THE REEL THING

IT'S not all sunglasses and autographs. We simply want to be recognised as a serious business and treated as such. I don't want Ireland to miss the boat." When Morgan O'Sullivan, then managing director of Ardmore Studios in Bray, Co Wicklow, made that comment to The Irish Times eight years ago, he was still trying to convince the government that what it could do for the film industry would be more than repaid by what the film industry could do for the country. Having witnessed at first hand what was achieved in Australia with political backing for a native film industry, O'Sullivan was in no doubt Ireland could do the same.

Now, as an independent producer instrumental in bringing the Oscar and BAFTA winning Braveheart to Ireland, he can say the Irish film industry is being taken very seriously. "We have produced in the past number of years - particularly in the past couple of years since the integrated policy of the Government came into being a body of work, both imported work and work generated here, that is admired in America, in Europe and beyond."

O'Sullivan's own track record as an independent producer played no small part in the upsurge of film making here. From the late 1960s, when the depiction of Ireland on celluloid was all sham rocks and shillelaghs, he was convinced a role in the international film industry would not only bring much needed jobs "but was a great way for us to make our mark and become known as a nation". And he applied himself to learning the business of film with remarkable resolve.

"I didn't want to be a writer, I didn't want to be a director, I was always interested in being a producer," he explains in the spacious, airy office which he now rents at Ardmore. "The producer is like a managing director of a company. He brings all the elements together: he raises the finances and he manages the show on a day to day basis." He saw the importance of making a connection with the US, which controlled the business side of the industry.

As a freelance broadcaster with RTE, O'Sullivan made his first working foray into Hollywood in 1970 during time off from the station. Intrigued by the TV series Hawaii Five O and the logistical problems of being set on islands 3,000 miles from its editing base in Los Angeles, he decided to film a documentary on the making of the series. He saw it as a great way of learning how the business worked.

"The producer of Haiwaii Five O, Leonard Freeman, couldn't believe it. A guy from Ireland arriving with a bag of film. He thought I was out of my mind." But it was the start of a valuable friendship as Freeman, and LA based Irish director Michael O'Herlihy, took a paternal interest in this young, sandy haired fella who saw no reason why what was being done in Hollywood couldn't be done in Ireland.

The first film O'Sullivan made in Ardmore in 1978 was directed by O'Herlihy. Cry of the Innocent, written by then Irish resident Frederick Forsyth, was a rather contrived TV thriller starring Cyril Cusack and Rod Taylor. With it, Tara Productions became the first foreign company to pre-sell a film to any American television network, in this case NBC for its Movie Of The Week. But O'Sullivan, his reddish hair now greying, cringes at the memory.

"I remember going to Freddie and saying: `You're living here tax free, Freddie, how would you like to put something back in: write us a Movie Of The Week'. `What's a Movie Of The Week, Morgan?' Freddie duly did it and it did quite well in the ratings and has been shown ever since. But it was a very modest, first time effort," he says with an apologetic frown of his bushy eyebrows.

Nonetheless, this debut's effects stretched beyond the initial success. Firstly, O'Herlihy invited some of the Ardmore technicians to spend time learning more about their craft out in Hollywood. Secondly, the fact that a respected, director had gone to Ireland to work with O Sullivan nudged open more TV executives' doors for him. This networking was to lead to his involvement with the very best of American television, and that was a company called Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, which made Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere and made Remington Steele over here".

Throughout the 1970s, O'Sullivan balanced his apprenticeship in the film business with the "day" job at RTE. His mellow, soothing tones gave a laid back air to whatever radio slot he occupied, be it Morning Melody, Late Date or the Morgan O'Sullivan Show. That consummate ease with chat and the involving gaze of his hazel eyes were valuable attributes. He made frequent trips to Hollywood to record interviews with stars out there, all the time watching, learning and making contacts in the industry.

"I spent some time with Hitchcock at Universal. He was brilliant. I mean, he was murderous on the cast, but just watching him was a delight, you could see that he was into the writing in such a big way."

