Filming plans and censorship efforts for Blue Rain

Blue Rain is the proposed art film that briefly organized Feridun’s and Füsun’s hopes of entering Turkish cinema, while giving Kemal Basmacı a role as prospective producer and protector of their project. Although Kemal pledged to make the film after Feridun delivered its screenplay, the script’s weaknesses, the slow censorship process, and repeated rewriting prevented production from beginning. The delays made Blue Rain both a practical obstacle and a measure of Füsun’s thwarted ambition: as the promised film remained unrealized, she began considering another acting offer.

Origin and Promise

Toward the end of November, after Füsun had coaxed him to finish, Feridun brought the final screenplay to Kemal after supper. He handed over the typescript on the upstairs landing, with Füsun watching closely, and asked Kemal to decide as its prospective producer. Füsun stressed that she believed in the screenplay and trusted Kemal not to let her down. He answered by declaring the film made, turning an informal promise into a commitment before he had read the pages.

The screenplay was titled Blue Rain. Its artistic aspirations mattered to Füsun, who wanted to star in it, but Kemal also recognized that the project offered a plausible reason for his frequent visits to the Keskin family. He had come to respect Feridun’s knowledge of film and his criticisms of Turkish filmmakers who imitated Western art cinema, made their work artificial or moralistic, or mixed artistic pretensions with melodrama and commercial populism. Yet Blue Rain, on Kemal’s reading, fell into many of the very traps Feridun had identified. It did not draw on Füsun, Kemal, or their romance, despite the intimacy surrounding its making.

Kemal’s judgment was especially sharp because the screenplay’s pursuit of art seemed to cloud the writers’ awareness of their own principles. It included three commercially motivated appearances in which Füsun’s character would be nude. Kemal considered these scenes, including one framed as an imitation of French New Wave cinema and another set in a dream garden, gratuitous and artistically unconvincing. His confidence in the project had been a performance even before he read the script; afterward, he privately opposed it more strongly than Tarık would have. Nevertheless, Kemal praised it to Füsun and Feridun and claimed to be ready to begin auditions for actors and technicians, sustaining the project rather than openly withdrawing his backing.

Censorship and the Rewrite

The production plan encountered a film industry in which state censorship could determine whether an investment reached cinemas at all. Hayal Hayati, a director whose film had been cut after the board objected to family quarrels, described outright prohibition as the worst outcome: even a heavily edited film could earn back its costs if it still made sense. The response to that risk was a two-stage process, beginning with submission of the screenplay for approval of its subject and scenes. As in other dealings requiring state permission, this system had fostered a complicated bureaucracy of permits, bribery, agents, and agencies offering to manage applications.

In the spring of 1977, Kemal and Feridun considered which intermediary might help Blue Rain through that process at the offices of Lemon Films. One possibility was Demir the Typewriter, an Istanbul Greek screenwriter and former boxer whose work was to revise scripts in his own style so they would not offend the censors. His edits softened conflicts between rich and poor, workers and bosses, victims and wrongdoers, and could temper a hero’s critical closing speech with approving references to the nation, Atatürk, or Allah. Even major firms that already bribed the censorship board used his services, valuing his ability to make extreme or vulgar material appear innocently charming.

After discovering how much they admired the lyrical passages Demir had contributed to films they had seen the previous summer, Kemal, Feridun, and Füsun visited him at home in Kurtuluş. The room’s enormous wall clock and Demir’s famous old Remington gave the meeting the atmosphere of a workshop devoted to the transformation of screenplays. Demir offered to recast their script if he liked it, but warned that his workload would make the process slow. His twin daughters, seated at the dining table among a stack of waiting projects, were already helping with the work and, he said with pride, had become even better than he was at preparing scripts for approval.

One of the twins returned Blue Rain after rewriting it specially for Füsun, along with praise that presented it as a genuine European art film. By then, however, three months had passed. Füsun was displeased by the delay and sometimes spoke crossly about it; Kemal pointed out that Feridun’s own work had been slow as well. The censorship machinery had not simply required a form to be filed: its queue, intermediaries, and repeated revisions had become part of the creative process, changing the screenplay while postponing the moment when it could be filmed.

Füsun’s Ambition and the Growing Delay

As winter began, the three visited backstreet haunts, prospective production offices, coffeehouses where actors and film workers gathered, and bars frequented by producers, directors, and performers. Their regular destination was the Pelür Bar, where aspiring starlets, film professionals, journalists, and people seeking entry into the business mingled. These visits placed Blue Rain within a lively but precarious film world: its participants traded stories and ideas, but the proposed production still lacked an acceptable screenplay and had not begun shooting.

The delay affected Füsun’s mood and her private work. When she had been able to paint little since their previous visit, Kemal understood that her discouragement arose from the stalled film. She told him that Feridun was unhappy with Demir’s rewrite and was starting it over, and urged Kemal to make clear that the process could not go on indefinitely. She wanted her film to begin. On another evening, she admitted that months might pass before Feridun’s art film could be shot because the censors were slow and suspicious. Her longing for a different artistic life also surfaced in her wish to go to Paris to see the pictures in its museums.

Füsun’s impatience coincided with another possibility. At the Pelür, Muzaffer had offered her a role in a romantic melodrama. She had not yet read a screenplay—one would be written if she accepted—but she considered the offer serious and was thinking of taking it. Kemal warned her about the men involved and advised that Feridun speak to them on her behalf. Füsun replied that Feridun was careful and that they were both taking care; the scene shows her weighing a real opportunity against a project whose production remained indefinitely out of reach.

Melodrama and the Later Film Career

The novel places this unrealized art-film plan against a cinema culture in which melodrama could command a powerful public response. At an open-air screening, Kemal and Füsun watched Orhan Gencebay play a poor fisherman trapped by obligation and by the aftermath of violence against a woman. The audience’s silence around the film’s treatment of shame and marriage made Kemal confront the social force of chastity and female reputation. A second feature turned attention toward the pain of love, which Kemal understood as a sorrow shared beyond the individual characters. These screenings do not resolve the artistic problems of Blue Rain, but they establish the emotional terrain against which its ambitions—and its commercial compromises—are measured.

The later course of Feridun’s filmmaking underscores how differently a production could reach the screen. In May 1981 he began shooting Broken Lives, a separate screenplay based on Halit Ziya’s novel but set in a world far removed from the source book. The production began at the old Peri Cinema, arranged as a nightclub setting. Critics disparaged the film, but audiences in Istanbul and the provinces embraced it, and it became a box-office hit. Its success helped revive cinema attendance after the years of political violence and brought Kemal greater standing as a producer. Blue Rain, by contrast, remains the project whose promised start was overtaken by script revisions and delay: it reveals the friction between artistic aspiration, commercial calculation, and the state procedures through which Turkish films had to pass.