Harvard Producer a Success

“I want to be a producer!” sings Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks’s classic “The Producers,” “And see my name...in lights!” For everyone watching the musical, and even for Bloom himself, this is almost pure fantasy. For Christopher L. Moore ’86, this is everyday life.

Moore has quite a list of production credits. After his career took off with “Good Will Hunting” he went on to produce “Reindeer Games” and the three “American Pie” films, as well as creating the “Project Greenlight” television series with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Moore didn’t study film at Harvard, but he cites it as an important launchpad for his Hollywood career. “I got into television production when I was at Harvard. Harvard was very important in that I met most of my contacts who gave me my first jobs and who I now work with,” Moore says.

It was also at Harvard that Moore first met Matt Damon, one of his closest collaborators today, though Moore emphasizes that the relationship mostly developed later.

“We did kind of meet at Harvard, but it was kind of a planned meeting for 10 minutes. We ended up really meeting when we both moved out to LA,” he says.

“I had quit being an agent to produce my first movie, and I called Matt to see if he’d star in it. And he couldn’t because he was starring in another movie, but he was the one who said ‘You should check out my friend Ben [Affleck].’ So he came in and ended up getting the lead in ‘Glory Daze.’”

After “Glory Daze” Moore got the chance to work with Damon, Affleck, and Robin Williams on “Good Will Hunting.” According to Moore, though he admires Damon and Affleck very much, Williams wins his respect in a way nobody else can.

“Robin Williams is the closest person to a genius that I’ve worked with. You watch that guy perform and he is functioning on a different level from any person I’ve ever been around. He is an amazing performer that makes everybody have to do their best work. It’s pretty amazing when you have one guy who is driving the creative experience like that.”

A few years later, Moore, Damon and Affleck continued their collaboration with “Project Greenlight,” a documentary about making independent films.

The three friends went through the arduous process of finding the money and resources to produce the program.

“It was later that we had the idea of the TV show as the way to do the documentary, and kind of in classic Hollywood fashion once we realized we could sell it all we decided to go ahead and do it,” says Moore. The show ran for two seasons on HBO then switched to Bravo for a third season.

Moore shows no signs of slowing down. He’s currently producing two films in development, and though tight-lipped about both, he did reveal a couple of details about one of them. The film, planned for 2007, is based on the story of Hunter Scott, a student whose school project on the USS Indianapolis sparked a Congressional review of the disaster and the eventual exoneration of the ship’s captain.

Moore has also recently branched out into directing with a film called “The Killers.”

“It’s a thriller about a group of college students put in a position of having to decide whether they would kill another person to save themselves,” Moore explains.

Moore says he relished the chance to take control as a director after spending so many years as a producer. “Producing is about providing all the necessary resources for directors and actors to go make a movie. You’re only as involved as they want you to be. If you are the director, you’re making a lot of those creative decisions. You’re working with the writers on the script, the camera crew. It’s a totally different creative endeavor.”

“The Killers” will hit theaters within the next year. “I am hoping it’ll be this fall but there are a lot of thriller movies aimed at Halloween, so it might be this time next year,” he says of his first directorial endeavor. “I think it will play well. I think people will like it.”