the dream team

NED O'HANLON is a media mogul with a difference. With a CV as long as yer arm, and a client list that includes U2, Garth Brooks and MTV, he'd be forgiven for, at the very least, flourishing a Cuban cigar in your face . . . just so you remember your place. But as soon as you're greeted with a decent handshake and offered a cuppa, it's clear that such posturings aren't part of the Dreamchaser supremo's etiquette.
Still, that CV certainly looks impressive: Executive Producer for all TV and film work related to Achtung Baby, including the earth-shattering Zoo TV; producer of the first three MTV Europe Music Awards in Berlin, Paris and London; producer of last year's Popmart; and most recently, chief cook and bottlewasher at this year's (deep breath) Rock ... Roll Hall of Fame's 13th annual induction ceremony. In short, it's fairly safe to say that Ned O'Hanlon is not your common-or-garden video buff with a passing interest in popular music.
"We're a pretty straightforward TV/Film Production Company," O'Hanlon offers, with a talent for understatement that'd leave Bill Clinton in the shade "Honest, your honour, we were just good friends"). "We just work mainly within the music world."
Yes, and Picasso had a penchant for eh, cubes. Even a glimpse at Dreamchaser's recent Hall of Fame presentation, a three-screen catapult through the back catalogue of American rock 'n' roll, with everyone from Little Richard to Martha ... The Vandellas and Johnny Cash treated with equal aplomb, illustrates why O'Hanlon's company garners the sweet deals. This is lateral thinking seamlessly melded with the fourth dimension of video. If TV is little more than chewing-gum for the eyes, then this Hall of Fame retrospective is a Dionysian banquet to be savoured by all five senses. Hardly the stuff of a journeyman film producer, more a challenge to stretch and tweak the outer limits of the imagination, Dreamchaser Productions are certainly no fly-by-night shysters.
Having cut his producer's milk teeth in Windmill Lane Studios in the mid-to-late '80s, and then escaped from a lecturing post in the College of Commerce in Rathmines, O'Hanlon found himself in the company of a wealth of talent, and, of course, a quartet of quite popular musicians by the name of Bono, Larry, The Edge and Adam. Three years later, he jumped at the chance of buying the nascent Dreamchaser Productions from its founders, Paul McGuinness, Ann-Louise Kelly (O'Hanlon's wife) and Barry Devlin.
"That was in 1990, and I bought the company so that I'd have a track record that I could use when I'd be looking for new business," he explains. "I bought it for #1, which, incidentally, I still owe Mr. McGuinness! And off I went from there."
The seeds of collaboration with U2 on Zoo TV were sown shortly afterwards, albeit in a very casual and low-key manner. "It just started off by us gathering together some footage of the band playing together," he recalls, "and it was really only in its formative stages then. Nobody really fully understood what Zoo TV was going to be about. It was just a concept, but it became more and more absorbing until MTV commissioned a half-hour documentary on the band as they were getting ready for the American leg of the tour. That's when Maurice Linnane, my business partner, came on board to direct that documentary."
And the rest was history, at least as far as O'Hanlon's personal life went. The documentary was due to wrap on the opening night of U2's American tour in Florida, when Linnane would film the band walking on-stage.
"We were due to come home the day after that, so we had just packed overnight bags," O'Hanlon recounts with alarming nonchalance, "and two years later we got home. That's literally how it happened."
Anyone who thought that Zoo TV was a prepackaged extravaganza which Bono and the boys had simply packed in their suitcases when they left home, might benefit from a little clarification here. This was a production whose gestation coincided with the tour, cosseted and cajoled into the big bad world by O'Hanlon and Linnane.
"It just grew exponentially," O'Hanlon continues. "It was really phenomenal. For that leg of the tour, which was only 8 or 9 weeks, the level of activity was just awesome. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears but then as a result, the level of interest from the media was huge.
"That tour, that show, was the definite tour of its time. It marked a whole feeling and attitude that was just so on. There was certainly a great deal of luck involved, but I think when people look back, they'll see it as a defining moment, so for us to be involved in that was incredible."
However, O'Hanlon wasn't so nonchalant as to ignore the goose that laid this golden egg.
"We travelled the whole world with them (U2)," he smiles, just a tad wryly, "and we got to spend millions of their pounds playing around with their show, and for people who had just started out in Dublin - we were homeless in fact, working out of my basement - you couldn't imagine a better kick-start."
Golden opportunity that it was, was O'Hanlon ever afraid that such heavy involvement with Zoo TV would stymie their ability to get other contracts, other business?
He nods his head vehemently: "Well, there is a very marked perception here in Ireland that Dreamchaser Productions is a wholly-owned subsidiary of U2. That is absolutely not the case. They're big clients of ours and we're happy to do as much work as they want to throw our way but that's the end of it. We work for a lot of other people. We've always done that, and we will continue to do that.
