States, Mehmed Münir Ertegün, was ordered by his government to prevent it from being made. As the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey was intent on suppressing any mention of the Armenian Genocide. Ertegün turned to the U.S. State Department and told it that he "earnestly hoped that [the movie studio] would desist from presenting any such picture, which would give a distorted version of the alleged massacres." The State Department tried to assure Ertegün that the film would not include any material that would offend Turkey but Ertegün remained adamant. The State Department attempted to mollify the Turkish government by presenting it with the final script, although this did not satisfy it either. The scriptwriters offered several watered-down versions but the Turkish government refused to budge. MGM's production chief was astonished by this level of interference by a foreign power, declaring, ″To hell with the Turks, I'm going to make the picture anyway.″ The fact that MGM planned to move forward with the production further enraged Turkey. Speaking to an MGM official, Ertegün threatened that ″If the movie is made, Turkey will launch a worldwide campaign against it. It rekindles the Armenian Question. The Armenian Question is settled.″ Ertegün′s threats were soon being echoed across the Turkish press. In a September 3, 1935 editorial, colored with anti-Semitic overtones, the Istanbul Turkish-language daily Haber opined: In the face of this pressure, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, conceded to Turkish demands and the film was scrapped. Michael Bobelian, a lawyer and a journalist, observes that the ″Musa Dagh incident is critical in understanding the evolution of Turkey's campaign of denying the crimes committed by the Young Turks ... The standoff with MGM revealed that Turkey would pressure foreign governments to go along with its policy of denial.″ In the early 1960s, an English publisher, Gordon Landsborough, attempted to produce a film version of the book and wrote a film treatment for it. When he discovered that MGM still held the film rights he attempted to buy them but was unsuccessful as MGM announced their interest in filming it, using a script by Carl Foreman. Landsborough wrote in 1965 of rumours of political pressure holding up that new MGM production. Another movie version was mentioned in the 1967 sales film Lionpower from MGM, as being slated for production in 1968–1969 but nothing came of this version either. 1982 film In the