Founding Lemon Films

Lemon Films was founded in early 1977 by Kemal Basmacı, Füsun, and Feridun as a small film-financing company that joined Kemal’s money and protective ambitions to Feridun’s filmmaking and Füsun’s hoped-for acting career. Its creation moved their project out of the film bars and into an office, but it could not separate filmmaking from the pressures surrounding it: the company had to finance production, negotiate state censorship, choose collaborators, and reach an audience. Its later commercial success with Broken Lives brought Kemal public standing in the film world, even as the enterprise had begun as a means of managing his private anxieties about Füsun’s place in that world.

Founding and Purpose

By the beginning of 1977, Füsun was making new acquaintances in Beyoğlu’s film bars, where admirers repeatedly offered to place her in photoromans or commercials. Kemal interpreted her friendly smiles and familiar touches as signs that she would soon leave Feridun, and imagined that he would marry her at the next opportunity. From that expectation came a protective rationale: he wanted Füsun to become an actress without having to draw close to the people he considered part of a sordid and compromising film scene.

Kemal signaled to Feridun that it was time to settle the technical team for their film project. The three then agreed that their joint venture would be better organized from an office than from the Pelür Bar. The company was to finance Feridun’s films, but it also offered Kemal a way to influence the circumstances in which Füsun might enter the profession. His account makes the founding both a practical decision about film production and an act shaped by his possessiveness: he hoped that a company he financed could provide a safer, more controlled route for her career.

The name came from Füsun. At her cheerful suggestion, they named the firm after Lemon, the canary. The bird appeared on the company’s business card, and Lemon Films operated next door to the New Angel Cinema. The choice gave the new business an identity associated with Füsun’s own suggestion, while its location placed it beside a cinema rather than within the bar scene from which the partners wanted to move their work.

Financing and Working Relationships

Kemal arranged for 1,200 Turkish lira to be deposited each month into a personal account at the Agricultural Bank’s Beyoğlu branch. The monthly sum exceeded what he paid either of his two highest-ranking managers at Satsat. Half went toward Feridun’s salary as managing director; the balance covered office rent and production costs. The company therefore rested on Kemal’s continuing financial support, while Feridun took responsibility for managing its film work.

The arrangement extended beyond the Keskin household. During the year after the company was founded, Kemal cultivated Feridun as a colleague and friend, meeting him at the office to review screenplay progress, applications to the Turkish Board of Censors, and the search for a male lead for Füsun. Kemal describes Feridun as affable, sensible, and sincere, qualities that allowed their partnership to function despite the strain created by Kemal’s feelings for Füsun and his jealousy of her social life. The company gave the two men a recurring professional setting in which to work together outside the family’s dinners.

Kemal also used Satsat to increase the film company’s resources. He and Feridun were wary of two well-known actors who had expressed interest in the art film, fearing that their reputations and conduct would expose Füsun to unwanted attention. They regarded such scandal as one of the film business’s means of making actors famous and drawing crowds, but wanted to avoid that kind of publicity around her. Knowing that protecting her could cost Feridun, Kemal ordered Satsat to remit additional funds and enlarge Lemon Films’ budget. The decision reveals how his private concern directly shaped the company’s expenditure and casting policy.

Censorship and Film Development

Lemon Films’ early work had to pass through a system in which state permission shaped what could be made. The censorship process was divided into two stages: first, a screenplay went to the board for approval of its subject and scenes; subsequent review could still affect whether the completed film reached cinemas. Because applications involved complicated permits and bribery, intermediaries and agencies offered to guide filmmakers through the process. In spring 1977, Kemal and Feridun spent time at the company’s office considering which agent to use for the Blue Rain screenplay.

One possible intermediary was Demir the Typewriter, an Istanbul Greek known for rewriting screenplays on his own typewriter. He softened conflicts and controversial material, making divisions between rich and poor, workers and bosses, rapists and victims, or virtue and evil less sharp. He could also temper a hero’s critical final words with conventional references to the flag, the nation, Atatürk, and Allah. Even films without obviously unsuitable material were sometimes entrusted to him for the everyday charm and innocence he could add. His work illustrates the terms on which Lemon Films pursued production: creative decisions were made in anticipation of censorship, not simply after a finished film was submitted.

The company’s plans later shifted toward a screenplay Feridun described as ready for production. In January 1981, over lunch at Rejans, he told Kemal that he had a crude but promising project. A ready screenplay meant that it had secured the approvals or permissions considered necessary for safe passage through the state process; when few popular screenplays were approved, producers could be willing to shoot material they would otherwise have rejected. Although Kemal thought the proposed film and its songs unsuitable for Füsun and damaging to Feridun’s artistic reputation, he agreed to back it, partly because he wanted to make Feridun happy.

Production and Public Consequences

Feridun began filming Broken Lives in May 1981. Despite borrowing its title from Halit Ziya’s eighty-year-old novel, the film’s story belonged to a different world: the muddy streets and gazinos of 1970s Istanbul rather than the Westernized bourgeois mansions of the Ottoman setting. Papatya played a wronged woman who became a singer and patiently planned revenge against the man who had taken her virginity. Production used the old Peri Cinema, with its theater seats removed and tables installed to resemble a nightclub. The staging drew on the gazino, a familiar setting for Turkish musical melodramas where singers’ performances could turn private suffering into public spectacle.

The film’s production also depended on the economics of audience-building. Filmmakers had once filled gazino scenes with real singers and members of the public who attended for a free show and served as unpaid extras. With a lesser-known actress such as Papatya, the production could not rely on a famous performer or an already eager crowd. It offered free kebabs to men who arrived wearing ties and women who came without headscarves, recruiting spectators to fill the scene. The method made visible the close connection between casting, the appearance of fame, and the practical need to create a convincing audience on screen.

Critics treated Broken Lives harshly, but audiences in Istanbul and the provinces made it a box-office hit. Viewers left cinemas moved by Papatya’s songs and the film’s revenge ending; the actor playing the evil rich man, Ekrem Güçlü, later avoided going out for a time after being punched and spat upon in the street. The film was also credited with bringing people back to cinemas after the period known as the terror years. As cinema attendance revived, the Pelür Bar filled again with people making deals or seeking to be seen. The success transformed Kemal’s standing: he became a prominent producer whom actors and crew members sought out, and the film company’s investment had effects well beyond its original office and budget.

Significance

Lemon Films connects intimate desire to the material machinery of cultural production. Kemal’s monthly transfers, his extra contributions from Satsat, and his interventions in casting were not detached business decisions; they were bound to his hope of directing Füsun’s professional circumstances. Yet the company’s projects also required negotiation with censors, agents, performers, venues, and audiences, forces that could not be controlled by personal funding alone. Its founding thus gives institutional form to a contradiction in Kemal’s plan: he hoped to shelter Füsun from the film world by placing her career within a company whose survival depended on engaging that world.

The company’s later success also altered the consequences of its beginning. Lemon Films had been organized as a way to finance Feridun’s films and manage Füsun’s entry into acting, but Broken Lives made Kemal publicly recognizable as a producer and helped revive the commercial world around the cinemas and Pelür. Its trajectory—from a business card bearing Lemon’s likeness and a carefully divided monthly budget to a hit film and a heightened public profile—shows how a personal project became subject to the larger demands of film production, censorship, and popular taste.