"People assume that we are owned by, and are therefore in the pocket of, U2, and in the case of other bands of U2's size, we would be excluded from consideration simply by our association. That's a down side but it's a bearable downside!"
Anxious not to "languish in the backwash" of U2, O'Hanlon and Dreamchaser Productions, using a little-known quickstep that straddled the heights of Zoo TV and the more terrestrial planes of MTV, found themselves piloting the inaugural MTV Europe Music Awards in Berlin in 1994. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to Camp Garth Brooks, an altogether different experience, with its pared-down entourage, and its Boy's Own ambience.
From the astral heights of Zoo TV, Popmart, et al, how did O'Hanlon go about breathing life into such a hallowed institution as the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame?
"The institution has existed in a notional sense for a long time," he offers, "but it only came into existence in 1987, when the Ohio State Government put up a ridiculous sum of money, something like $50 million, to entice the institute to build a museum there. Anyway, it's a very unusual building, a glass pyramid, with a lot of different exhibition levels. What struck me about that building was that it was so stark and sterile. It was everything that rock 'n' roll wasn't. As far as Maurice and I saw it, this exhibition should be noisy, with lots of bad attitude. And that's what we've done."
With three screens, each 80 feet x 25 feet, their canvas was large, their options limitless. And with two-minute collages for each of the 13 years of Hall of Fame inductees, O'Hanlon and Linnane got to scour more than a handful of vaults for the right kind of footage. What they've produced is a melting pot of sounds, images and bravado, the insouciance, and above all, the sheer boldness that is r 'n' r.
O'Hanlon isn't one to rest up between projects, and his current work in progress sees him in cahoots with the guys and gals from Planet Hollywood and MTV. Not content with shepherding a movie memorabilia restaurant chain, Bruce Willis, Arnie ... Co. are embarking on a chain of restaurants with a music theme, and guess who's coming to dinner?
"I'm not sure what the chain will be called yet," O'Hanlon admits, "but it's a celebration of live music, and the first restaurant will have its own live venue too, so there'll be a chance for upcoming bands to play to a decent size audience.
Listening to O'Hanlon, it's hard to imagine that Dreamchaser Productions manage to prise themselves away from the cameras or editing suites long enough to engage in the usual frolics associated with life on the road. Needless to say, this facade of respectability quickly disintegrates as soon as alcohol is allowed a mere peep into this conversation. Maurice Linnane, partner in crime as well as in business, perks up at the mention of post-production festivities, and proceeds to wallow in the delights of past glories.
"We had a night and a day to remember in New York with Gary Oldman," he declares. "We were having breakfast with Phil Joanou, he of Rattle ... Hum fame, in the Ritz Carlton, and he happened to mention that a friend of his, a guy called Gary Oldman, had phoned, and was calling around. Now, I didn't know who Gary Oldman was, but I was quite happy to hang around anyway. The thing is, when he eventually arrived a few hours later, he was half shot, straight off Concord from London. When he had phoned Phil, he'd been in London and here he was, with about a hundred bottles of Jack Daniels in his travel bag. He was having a terrible time because he was in the throes of leaving Uma Thurman. He was a lovely man and the nicest drunk I've ever met. Which was just as well, because we were very drunk too."
O'Hanlon and Linnane, then proceeded to adopt Oldman, ferrying him with them as they flew to Boston, not once but twice in the course of the same day where they were editing a U2 video. Oldman just decided to go along for the ride, and what a ride it was.
"It's probably safe to say that we were on something of a bender," O'Hanlon offers with that trademark impeccable understatement. "We lost Phil in New York somehow, and we got up the next morning to be greeted by Phil, hammered out of his mind, with a wife and a wedding video from the Elvis chapel in Las Vegas. It was unbelievable. The preacher was singing 'Wise men say only fools rush in', and Phil was sitting in a foetal position on a pew with a cigarette that he kept trying to light! They parted company about a day later. We just lost track of him for five minutes and he went and got himself married!"
Not quite the sedate existence that O'Hanlon might lead one to believe he leads, but then again, things are seldom what they seem . . . thankfully. So, having left Cavan all those years ago, throwing up the chance to follow his father's footsteps by sitting behind the editor's desk of The Anglo Celt, Ned O'Hanlon is a man at one with the world. But where to next? Well, his future's certainly footloose, if not quite fancy free.
"Well, we've just been commissioned to do a documentary for Michael Flatley. I think you could say that at this stage, we're suffering from camera hunger. We need to get out there and shoot some footage. And there are some other live shows we'll be working on later in the year. So I don't suppose we'll be idle for long!" n