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Jan 20 2007
Sylvester Stallone wants to Make Armenian Genocide Epic
Saturday, 20 January 2007 Written by Alexander G. Rubio
I think it's safe to say a man of Sylvester Stallone's means can
afford to globetrot with the best of them. But prudence should
perhaps dictate that he scratch Turkey off his shortlist of potential
vacation spots. As the whole pre-Nobel Prize saga of Orhan Pamuk, and
related cases, show, there are certain historical topics that are
prone to stir up a bit of... bad blood... in that part of the world -
One of them is, of course, the question of the status of the Kurdish
population. But chief among them is perhaps the festering sore that
is the Armenian genocide.
As recent events have shown, it is a question that still provokes
deadly conflict. The murder of the Armenian journalist and editor
Hrant Dink, who had been the victim of even official persecution, is
a glaring example of just how inflamed this topic really is.
And this is the hornet's nest Stallone is planning to put his foot
to.
Slain journalist Hrant Dink
(Click for full image)The star of such movies as, "Rocky", its recent
sequel "Rocky Balboa", and the decidedly non-pacifist "Rambo" is
planning to shoot a movie based on the book "The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh" about the Armenian Genocide by the Austrian author Franz
Werfel, according to The Denver Post, via Filmstalker.
During World War I, as the Ottoman Turkish empire fought Russian
forces, some of the Armenian minority in eastern Anatolia sided with
the Russians.
Turkey took reprisals. On 24 April 1915 it rounded up and killed
hundreds of Armenian community leaders.
In May 1915, the Armenian minority, two or three million strong, was
forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards
Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route.
The issue has long been a contentious topic in Turkey, which claims
the 1915 events were not genocide, something that has become a bit of
a problem in Turkish relations to the European Union, which it hopes
to join as a member, due to the European Parliament's decision to
recognise as genocide the extermination of around 1.5 million
civilian Armenians in Turkey (the Ottoman Empire at the time) in
1915.
Late last year, French MPs also passed a bill making it a crime to
deny that the Ottoman Turkish empire committed genocide against
Armenians, a decision that delighted Armenians and infuriated the
Turks.
For years Stallone's wanted 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.
(After futile attempts to turn the novel into a movie, filmmakers
finally succeeded in 1982, but it was a low-profile production.)
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."
A pretty great shot.
The movie would be "an epic about the complete destruction of a
civilization," Stallone said. Then he laughed at the ambition. "Talk
about a political hot potato. The Turks have been killing that
subject for 85 years."
And the blow-back has not been slow in coming. UK daily The
Independent reports that the plans have attracted the wrath of the
Turkish community in Hollywood.
Victims of the Armenian genocide
(Click for larger image)A group calling themselves the Association on
Struggle Against Armenian Genocide Acknowledgement is targeting
Stallone with an angry letters campaign urging him not to make the
film.
"The book is full of lies, since the author got his information from
nationalist and radical Armenians," says the association's chairman,
Savas Egilmez.
"We have already sent necessary documents about the mentioned days to
the producer of the film. Our allies will urge the producer not to
produce this film."
On the eve of the orchestration of his own genocide against the Jews,
Hitler took comfort from the fact that such an atrocity could
seemingly pass all but unnoticed to the outside world. "Who remembers
the Armenians?", he asked. Well, quite few, and more each day, seems
to be the answer.
http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/4616/42/
Jan 20 2007
Sylvester Stallone wants to Make Armenian Genocide Epic
Saturday, 20 January 2007 Written by Alexander G. Rubio
I think it's safe to say a man of Sylvester Stallone's means can
afford to globetrot with the best of them. But prudence should
perhaps dictate that he scratch Turkey off his shortlist of potential
vacation spots. As the whole pre-Nobel Prize saga of Orhan Pamuk, and
related cases, show, there are certain historical topics that are
prone to stir up a bit of... bad blood... in that part of the world -
One of them is, of course, the question of the status of the Kurdish
population. But chief among them is perhaps the festering sore that
is the Armenian genocide.
As recent events have shown, it is a question that still provokes
deadly conflict. The murder of the Armenian journalist and editor
Hrant Dink, who had been the victim of even official persecution, is
a glaring example of just how inflamed this topic really is.
And this is the hornet's nest Stallone is planning to put his foot
to.
Slain journalist Hrant Dink
(Click for full image)The star of such movies as, "Rocky", its recent
sequel "Rocky Balboa", and the decidedly non-pacifist "Rambo" is
planning to shoot a movie based on the book "The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh" about the Armenian Genocide by the Austrian author Franz
Werfel, according to The Denver Post, via Filmstalker.
During World War I, as the Ottoman Turkish empire fought Russian
forces, some of the Armenian minority in eastern Anatolia sided with
the Russians.
Turkey took reprisals. On 24 April 1915 it rounded up and killed
hundreds of Armenian community leaders.
In May 1915, the Armenian minority, two or three million strong, was
forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards
Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route.
The issue has long been a contentious topic in Turkey, which claims
the 1915 events were not genocide, something that has become a bit of
a problem in Turkish relations to the European Union, which it hopes
to join as a member, due to the European Parliament's decision to
recognise as genocide the extermination of around 1.5 million
civilian Armenians in Turkey (the Ottoman Empire at the time) in
1915.
Late last year, French MPs also passed a bill making it a crime to
deny that the Ottoman Turkish empire committed genocide against
Armenians, a decision that delighted Armenians and infuriated the
Turks.
For years Stallone's wanted 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.
(After futile attempts to turn the novel into a movie, filmmakers
finally succeeded in 1982, but it was a low-profile production.)
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."
A pretty great shot.
The movie would be "an epic about the complete destruction of a
civilization," Stallone said. Then he laughed at the ambition. "Talk
about a political hot potato. The Turks have been killing that
subject for 85 years."
And the blow-back has not been slow in coming. UK daily The
Independent reports that the plans have attracted the wrath of the
Turkish community in Hollywood.
Victims of the Armenian genocide
(Click for larger image)A group calling themselves the Association on
Struggle Against Armenian Genocide Acknowledgement is targeting
Stallone with an angry letters campaign urging him not to make the
film.
"The book is full of lies, since the author got his information from
nationalist and radical Armenians," says the association's chairman,
Savas Egilmez.
"We have already sent necessary documents about the mentioned days to
the producer of the film. Our allies will urge the producer not to
produce this film."
On the eve of the orchestration of his own genocide against the Jews,
Hitler took comfort from the fact that such an atrocity could
seemingly pass all but unnoticed to the outside world. "Who remembers
the Armenians?", he asked. Well, quite few, and more each day, seems
to be the answer.
http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/4616/42/