FEATURE - Bobby Moresco's Oscar Momentum

FEATURE - Bobby Moresco's Oscar Momentum

Thanks to Crash and Million Dollar Baby, Paul Haggis' partner in crime is rolling with a new TV series and his feature film directorial debut.

By Daniel Robert Epstein, FilmStew.com

Robert Moresco first appeared in Hollywood as an actor in the cult classic Turk 182 and a number of 80's TV shows. Since then, he's become a respected and powerful writer-producer, with credits such as producing the Oscar winning Million Dollar Baby and co-writing Crash, another Oscar winner.

Moresco has now ventured into directing with 10th & Wolf, a film set in the world of the Philadelphia mob. James Marsden plays a disgraced Iraqi soldier who is given the chance to clear himself of charges by becoming a snitch. It's quite a switch for Marsden, seen earlier this summer as Cyclops in X-Men: The Last Stand.

"A lot of actors read for the role and said they wanted to do it," Moresco recalls during a recent interview with FilmStew. "I thought Jimmy had the perfect, handsome, good-looking, lead look. Everybody said he hadn't done it [a lead dramatic role] before, but he's just perfect."

"What he does in the film is bring a quiet strength to it much in the same way the great movie stars do. Without doing much he does everything and I thought Jimmy had that movie magic."

Surrounding Marsden in 10th & Wolf is an impressive ensemble cast that includes Giovanni Ribisi, Val Kilmer, Dennis Hopper, Brad Renfro, Lesley Ann Warren and Brian Dennehy. Moresco is particularly thrilled to have found room for Dennehy, given his longtime admiration of the actor.

"He's just a fabulous actor," Moresco exclaims. "His character is a guy who's a bit iconic and represents a certain sense of authority, which Brian brings in every sense of the word, every inch of it. You want to trust the character, if that's a good thing or a bad thing when you see the movie you decide for yourself. But I thought he was absolutely perfect."

Lesser known but no less ensemble-driven is the cast of Moresco's new NBC fall drama series The Black Donnellys, on which he is both show runner and teamed once again with Paul Haggis. The series was inspired by Moresco's own youth in the Hell's Kitchen district of Manhattan, where an Irish mob by the name of The Westies ruled with an iron fist.

"One day, Paul had an idea," Moresco remembers. "He said, 'Hey, I want to do your life story. Do you want to do it with me?' I said, 'Yes, because you'll do it without me if I don't.'"

"We wrote this thing based on the world I grew up in: four Irish brothers involved in the Irish crime world, who go into tensions against not only an Italian family but some others too," he continues. "It's not autobiographical, but we deal with childhood memories and real-life flesh and blood characters."

As a beneficiary of one of the biggest Best Picture upsets in Academy Awards history this spring, Moresco's more recent life experiences have been heady ones indeed. But having come up through off-Broadway and Broadway as an actor, with relatively modest ambitions, Moresco is quick to deflect any lasting halo effect.

"For a short period of time, it's nuts and fun and you try not to pay too much attention," he reveals. "Not for a minute do you think, 'Hey, I'm better than these other guys because I have an Oscar.' That's silly. What is fun is everybody saying, 'Hey, you've done good work.' That's pretty cool. I love and appreciate that."

With regards to film financier Bob Yari currently suing Crash producer Cathy Shulman for what he claims is a producer credit bump, Moresco simply shakes his head. "Paul and I sat down and wrote Crash from a place where we just did something we wanted to make. We don't think about finances and then the finances happen and then when it goes crazy it is like that old saying, success has many fathers. So people fight it out, but I don't worry too much about those things. I move on. I'm doing more work and that's what's important to me."

In addition to 10th & Wolf andThe Black Donnellys, Moresco has tried to stay busy with other projects. These include screenplays for a romantic comedy, a Hitchockian thriller and an imminent sports movie project. Moresco also plans to direct the final first season episode of The Black Donnellys.

But for now, it's all about getting the word out about 10th & Wolf, which opened August 18th in limited release. "The kicking off point for this film was a mob war in Philadelphia around 1991-92, and the first Iraqi war right after that," he explains. "What I thought was, 'Ok, I can find something worth writing about this idea of questioning authority?'"

"This idea of young people who were taught certain things and believe in certain things, and maybe they find out they might have been lied to," he continues "The question for me in writing this script was, what if everything they've said to us is a lie? What's the emotional and moral price we pay for that?"