IN 1984, O'Sullivan left Montrose to run Tara Productions full time. Two years later he put together a package with Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises and NadCorp to buy Ardmore out of liquidation.

His appointment as managing director at Ardmore would have come as no surprise to those who remembered his days at Presentation College, Bray, down the road from Ardmore. "I used to run the film shows at school on a Saturday night," he recalls. "We got out 16 mm films from General Film Distributors in town. I picked the films and advertised them. I remember the first time we got a film out it broke, so it was the first time I had to use a splicer! I remember going to Coca Cola and getting them to put on promotions with the movie, all that kind of stuff. Dublin Dairies used to supply us with ice cream."

The freckle-faced pupil had joined Presentation College as a boarder at the age of 12. Born in Sutton in 1945, he spent his early school days at nearby St Fintan's. He was an only child, and his mother and father had separated by the time he was five. His father went to work in business in Cape Town.

It was through his mother, Elizabeth, who typed radio scripts at RTE, that O'Sullivan got his first break in broadcasting. When P.J. O'Connor was looking for a boy actor to read two or three lines, she volunteered her 14 year old son's services.

"I apparently read the two or three lines okay and he said would I like to come back in? So I auditioned for the series Bookshop On The Quay, written and directed by Dan Treston. I remember three of us sitting outside waiting in Henry Street, knees shaking." He got the part, playing opposite Brenda Fricker, and a role as a teenager in The Foley Family series followed.

In real life, this teenager had no doubt but that he had a vocation to the entertainment industry. He kept saying he wanted to go into the film industry, "but there was no film industry here". Straight after school, he joined Peter Hunt's recording studio where he operated sound equipment. "They did all the sound for film. I worked with Louis Marcus and all the film makers of that time. I recorded the Chieftains' first album there." He also worked on the Gael Linn - newsreel with Colm O'Leary.

The day, in 1966, that the 21 year old O'Sullivan married Liz Clancy, a nurse from Athy, Co Kildare, they flew to London, to take the boat to Australia. He had a job lined up at Tamworth, 400 miles northwest of Sydney, as a presenter with the local radio and television station. A spell with the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Sydney, and then commercial television, followed. The first of their three daughters was born there before his return in 1969 to RTE.

A second spell of living abroad came after he left Ardmore in 1990. He went to Los Angeles for more than two years, developing projects which he brought back to Ireland and has worked on over the past couple of years. Although no longer Ardmore's managing director, he has continued to use the studios and for one of those projects, The Old Curiosity Shop starring Peter Ustinov and Tom Courtenay, he had an entire Dickensian London street recreated there last year.

While O'Sullivan was capitalising on years of personal contact building, it took the help of a fellow visionaries Minister Michael D. Higgins, to switch film making here into fast forward. The Minister's radical improvements in Section 35 tax incentives for investment in the film industry in 1993 made Ireland an attractively viable option for film makers. And in this new, film friendly environment, the joint efforts of O'Sullivan and Higgins brought in the $70 million Braveheart, the biggest production ever made here. The executive producer on Braveheart, Steve McEveety, who was having logistical problems with the planned shooting in Scotland, first contacted O'Sullivan.

"It wasn't that they couldn't get an army or they couldn't get a battlefield, but the difficulty was that the battlefield was 25 miles from where the army was stationed. So I suggested we probably could supply the "army because we were in a very benign environment and I thought the Department of Defence and everybody here would generally respond to a picture of this size and the kind of high quality production it was.

O'Sullivan went to the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, where indeed he found a positive response. The Department sent over assistant principal officer Martin Dennehy to O Sullivan's next meeting with the producers in London. "We more or less said they could have the army," he laughs. "Well, we said there was a very good chance they could get the army. The Curragh was an ideal location for the battle and added to that was the fact that we could house the soldiers literally over the hill. When all the various Departments weighed in behind us, it became possible to bring it about.

