BOOKENDS AND BARSTOOLS
Mine's a pint, says Michael Dwyer, as he notes that five of the Irish films at this year's Galway Film Fleadh devote themselves to the immigrant experience - in US pubs. The last issue of the high-profile British trade paper, Screen International, devotes three pages to the Galway Film Fleadh and comments that "11 years old and lasting just six days, (it) has established itself as the foremost of Ireland's nine film festivals with industry and audience alike". With a sharp upswing in afternoon attendances this year, the fleadh's audience figures should reach an all-time high, and the industry is out in force again with over a dozen key executives and producers from the US and Europe in town to share their wisdom with many Irish film-makers participating in the annual Fleadh Fair. And as ever, the numbers of Irish film-makers in attendance will be swelled now the weekend is here. While there is a wealth of international cinema to savour at Galway, the fleadh remains the pre-eminent Irish festival when it comes to Irish and Irish-related movies.

The first new Irish feature by an Irish director shown at Galway this week was Liam O Mochain's The Book That Wrote Itself, which attracted a sizeable audience away from the opening night festivities at the Galway Rowing Club on Tuesday. O Mochain, an exuberant presenter on TnaG's Hollywood Anocht, made this playful spoof on literature and movies on a minuscule budget and cast himself in the central role of Vincent Macken, author of the Celtic romantic saga, The Book of Conn, which he passionately - and foolishly - believes to be The Great Irish Novel. Accompanied by Macken's truly effusive narration, this sprightly film follows his progress around Ireland with a video film-maker (Antoinette Guiney) who has some rudimentary experience of filming, weddings and christenings. He entrusts her to document his novel on video, but she's more interested in making a documentary about him.

Their journey takes them from Dublin to Wexford (for a cruel skit on the opera festival) to Clare and on to Galway Film Fleadh itself for some acutely incestuous filmbiz jokes. Towards the end there's a faux pas when the movie moves outside its parameters and O Mochain/Macken goes to the Venice Film Festival, blags a press card and asks inane, mostly Irish-related questions at the festival's notoriously inane press conferences to, among others, George Clooney, Kenneth Branagh, Melanie Griffith and Bryan Singer. The excision of that superfluous sequence would surely benefit this good-humoured exercise, which makes inventive use of its minimal resources.

NOTES FROM AUSTIN - THE LODGER
http://www.filethirteen.com/events/austinff/aff_day5.htm

The feature, The Book that Wrote Itself, is a wonderful, witty, cutting edge, indie film that does not have one used idea around. New and fun and a bit of an "insider" in-joke, the film also pokes a bit of a harsh light on film festivals, industry wannabees and artistic fervor. Mochain has a gimmick here guaranteed to draw you into the film. He went to press conferences and filmed himself pretending to be a journalist asking questions of George Clooney, Melanie Griffith, Chazz Palmenteri and director Bryan Singer. This is the film's big draw, a easily hypeable hook. But once it gets you inside, this gimmick, almost at the film's end, almost seems unnecessary. Still, if it gets butts in the seats to see this wonderful and unique film, I am all for it. Plot... I won't give that away. Suffice it to say that Mochain, who is also the main actor in his film, creates a wonderful character, gives that character a marvellous sidekick and speeds across the Irish landscape at a breakneck pace to tell his story. It's no wonder Mochain's character talks a mile a minute, the film is just jam-packing all the marvelous stuff that it can into 75 minutes. And the story goes on unexpected twists and turns every step of the way. It's not a mystery... It doesn't keep you guessing. Rather it just goes into all this seeming uncharted territory to be new, original and highly creative. It's great stuff.

Filmed on digital and then transferred to 16mm, the film might suffer from not being able to bring us the marvelous locales it treads in vivid Technicolor Cinemascope. This may make the visuals a bit lacking, but the film's inventiveness far overshadows this. Still, you know what I think? I think somebody ought to give Mochain the Goddamn money to remake the thing as an 35mm, widescreen epic. Of course, with that kind of cash, Mochain could probably make 10 or 20 new, creative, unique, character driven, plot twisting, award winning, indie films. Now that would be some money well spent.

