The Message

Akkad was making an epic about the Islamic world called The Lion of the Desert when he was approached by the director John Carpenter, who said that he wanted to make a picture for $300,000. “I laughed,” the producer later recalled. “You get worried when the budget is high or low. I asked him about the story. He told it to me in four words and I grabbed it. He said, ‘Babysitter to be killed by the boogie man.’ The babysitter part grabbed me because every kid in America knows what a babysitter is. I told him, ’Let’s do it.’ I was spending $300,000 a day on Lion of the Desert.”

Halloween came in on budget, and was a success at the box office. Akkad once asked one of his sons, then aged 17, why people were prepared to pay good money to be scared. The boy replied: “Dad, I take a girl with me to the cinema. After five minutes, I’m either grabbing her or she’s grabbing me.”

Born at Aleppo, Syria, in July 1930, Moustapha Akkad was the son of a customs officer, who, when his son secured a place at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to study film direction and production in the early 1950s, saw him off at the airport with $200 and a copy of the Koran.

Akkad spent a further three years studying for Master’s degree at the University of Southern California (USC), after which he met the director Sam Peckinpah, who hired him as a consultant for a film about the Algerian revolution; the film was never made, but Peckinpah encouraged the young man, who found a job as a producer at CBS.

In 1976 Akkad produced and directed The Message. Originally called Mohammed, Messenger of God, the title had to be changed after cinemas received threatening telephone calls from Muslims who thought that the film offended Islam by portraying the Prophet himself (it did not). The picture, which starred Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas, was about the origins of Islam, and Akkad had go outside the United States to raise the money. He later remarked: “Being a Muslim I felt that it was my duty to tell the truth about Islam.”

His next big project, The Lion of the Desert (1980), in which Quinn and Irene Papas were joined by Oliver Reed, Rod Steiger and John Gielgud, was about the real-life Bedouin leader Omar Mukhtar (Quinn) who fought Mussolini’s troops in the deserts of Libya. To finance this picture, Akkad had persuaded Libya’s President Gadaffi to invest $35 million, and he blamed the film’s relatively poor performance at the box office on the publicity over this.

Akkad, who once tried to buy Pinewood Studios from the Rank Organisation, had a studio at Twickenham. For many years he had been trying to raise $80 million to make a film about Saladin and the Crusades, starring Sean Connery, for which he already had the script. —The Telegraph