Michael Feeney Callan

Michael Feeney Callan is a novelist, filmmaker and painter, also known for his biographical writing.

An award winner for his short fiction, he joined BBC television drama as a story editor, and wrote screenplays for The Professionals (TV series) and for American television. He wrote the template Irish police drama series, The Burke Enigma, starring Donal McCann, and Love Is, starring Gabriel Byrne, and went on to direct a number of television programmes, among them the celebrated bio-documentary The Beach Boys Today. Callan has published several novels and has written biographies of Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Harris. Forthcoming is his major biography of Robert Redford.

Poetry

Callan's abiding wish, from childhood, was to contribute to internationalising Irish cultural experience and, in his words, "to writing some good, lasting poems". His first poems, often on romantic themes and deploying surreal language, were published within David Marcus’ New Irish Writing series in the 1970s.

Callan has continued to write poetry over the past thirty years and in 2003 published an anthology Fifty Fingers, which includes the very first published poem, Barbara.

Books

Following the early success of his short stories, winning the Hennessy Literary Award for Short Fiction for Baccy, Callan has enjoyed a diverse publishing career . Several British television adaptations, including Capital City (ITV), Jockey School and Target: The Bronze Heist (both BBC), were accompanied by works of fiction and performing arts biographies.

Essay filmographies on Julie Christie and Jayne Mansfield were followed by authoritative biographies of the enigmatic Sean Connery, long time friend Richard Harris and most recently Anthony Hopkins. The Connery book was referred to as "a necessity for Connery and Bond Fans" by the Los Angeles Times and the novelist and critic Dermot Bolger, reviewing Anthony Hopkins' biography referred to Callan as "one of Ireland's foremost biographers".

Callan’s first fiction novel, Lovers and Dancers, set in Ireland in the famine years, was inspired by Anthony Trollope's early writing and was well-regarded on publication.

Subsequently, in 2002, Callan Published Did You Miss Me?, a novel which explored many difficult female themes.

For ten years from the middle nineties, Callan travelled throughout the United States interviewing more than 400 sources for his latest work. This landmark biography profiling Robert Redford has been written with the co-operation of the subject who has provided unrestricted access to his diaries, scripts and personal records. This book will be published in November 2009 by Random House, USA.

Writing for Television

Callan's first major screenplay was the epic crime series The Burke Enigma, a six-hour film production for RTE, which starred Ray McAnally and Donal McCann and went forward as RTE's drama entry for the 1979 Prix Italia. Subsequently he joined BBC television drama in London, where he story-edited the detective series Shoestring (TV series). Simultaneously, at ITV, he wrote for the action series, The Professionals (TV series).

In the 1980s, Callan collaborated with Frederick Forsyth on two Public Broadcasting Service-aired adaptations of Forsyth's stories Privilege and A Careful Man (Mobil Showcase).

Perhaps the most intriguing television project of this decade, however, was his unproduced Dr Who two-part episode entitled The Children of January which was delivered to the BBC in 1985 but remained unfinished when the series was suspended under Jonathan Nathan-Turner's producer tenure.

On his website recently, Callan responded to an enquiry on this subject thus: “I wrote a two-parter called The Children of January. It was to be a season closer, not a series termination. But the BBC decided in mid-season that the show had run its course and, in the middle eighties, I think they were right. But I loved my episode, which was delivered late in 1985. I created a race of runaway proto-humanoids called the Z'ros, sort of 'human bees', of which I still have the fondest nightmares. The Children of January, incidentally, refers to renegade outcasts of a dawning 'parallel universe' civilisation that was abandoned”.

This elusive story will finally see the light of day in an audio production featuring Colin Baker and several of the original BBC cast, for Big Fish Productions, the celebrated Dr Who archivists.

Callan has continued to write for Television, including the popular ITV series Cluedo (television) and the RTE drama Templewood.

Film and Directing

Michael Feeney Callan made a significant contribution to the regeneration of the film industry in Ireland during the 1980s. Joining Morgan O'Sullivan's pioneering production set-up, Tara Productions, Callan collaborated in a strategy to acquire the defunct National Film Studios (as Ardmore studios was then named), alter film investment law and attract Hollywood-based co-production into Ireland.

Throughout the eighties, Callan worked with O'Sullivan, forging a bridgehead at the renamed Ardmore Studios and brought in partnership with the NEA and MTM Hollywood in November 1986.

In the 1990s, began directing.. His directorial debut was with the six-part series My Riviera, in which Roger Moore, James Coburn, Charles Aznavour and Joan Collins hosted a review of their favourite places on the Cote d'Azur, an area Callan has frequented since the late 1970s. The series was screened on ITV and throughout the world.

For RTE, Callan wrote and directed The Beach Boys Today, an immensely well-received road film documenting the final touring days of the legendary Beach Boys.

Following this project, more work in the USA followed, including a documentary entitled Back to Enchantment about animators Gary Goldman and Don Bluth [ An American Tail, Anastasia (1997 film)] which tied in with the Warner Bros. release of Thumbelina (1994 film).

In 1994, Callan was requested to write, co-produce and co-direct a film documenting Perry Como’s final concert. Como, by then in his 80th year, was unwell in the week leading to the performance and the performance itself was curtailed as a result but Como expressed himself exhilarated by the experience and later commented that he had always wished to end his career in Ireland.

After a decade working on the Redford project, Callan returned to directing with the straight-to-video film ‘Luke Kelly: The Performer”, which subsequently spent eight weeks at the top of the DVD sales chart in Ireland. The DVD comprised a mix of live footage and contributions from contemporaries and the later generation of musicians influenced by Kelly. According to Callan, the project was “a wonderful fusion, part biography, part musical. It covered so much of the ground I love, the stuff that inspires me. And Luke was an incredibly gifted man.”

In December 2007, Callan joined the advisory board of Irish Film America, along with Jim Sheridan and Paddy Breathnach, a move which has underlined his commitment to supporting Irish artistic endeavour worldwide.

Painting

Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne observed that "Callan's work is like a love affair with French painting", and this seems comprehensively accurate, since Callan began painting in Valbonne in the South of France in the eighties and titled his first exhibition, staged at Dublin's Blue Leaf Gallery in May 2002, A Workshop in France.

Subsequently his work ran on two parallel tracks. His figurative nudes featured in the Blue Leaf's Nude group showing in November 2002, and more detailed figurative work, taken from his heavily illustrated poetry notebooks, was the focus of the Fifty Fingers exhibition, which opened at the Pembroke Blue Leaf Gallery in August 2003. In tandem with this figurative work, Callan's experiments in abstract cubism have produced strikingly individual works peopled with statuesque Hellenic imagery. He also contrives to work in bronze.

Callan's next exhibition entitled Suburbia, with themes of childhood and adolescent iconography, is due to be shown in Autumn 2009.

Other Media Work

Callan is a regular guest on RTE Radio 1 programme The Arts Show