ZOOM WITH A VIEW
Not many young movie-makers can boast that their first film starred a multi-million dollar cast like George Clooney, Melanie Griffith, Kenneth Branagh and Robert De Niro. But then not many young film-makers are like Liam O'Mochain. The cheeky 25-year-old from Rosmuc in Connemara believes in the saying nothing ventured, nothing gained. And the tactics Liam employed to make his movie The Book That Wrote Itself which is being shown this coming week at the Galway Film Fleadh - are the work of genius. He headed off to the Venice Film Festival last September and blagged his way into various high-powered press conferences featuring the megastars of the movie world. All Liam had was a swagger, an out-of-date press card, two film crew - and the ability to speak in Irish "so they hadn't a clue what we were saying". As he interviewed stars like Clooney, and Griffith - supposedly about their movies - he was also cleverly manipulating their responses for the purpose of his own film. Liam recalls: "I had the camera put on myself while I asked a question that could relate both to their own work and also with the character in my film. "The stars had no idea that they were becoming characters in my movie - they just thought they were being asked general questions. "George Clooney said he would love to come to Ireland, that he was half-Irish. Then he laughed, and his laugh was exactly what we were looking for."

Liam calls his project "a film within a film within a film". And over the five days of the Venice festival, he came close to being sussed a few times - but he just brazened it out. He recalls: "There were people sitting beside me who got chucked out, and I would just have to move up a gear at that stage, put my chest out and start as some serious questions. But it was great fun, and I learnt that if you have the right attitude when you are walking in, they only just half-glance at your credentials, while other people got their cards scrutinised." Besides having a neck like a jockey's undercarriage, Liam also has acres of bare-faced cheek - he's sending The Book That Wrote Itself into next year's Venice Film Festival! The movie also features Ireland's first sacrilegious sex scene. Liam laughs: "The main character goes off with an American girl and in the midst of all of the whole sexual thing that's going on, all he can think of is the 'Our Father' in Irish - especially the line 'Thy Kingdom Come'".

The Book That Wrote Itself also features about 40 "real" actors, including Eddie Naessens who played Fair City rapist Dr Jack Shanahan and Carol Meyers - who starred in Third Rock from The Sun. And watch out for pretty Antoinette Guiney. Multi-talented Liam also appears on screen. The 70-minute movie was made for £25,000 and was sponsored by Iarnrod Eireann, and Compaq computers amongst others. But it just shows what can be done with a lot of talent - and a bit of a brass neck.

A STRIFE LESS ORDINARY POP QUIZ HOTSHOTS: HOW DO YOU GET A HOST OF HOLLYWOOD MEGASTARS INTO YOUR FLICK AND STILL MANAGE TO MAKE AN IRISH 'ROAD' MOVIE FOR A LITTLE UNDER TWENTY-FIVE GRAND? IT'S EASY - JUST GIVE LIAM O'MOCHAIN A BELL, OFFER HIM A FEW BOB AND IF HE'S IN GOOD FORM, JEEZ, HE'LL PROBABLY THROW IN A TOM CRUISE CAMEO. FOR FREE. WITH O'MOCHAIN'S DEBUT FEATURE THE BOOK THAT WROTE ITSELF SCHEDULED TO OPEN THE GALWAY FILM FLEADH NEXT WEEK, GARRETH MURPHY MET UP WITH THE ACTOR CUM DIRECTOR CUM WRITER. ('CUM DIRECTOR'? ARE WE SURE ABOUT THIS? - ED)
It'll look good on the movie posters: 'A new Irish movie with George Clooney, Chazz Palaminteri, Melanie Griffith, Bryan Singer and a galaxy of Hollywood stars'. What's more, it won't be one word of a lie either. Well, not according to sometime TnaG presenter Liam O'Mochain. And of all folk, Liam really should know since he's the director and star of said flick - The Book That Wrote Itself. For the last eighteen months or so, the Galway-born film maker has spent most of his time raising cash, writing, directing, editing, producing his debut feature and using whatever time was left over to blag his way across Europe in an effort to secure the services of some of Hollywood's biggest stars to appear in The Book That Wrote Itself - however unwittingly.

