LION OF IRELAND

THE MOVIE THAT NEVER WAS. PART ONE.

Back in the early 80s, I was approached by a new Hollywood movie company to lend my skills to a development project for a major new historical epic film drama, the story of Brian Boru, the greatest of all the High Kings of Ireland and regarded by some historians as ‘The Charlemange of Ireland’.
The movie project was based on the number one bestseller in the USA the previous year, ‘Lion of Ireland’, by Morgan Llywelyn.

With the encouragement of then US president Ronald Reagan (yeah, don’t ask) whose favourite book it was, the filmmakers raised the seed money to get the movie started with a promise of millions more to come so off they went to Ireland to get the show on the road.

They assembled quite a formidable team with three-time Oscar nominee Bill Creber as overall Production Designer so when I was asked to join the team I jumped at the chance to work with this Hollywood movie art legend.

Bill was a mate of actor Charlton Heston from the time they worked together on the very first and probably the best ‘Planet of the Apes’ and he designed the look and the sets for the entire movie.
Remember that final iconic scene with the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand, that was Bill’s idea.

Bill died in 2019 and in 2020 he was inducted into the Hollywood Hall of Fame. That’s how good he was.
It is also worth mentioning that he was a wonderful, kind, and witty man and a joy to spend time with, always knowledgeable and a font of great stories from the many movies he worked on.

Working with Bill and his assistant Reneé Brown was an education and he was very generous with his time, so much so that we all hung out together for the duration of the project and we became good friends along with Director Herb Wright.

Herb was a tall Californian charmer, a lovely guy but boy did he know how to party so we all ended up having one of the best times of our lives. Money flowed into every bar, restaurant, and nightclub in Dublin as we all worked and partied together for the entire summer of 1983.

All this was at a most difficult time in Ireland with yet another massive recession and mass emigration the order of the day. Work was sporadic at that time but I was always lucky picking up commissions as I had three kids to feed, educate and keep in good health so I needed every penny I could get and they paid damn well.

I produced a huge amount of work for this project so it is time to sort it all out and show it.
I was smart enough to record almost all my artwork as it progressed so even though the original art went back to the USA with the crew when the movie collapsed I had a good, if not perfect, record of the work.

THE THREE WORKS

The three key Production Paintings shown here were finished ahead of time so I took them to my photographer friend, the late Louis Pieterse, who made 4”x 5” transparencies of them so the reproduction here is perfect, unlike most of the rest of this work which I photographed myself on my Nikon F 35mm camera, often with only a few minutes to spare before the early morning courier call.

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Now my brief for these three scenes was simple: stick to the script but use your imagination. That’s exactly what I did. Remember I was working from a movie script so the characters mentioned in my work here were based more on invention and legend than real history.

The first painting is of the fictional goddess Fiona showing a young Brian Boru a vision of his future ascent to the throne of Ireland. This was simple enough and I used some photos of a young girl I knew, Susie Lynch*.
A few months before this Susie had sat for photo portraits for me for another work, featuring the fairy goddess Fann, so I had a readymade model for this work and everyone was happy with the result.

The next painting was a depiction of an encounter between Brian and Fiona, with a teenage Brian planting his sword in the soil beside the sacred oak tree of Magh Adhair as Fiona weaves her magic.

Finally, the painting of the coronation of Brian Boru as High King of all Ireland at the Hill of Royal Tara went smoothly enough but lacked a killer effect to add to the importance of the occasion so I played around with ideas.
I remembered an earlier painting I had done at the very beginning of the script, ‘The Vision of Brian’, a watercolour flashed off quickly for a script meeting.

This painting sketch depicts Brian Boru as a child on a hill with this massive spiral forming in the sky above him as a portent of his violent, battle-filled future so I added a calmer and more majestic spiral in the clouds above him atop Tara Hill more fitting for a king.

The good news is that everyone loved what I was up to so I got great freedom to be imaginative, creative and was well paid for my efforts at a time when everyone, except our charmed Irish elite, as usual, was suffering in yet another whirlpool of a recession.

NOTE: *Susie Lynch.
One of my own best friends to this day is a mother of three grown kids, Karen Winston, who became a friend way back in 1983 thanks to this movie when she was cast as the Deirdre, the first wife of Brian Boru.
I had met Karen for the very first time that same day in the Berkley Court Hotel on my first meeting with Bill Creber and Herb Wright as she was just finishing her reading for the part in the movie.
When she saw this painting she laughed and said:
‘ Jim, that’s my friend Susie Lynch!’.
Yep, Ireland is one small country. Turned out Karen and Susie were good friends.

I and Karen became good friends too, there and then, and years later she became my regular model for my artwork and quite an inspirational one too.
Today, when myself and Karen, friends for life now,
get together we have great fun reminiscing on those crazy times we all had for the three or four long summer months of 1983.

Yep, working on movies, even abandoned ones, is always real fun and we were all lucky to have been involved.

Next. Blog 2:
Karen, in costume as Deirdre, and other works