVESTER STALLONE’S DREAM TO PRODUCE 40 DAYS OF MUSA DAGH

Armenpress
Dec 20 2006

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS" In an interview with Denver Post
actor Sylvester Stallone said one of his dreams was to to create an
epic, and the book that intrigues him is Franz Werfel’s ‘The Forty
Days of Musa Dagh,’ detailing the Turkish genocide of its Armenian
community in 1915.

"French ships eventually rescued some Armenians, and Stallone has
his favorite scene memorized: ‘The French ships come, and they’ve
dropped the ladders and everybody has climbed up the side. The ships
sail. The hero, the one who set up the rescue, has fallen asleep,
exhausted, behind a rock on the slope above. The camera pulls back,
and the ships and the sea are on one side, and there’s one lonely
figure at the top of the mountain, and the Turks are coming up the
mountain by the thousands on the far side.’ "Talk about a political
hot potato. The Turks have been killing that subject for 85 years,"
the super star added.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a 1934 novel by Austrian-Jewish author
Franz Werfel based around an event that took place on Musa Dagh
in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. The Forty Days of
Musa Dagh achieved great international success and has been credited
with awakening the world to the evidence of the persecution of the
Armenians.

The novel is a fictionalized account based on the real-life defense
of Musa Dagh’s Damlayik by Armenians who were facing systematic
deporatations and massacres put into effect by the government of
Young Turks.

Although written as a novel, the historical background content of
the book has generally been accepted as fact. In the 1930s Turkey
pressured the United States State department to prevent MGM Studios
to produce a film based on the novel.

A filmed version of the story was eventually made independently and
was released theatrically in 1982.