The film itself concerns the trials and tribulations of a young writer who believes he has written the definitive Celtic novel. Unfortunately though, nobody (not least, the publishing world) seems to agree. So, in a last gasp attempt to get his novel published, Vincent (played by O'Mochain) attempts to re-interpret the novel with the aid of a young film enthusiast in a modern setting to prove to ne'er-do-well literary agents that there's very definitely a market for the book. This of course leads to all sorts of madcap and rapscallion antics involving opera singers, flutes (of the tin variety, not the ... never mind) and of course, film stars. In short, Brown acid material, basically. "The inspiration for the movie," says O'Mochain, "came about 18 months ago. I was watching a film called Before Sunrise which is about a couple who fall in love while travelling across Europe and I remember thinking; 'I'd love to make a European road movie'. We'd been thinking of doing a film for a while and the other writer and myself started throwing ideas around. Within a couple of days we had a story pretty much pencilled out. The basics of it was that I was going to head across Europe and get a seven-person crew and seven actors to travel with me. The theme of the story was quite similar: this writer who thinks he's written the definitive European novel except nobody wants to publish it. The book that he's written is about this Spanish peasant who fails in love with an Italian Duchess and to win her, he's got to go across Europe and perform these tasks. Oh, and he gets mixed up with Mafia along the way. The unfortunate thing was that we didn't really look into the whole budgetary thing and to do the script any justice, we'd need piles of cash. In the end we decided that it would make a lot more sense if we did the thing - with the honourable exception of a few scenes - in Ireland."

Unsurprising though, the movie soon ran into production problems. Personnel changes dictated that as well as becoming the sole writer of the project, O'Mochain (with only a smattering of previous experience) had to take the director's chair. Of course, he had to do this in between trying to act in the damn thing and raise cash to ensure it actually got finished. Heavy. "A short time after getting a bloke to write the first draft of the script, he got a better paying gig and had to do that. Directing was never my intention but each of the 5 directors that we interviewed told me to give it a shot, so I did. In regard to the financing, I didn't want any film company on board because the story was so strange that I knew that nobody would be prepared to shell out for it. When it was finished people could see it and say 'oh right that's what it's all about ...' It's a hard way to do things - like spending the second week of my holiday trying to get quotes from movie stars at the Venice Film Festival - but it also taught me a lot of things." Ah yes, Venice. The city of romance. The city of beauty. The city of a thousand stories. But more importantly, the city with a fuck off film festival at which O'Mochain managed to blag his way into. "It was actually funny because we could only afford to work out of a tent for the few days at the festival. And of course, it only ever rains when you've pitched a tent and got your camera out ... It was real makeshift material as we were recharging the camera's battery in the jacks of the site every night and hoping it would be ready for the following day's work. I'd managed to blag myself an access all areas pass but it was tough trying to find questions that are relevant to the character in the film and relevant to the stars themselves. After a few days asking people like Bryan Singer and George Clooney whether they'd ever consider coming to work on say, a low budget Irish road movie, I started to get a few blank looks from both the stars and the other press there. No worries, though."

CLOONEY IS LEFT REELING OVER HOT NEW IRISH FLICK
Irish film The Book That Wrote Itself has been hailed as "the next Blair Witch" by a top US director. James L. Brooks (responsible for Terms of Endearment) watched the low-budget flick in America recently and has been singing its praises since. George Clooney, Kenneth Branagh and Melanie Griffith all feature in the £15,000 production which was the brain-child of Galway film-maker Liam O'Mochain. However none of the stars knew about their role and Clooney is reported to be livid when discovering that he had been included. O'Mochain told me this morning how a novel idea allowed him bag the top-stars at a fraction of the usual price. "I had press passes for conferences as so-on and we filmed them during these - because they were in the public domain they have no legal recourse," he explained. The movie, which had its debut at the Galway Film Fleadh last May has just won the Lodger's Award for Best Feature in the US and has been accepted for festivals in Argentina and Oslo. It will be released in cinemas this April and O'Mochain is currently negotiating with top American distributors and networks about showing it there.