"What the army brought to it more than anything was man management," he explains. "If you wanted 1,600 people to move one pace to the right, they did it in unison. It was a terrific marriage of the industry and the public sector."

So Scotland's loss was Ireland's gain and 11 weeks of the 16 week shoot were switched here. "The co operation we got right from the top down was phenomenal," says O'Sullivan. "I think the beauty of this industry being so applicable to this country is that it is one of the few countries in the world where you can pick up the phone and you can get the head of state on the phone. Well . . .", that ready laugh again, "I'm not sure, I've never tried it but I have that kind of image."

Braveheart was a high profile success in the film industry here, which by last summer had discreet little film location signposts popping up all over the country. Michael Collins, Last of the High Kings, The Van, The Boy From Mercury and Moll Flanders, were just some of the productions spawning businesses in set construction, lighting, transport, catering and other allied trades.

But will 1996 see more of the same? O'Sullivan fears not. Although rumours of, the death of the Irish film industry were greatly exaggerated out in Hollywood after new limitations on Section 35 investments were announced in this year's Budget, he detects a distinct change in attitude.

"I've been in Los Angeles twice over the last month and I must say it's a different atmosphere. We were saying the government is very supportive of us, now they're saying: `You guys were only up and running and suddenly now it's all been changed.' Hollywood is frightened of that."

A self proclaimed optimist, he admits he was surprised by the extent of the reaction. But he stresses that one of the problems was that "Ireland Inc" didn't move quickly enough in the international market place to quash the rumours that Section 35 had been scrapped, rather than just capped. The changes to be enacted in the Finance Bill, in the Dail next month, include restricting each film to raising no more than £7.5 million from Irish investors under the tax incentive scheme. Whereas Braveheart, for instance, raised £10 million.

He thinks it was probably too early for the Government to reduce the benefits. "I have never been of the mind that incentive programmes should last for ever but I do think it needs quite a while to succeed. If you examine how it worked in various other countries that adopted a similar system, it took them 10 or 15 years before they really began to make inroads.

"You need volume to get the industry going," he points out. "There is a danger now with changes in Section 35 that we may operate at half speed to the point where we don't achieve critical mass. You don't have to do a Masters in business to know that any industry needs critical mass. We had it last year, we do not have critical mass this year and it doesn't look like we're going to."

He refers to the many spin off companies created by the recent boom in film activity. "A lot of those people put the money back into their own businesses to grow. Now they find themselves having to keep going at a certain level in order to sustain their growth and to grow further. That's the big worry at the moment: how do we now a) market ourselves better and b) how do we find more product to do?"

He sees huge potential in the high tech end of the film industry. "Parts of sets are starting to be generated by computer and this is an area I think we should be going into. When you think of Ireland being the Silicon Valley of Europe, if we could interface with the computer industry, can you imagine what we could do?" He has had some experience of that in the past year, having been called in when the sci fi Space Truckers ran into financial problems last summer. It is now in post production in Sandyford and is due for delivery in July, one month after the US cinema release date for another Ardmore production, the £15 million Moll Flanders, staring Morgan Freeman and Robin Wright.

CURRENTLY working on a project with Pierce Brosnan, he clearly revels in the intensity of the industry. After listing his idea of relaxation as reading scripts, going to the cinema and entertaining film visitors, he concedes: "It is a bit of a full time job I suppose." The family home is just across the road from Ardmore and his wife Liz is very much part of the business through entertaining.

He is also targeting ownership as the next stage for the industry here. Instead, of making productions to order and handing them over to the American studios or TV stations, Irish companies would own distribution and territorial rights for some of their work. A couple of months ago, he approached Tom Palmieri, an old friend from his MTM days, and, with Dublin businessman Bernard Somers, formed a company which will develop original material and fund writers. "We're now getting more and more into the ownership business of the projects, which is where we want to be."

For the single minded Morgan O'Sullivan, knowing where he wants to be has never been a problem.