“I was always observing human behavior from a really early age and aware of human behavior. That’s really what directing and acting is: being aware of how people act and how people relate to one another — what makes you desirable, or confident, or not.” bubblegum and drive [Becker] around, but I got to read all the scripts that came through the door,” he said. “That was a good education in screenwriting. It was just kind of soaking up everything I saw.” While those jobs put Moore adjacent to the big time, he started to get a kind of artistic wanderlust. Eventually, he got so tired of Hollywood that he got a job as a personal assistant, and later taught safe sex classes in the Santa Monica School District. Hungry to work in live theater again, Moore got a job as the assistant to a former college professor who was directing the Broadway adaptation of novelist E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime.” When the out-of-town tryouts in L.A. were over, Moore followed the production east to New York. “I started working at a Broadway level, with Broadway actors, on a big Broadway show as the assistant,” he said. “I was in charge to a small degree. That was again great training: seeing how the union
worked, what actors were like at that level. It was the first time I was being paid a living wage and I could pay my rent without working three jobs, and I was doing theater. That was a big moment.” Moore signed a contract to work with the production for two years, and it looked like his musical theater dreams were finally coming true. To celebrate, Moore bought himself a trip to Greece. Just before he was scheduled to fly out, however, a blow to the gut: he opened the New York Times and saw that the producer of the show had been indicted on charges of securities fraud. “It was on the front page,” he said. “I realized at that moment that I didn’t have a job ... That was my first really big reality dose of what I’ve since come to know in this business, which is that you just never really know if you have a job or not. You never know where the success is going to come from.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 16
BIG BREAK: Moore directed Avenue Q on Broadway.
MICHAEL SCHAMIS
“Dreamgirls” in Tulsa when he was 16 that he said he started to think about working behind the scenes. “That’s when I realized that there was this larger world there,” he said. “That’s when I started to understand: people actually do this. It’s not just the entertainment. There’s a life behind it.” Warren Rosenaur played a dog in the staging of “Peter Pan” in which Moore played his first role. Later, as a drama teacher, Rosenaur became an early mentor to Moore, and directed him in several productions as a student at Fayetteville High School. “He was the blondest Bernardo in the history of ‘West Side Story,’ ” Rosenaur said, laughing. “We had to dye his hair to play Bernardo. Dan Quayle, I believe, was the vice president at the time, and one of the teachers said: ‘I think you cast Dan Quayle.’ ” Rosenaur said Moore was very smart in high school. He knew he would go far. “He’s a very intelligent young man,” Rosenaur said, “and most of the students I’ve had who are very intelligent can figure out and know where their niche is, whether it be acting, technical stuff or behind the scenes. Smart kids can figure out how to make things happen for them, and he was very, very smart.” After high school, Moore went on to Northwestern University, where he was enrolled as a film major, but soon switched to theater. While at Northwestern, Moore directed his first big musical and — with a writing partner — completed his first play, “The Floatplane Notebooks,” an adaptation of a novel by Southern writer Clyde Edgerton. After graduation, Moore lived for awhile doing “really horrible day jobs,” including dressing up as a hip-hop dancing cat at a local museum. Soon, he’d had enough of the harsh Midwestern winters. “I thought: You know, if I’m going to be poor and unemployed, I want to be poor and unemployed near the beach,” he said. Moore moved to Los Angeles “sight unseen.” He said the first few months were “terrifying.” “I got there, and I realized that I had absolutely no concept of how anything worked or who anybody was,” he said. “I was reading the trades and didn’t know what it meant. There’s a lot of savvy people there, and I definitely felt like a small-town kid.” Eventually, Moore got a job as an agent’s assistant and later parlayed that into a gig as an assistant to director Harold Becker on the little-remembered 1996 Al Pacino vehicle “City Hall.” “I didn’t do much more than get coffee and
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