What do Braveheart, Michael Collins, Excalibur, Into the West, Dancing at Lughnasa and Far and Away have in common? As any film location manager will tell you, they were all filmed wholly or partly in Co Wicklow. Over the past 40 years or so, Co Wicklow has probably seen more film crews than the rest of Ireland put together. The reasons are obvious - proximity to the capital (and its crews and facilities), a wide variety of scenery, and the presence of the country's main film studios at Ardmore outside Bray.
Now Wicklow County Council, with financial support from the National Millennium Committee, is developing a location trail for film enthusiasts who may wish to venture out of the darkened auditorium to see where certain key scenes were actually shot.
There's an inevitable amount of overlap. Among the many similarities between John Boorman's The General and Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Ordinary Decent Criminal is the fact that both had scenes shot in Sally Gap, which also masqueraded as Co Donegal for Dancing at Lughnasa.
The spectacular, privately-owned estate at Luggala features a lake which has seen King Arthur's sword flung into it (in Excalibur) and a nuclear explosion (in The Butcher Boy).
Most heavily used of all is the grand estate at Powerscourt, which has played host to such spectaculars as Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) and Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975).
According to the Wicklow Film Commission, the Hollywood in Southern California is actually named after Hollywood in West Wicklow - the present post office owner's great-great-great uncle moved to California many generations ago and named the place after his hometown.
The location trails, which will be completed by November, will be self-guided, with storyboards along the way giving detailed descriptions of the films and scenes relevant to each area.
The latest production to hit the Wicklow trail, The Count of Monte Cristo, started night-shooting this week at Brittas Bay. The $40 million film features rising star Jim Caviezel (The Thin Red Line, Ride With the Devil and the supernatural drama Frequency, which opens here next Friday) as the famous prisoner, and Guy Pearce (LA Confidential and this weekend's release, Rules of Engagement) as the friend who betrays him. Also in the cast are veteran Irish actor Richard Harris and up-and-comer Dagmara Dominczyk (soon to be seen in Keeping the Faith). The director is Kevin Reynolds (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Waterworld). Contrary to some reports, the bulk of The Count of Monte Cristo will be shot in Ireland, where the production is based for the next two months before moving to Malta for five weeks.
The ongoing saga over Napster has helped to raise public interest in the legal and technical issues surrounding music copyright on the Internet. But, according to some commentators, exactly the same problems faced by record companies may soon be confronting film-makers and distributors. In the wake of the injunction against the musicswapping website, a conference in Los Angeles heard that it was now possible to download an entire feature film from the Net. The Hollywood Reporter reported how technologist Bruce Forest took his audience step-by-step through the process, and claimed that by signing on to a movie piracy message board, he was able to access dozens of films, including just-released features such as X- Men and Chicken Run. Forest estimated that by the end of 2001, one million full-length feature films will be pirated over the Internet each day.
Madonna's latest video, Music, featuring Ali G, which has been getting plenty of play on late-night television lately, has a major Irish input in the form of Dublin-based company, Monster Animation, who provided the retro-1970s animation section of the clip. The former Don Bluth studios employees worked with Swedish company Filmtecknama to produce the animated drawings, every frame of which were digitised and sent directly via the Internet to the singer for approval. "This is a great breakthrough for us," says Monster's creative director, Gary O'Neill. "Sometimes you just need a lucky break like this to really establish your standing in the industry."