Ducking and diving, wheeling and dealing, actor/filmwriter Liam O'Mochain has the greatest neck in Irish film history. Not content with casting a host of actors from Irish television and theatre, the twenty five-year-old's feature film debut The Book That Wrote Itself also managed to include cameo appearances from stars such as George Clooney, Melanie Griffith, Kenneth Branagh and Bryan Singer. The multi-talented Galwegian multi-jobs as writer, director and actor in his latest film which follows the adventures of a young Irish novelist who's convinced that his Celtic quest saga has all the markings of a hit movie. In quasi-documentary style, Liam's celluloid antics included blagging a press card at the Venice Film Festival. He then shamelessly chased celebrities and filmed himself, in character, pitching at and wooing these potential stars. An Autumn release for The Book That Wrote Itself looks certain while Liam is currently flexing some production muscle for his second feature, Home. Already a seasoned veteran on the theatre and television circuit (including seven documentaries and an award-winning short film), O'Mochain's unique and unabashed approach to filmmaking will definitively mark him out from the crowd. Believe it.

A CUT ABOVE
Liam's made his Fortune - now fame beckons... What have movie-makers Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Ridley Scott, Brian De Palma, Jonathan Demme and Liam O'Mochain got in common? Liam? Liam who? Okay, O'Mochain is not as illustrious as the makers of Jurassic Park, Thelma and Louise or Silence of the Lambs. But this Connemara-born film producer has recently taken the first step on the same path to fame, and fortune. He has just won a Finalist Award at the prestigious Houston International Film Festival - where Spielberg and friends also scooped their very first trophies before going on to greater things. Liam won his accolade for his film Fortune - against stiff competition from 29 countries. And it is all the more satisfying because himself and director Alan Friel made the movie on a shoestring budget of than £6,000. It is described as "a modem fairytale set from the 1890s to the 1950s", and has been doing the rounds of film festivals all over the world. And Liam has been there too at the invitation of the organisers - but not wasting his time gadding about, throwing shapes and supping champagne. Instead this bundle of boundless energy and talent has been making contacts - and making documentaries to help pay his way so he can make more movies. "I did a couple of documentaries for RTE and TnaG, one from the Venice Film Festival, one from Sundance, one from Galway and one from Manchester," he told The Star.

The 25-year-old native Irish speaker is well-used to living on his wits since he took up an artistic lifestyle seven years ago. And in the two years since he has earned a crust turning his hand to everything under the sun. He's produced stage drama, done radio work as an actor, appeared in commercials, and has taught courses in all aspects of film production at the Irish Film Institute. Fortune has paid off handsomely in terms of making people sit up and take heed when they hear it has won an award. And it boosted the careers of many of the people that worked on it. "It generated stuff for me and for the director Alan Friel who has gone to do commercials and work with Ridley Scott and people like that. And the guy who did a couple of the pieces of music, David Downes, is now the musical director of Riverdance in the States," he said. And some day soon, Liam will hit the jackpot - though all he really wants to do is be an actor. The Book That Wrote Itself will begin shooting in October for about three weeks in various locations around the Irish coast. It is an intriguing film-within-a-film that strung from Liam's irrepressible creative spirit. And as ever, the budget is low it could stare snakes straight in the eye. There are some sponsors already - including Kaelleon Design, Iarnrod Eireann, Dublin Bus and Theatre company Muintearas. But if anyone wants to throw Liam a million or so, or even a couple of quid, he'd be eternally grateful. And you could be helping the career of a future Liam Neeson, or Gabriel Byrne. "My only ambition is to be able to concentrate on acting with maybe a little producing on the side. What I plan to do every year is lose a job, you know the way people are always trying to gain a job, well, I'm trying to lose one. In the beginning I did seven or eight different things. Now, I'm down to three or four, so maybe next year I'll achieve my ambition and just act and produce," he said.