Contra Costa Times, CA
July 11 2005
Author aims to uncover genocide’s screen link
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.
“From our window I could see the Grace Episcopal Church, and next to
it was the Capitol Theater. On some Sundays, I chose the latter over
the former,” Minasian said. At 10 cents a show, it was the best
entertainment value of the day, and the darkened theater offered an
escape from everyday woes.
There was plenty to escape from: The Depression was in full swing on
one side of the ocean, Adolf Hitler was coming to power on the other,
and in the Armenian community he grew up in, the memory of the
atrocities committed against his people during the genocide that
began in 1915 was still fresh.
Armenians say that Turkish forces, trying to purge the country of
Armenians, caused the deaths of 1.5 million people in outright
killings or in forced deportations that led to starvation during
World War I. The Turkish government denies the genocide occurred.
For someone of Armenian descent, it rarely takes long for the
conversation to circle around to the genocide 90 years ago. For
Minasian, it takes no time at all for the conversation to circle
around to movies.
The 80-year-old Moraga resident, who lost siblings during the mass
killings, has spent 24 years researching the place where those two
circles intersect: 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.
The Armenian community — scattered throughout the world after the
genocide — had hoped the film would finally bring international
attention to their plight, and he felt the loss keenly.
“All of us knew, yes, Turkey had something to do with stopping that
movie from being made, but we never knew who, what, when, where,
why?” Minasian said. “Well, I found out.”
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.
By then Minasian was in the Air Force, “stationed in a godforsaken
place in west Texas called Rattlesnake Army Air Base,” where they
trucked in girls from nearby towns on the weekends to dance with the
GIs.
“None of us ever got to finish a dance, because we were always cut
in, but I had plenty of time to read in my off hours,” he said. He
found the book at the base library. “I read that book more often than
any other book. I used to read it every April … because April is
the anniversary of the genocide.”
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.
The villagers were relocated to the Middle East, where they formed a
community in the Anjar area of present-day Lebanon, said Barlow Der
Mugrdechian, a professor of Armenian Studies at Fresno State
University who knows of Minasian’s project. The incident is “a
well-known story to the Armenians.”
But the book, written by an Austrian Jew as Hitler was gaining
influence, had an even broader appeal. It was embraced with
particular enthusiasm by Jews who saw it as an inspirational tale,
and Germany quickly banned the book.
“I say, look, if the world had responded to the Armenian genocide,
there might not have been a Holocaust,” Minasian said.
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.
Over the next decades, Minasian sifted through archives from Armenian
newspapers, Hollywood institutions and the U.S. State Department to
piece together a picture of the doomed flick’s fate.
Between raising a family and pursuing a teaching career, he has
written articles on the topic published by the National Association
for Armenian Studies, and a 300-page manuscript he hopes to publish
soon.
“He’s done a rather thorough study of this whole issue,” said UCLA
professor Richard Hovannisian, a leading scholar of Armenian studies.
Turkey’s role in the movie’s demise isn’t a matter of speculation,
it’s well-documented in diplomatic correspondences in the U.S. State
Department archives, he said. “(The movie) would have attracted
worldwide attention on the screen, so the quashing of the work was a
blow to historical memory.”
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.
His passion for film is one of the forces driving the project,
evident in the old movie posters lining his walls. Conversations
about almost anything can lead back to movies, from the book Minasian
just finished reading (“The Da Vinci Code,” whose movie version will
star Tom Hanks) to Armenia’s early embrace of Christianity (which
elicits a reference to the recent Crusades flick “Kingdom of
Heaven”).
When “Sideways” came out last year, Minasian was the first to spread
the word throughout the local Armenian community: Some of the final
scenes feature an Armenian-American wedding, filmed at a real
Southern California Armenian church.
For Minasian, the genocide isn’t just history, it’s family history.
His parents both survived the massacre but lost their first spouses
and some of their children. His mother was 19 when she watched the
men in her village, including her first husband, marched away by
Turkish soldiers, carrying the shovels to dig their own graves. His
mother and sister joined the long line of Armenians forced to march
toward the Syrian desert, with only as much food and water as they
could carry.
His father was already living in the United States, hoping to send
for his first wife and three children back in Turkey, when the
massacre began. Only one daughter from that marriage survived, and
when Minasian met her in 1976, she told him about a brother he had
never heard of, who died of typhus at age 3 on one of the forced
marches. Minasian, who still wonders why his father never mentioned
the little boy, now carries a copy of the child’s picture in his
wallet.
His work is a tribute to them.
“I see it as my legacy for my folks, who were survivors, and so many
of the people I came to know in my youth and even now,” he said. “You
see, we’re not fighting for vengeance, we’re fighting for justice. We
want the Turkish government to own up to what they did.”
BIOGRAPHY
NAME: Ed Minasian
AGE: 80
EDUCATION: Master’s from UC Berkeley
OCCUPATION: Retired teacher from Laney College in Oakland
RESIDENCE: Moraga
CLAIM TO FAME: Spent years researching MGM’s attempts to make a movie
about the Armenian genocide
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress