If it hadn't been for the first World War, Killarney could well have become Ireland's Hollywood, the centre of Irish film production, writes Hugh Oram.
In the four years before the war started, nearly 30 American feature films were made in and around Beaufort, a small village about six kilometres outside Killarney. Only about a quarter of them survive today, which isn't a bad survival rate, considering that out of all the silent films made around the world, more than 80 per cent have been lost.
The whole enterprise was the creation of a film-making genius, John Sidney Olcott, who was born in Toronto in 1873. Olcott, who later dropped the John from his name, was always strongly aware of his own Irish heritage. After becoming an actor in New York, he quickly moved into movie production, which was just starting. When Olcott was 34, he and three partners set up the Kalem Film Company. He himself became one of the most prolific directors of the silent film era, with a very energetic style.
One of Kalem's early successes, soon after the company was formed, was Ben Hur. Then Olcott had a brainwave: he knew that there was a vast potential audience in the US for films with an Irish theme and thought they would have a much stronger and more authentic appeal if they were filmed on location in Ireland.
So Olcott and his film production crew set sail for Ireland, eventually landing up in Killarney. The first film they made here - and the first film by any US company shot outside the US - was entitled The Lad from Old Ireland and many more feature films followed quickly, such as the Colleen Bawn and the Collegians. A couple of the films were non-fiction.
The films were all made in the Killarney valley and Olcott set up his headquarters in the bar and restaurant at Beaufort run by the O'Sullivan family. Olcott had started a trend that lasts to this day of big Hollywood studios making films far from Hollywood.
All Olcott's Irish-based films were made outdoors amid the splendid landscapes of Co Kerry in natural light. No electricity was available for lighting, so even the interior scenes look very windswept. Irish involvement was limited to less technical roles such as set construction, transport and walk-on parts.
In the midst of his triumphs in Killarney, Olcott was sidetracked by the making of another epic, the first ever five-reel film, which was called From the Manger to the Cross, the story of the life of Jesus.
Olcott took his production crew to Palestine, to shoot the film on location. It cost $35,000 to make, but turned in profits of around $1 million, a vast amount in those days, rivalling the success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ more than 90 years later.
There was also a great market in the US for the Kalem films made in Killarney and their popularity was boosted by clever Hollywood publicity. When The Colleen Bawn was ready to open in the US, the producers had tons of soil shifted from Killarney to the US in the form of squares of turf, each just over a metre square. Each cinema showing the film got some of these so that patrons, for the price of a cinema ticket, could stand on old Ireland's "ould sod".
All Olcott's plans for Killarney came to naught, when war broke out in 1914. He promptly abandoned his schemes in Co Kerry and returned to the US, where he spent the rest of his career in Hollywood. He established himself as one of the great movie directors there, directing stars such as Mary Pickford. He died in Hollywood in 1949.
Denis Condon, who wrote a Ph.D. thesis on all facets of the cinema in Ireland before the foundation of the Irish Free State, says it is likely that what Olcott had in mind was a permanent building in Kerry that could house sets and other equipment between production seasons, rather than a permanently manned facility that could be used by other film-makers. But whatever his intentions for film production in Kerry, the first World War signalled The End to one of the great "might have beens" of the Irish film industry.
These days, the Irish Film Archive has copies of about a third of Olcott's films made in Killarney. The first person to realise the value of preserving Olcott's Irish work was the late Liam O'Leary, when he was working at the National Film Archive in London in the 1960s. One day someone came into his office with a collection of rusted film cans containing some of those early Killarney films, and O'Leary was overcome with excitement. The careful preservation of those delicate early films had started and continues to this day.
Ironically, the present Minister for the Arts, John O'Donoghue, who is himself from south Kerry, now plans to appoint an Irish film ambassador to Hollywood to promote Ireland as an ideal film location. Film-making has come full circle, or perhaps full reel, from Sidney Olcott's time in Killarney nearly a century ago.