Blame the writers, Bossypants, blame the writers
Without meaning to, Tina Fey, who recently hosted the Golden Globes, may have misinformed her audience about the professional achievements of Amal Clooney (ne Alamuddin).
In a funny take down of Amal’s husband, actor George Clooney (who was receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes ceremony) Fey listed some of the achievements of his wife Amal, which truth be told, are probably a bit more demanding (but less lucrative), than George’s. “So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.”
During her joke, Fey reported that Amal “was selected for a three-person UN commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza strip.”
She was offered a seat on the panel, but turned it down.
Maybe Amal can convince her husband to add some heft to his resume producing the movie The Forty Days of Musa Dagh which was stuck in development hell for decades before a disappointing version was made in the early 1980s.
In the 1930s, MGM bought the rights to the book by the same name written by Franz Werfel, who told the story of five villages that successfull defended themselves from destruction at the hands of the founders of the modern state of Turkey.
A new translation of the book, translated from German by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel and published by David R. Godine, is available here.
As it turns out, Turkish government blocked the production of the movie for many years. That should incense Clooney, who was furious at how the rollout of a more recent movie, “The Interview,” was disrupted by hack attacks blamed on the North Korean government. Clooney would be doing the world a great service if he could get a decent version of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh produced for a wide audience.
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