After MGM gave up on the adaptation, it sold the film rights to John Kurkjian, a real-estate developer with little filmmaking experience. Kurkjian initially hoped another studio would purchase the rights from him, but the contract was due to expire in only six weeks in 1982. With no major backer secured, he decided to start production himself to preserve control of the property. Writer Alex Hakobian was instructed to combine material from several earlier scripts, producing a screenplay that critics and historians later judged to bear only a thin resemblance to Werfel’s novel. The intended budget had been roughly $8–10 million, but the independent production could raise only about $1 million; labor costs alone consumed a large portion of the money at union rates. Scenes and the scale of the story were drastically reduced, and filming was carried out around Malibu and the hills of Los Angeles rather than on the grand historical canvas originally envisioned. The finished film was screened mainly for Armenian audiences, avoided by commercial theaters, and savaged by the few critics who saw it, with assessments ranging from a 'dreary little film' to something not even amounting to a conventional B-picture.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1980s
The Six-Week Deadline That Turned Musa Dagh into a Million-Dollar Rush Job
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh / 1980s
After MGM gave up on the adaptation, it sold the film rights to John Kurkjian, a real-estate developer with little filmmaking experience. Kurkjian initially hoped another studio would purchase the rights from him, but the contract was due to expire in only six weeks in 1982. With no major backer secured, he decided to start production himself to preserve control of the property. Writer Alex Hakobian was instructed to combine material from several earlier scripts, producing a screenplay that critics and historians later judged to bear only a thin resemblance to Werfel’s novel. The intended budget had been roughly $8–10 million, but the independent production could raise only about $1 million; labor costs alone consumed a large portion of the money at union rates. Scenes and the scale of the story were drastically reduced, and filming was carried out around Malibu and the hills of Los Angeles rather than on the grand historical canvas originally envisioned. The finished film was screened mainly for Armenian audiences, avoided by commercial theaters, and savaged by the few critics who saw it, with assessments ranging from a 'dreary little film' to something not even amounting to a conventional B-picture.
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