From Slate’s the best movies never made:
Genesis 1948
In 1970, Otto Preminger bought the screen rights to Dan Kurzman’s 800-plus-page nonfiction chronicle of "The First Arab-Israeli War," intending a follow-up to his 1960 epic, Exodus. At a press conference, he said, "We’ll show both the conflict on the battlefield and in the political arenas in Washington, Moscow, the United Nations, and the Mid-East." He expressed the hope that the film "will offend neither Arabs nor Jews" without acknowledging that Exodus had certainly offended Arabs. Israeli parents, meanwhile, had reason to be wary of Preminger’s planned location shoot. While filming Exodus, he labored over one scene in which a dozen very young Israelis were to cry on cue as Arabs attacked their homes. When they wouldn’t cooperate with tears, Preminger instructed an assistant to lead the children’s mothers over a hill and out of sight. ”You see, your mothers have been taken away,” Preminger informed them. ”You are never going to see them again—never!” The children obediently burst into tears. But instead of Genesis 1948, he made a domestic-discord movie, Such Good Friends.
