MONDAY

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Archives
• Young Voices
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis

FEATURES

• Election 2008
• Right to Return
• Examining Hip-Hop

RELATED LINKS

• The Black Donnellys
• Article on Mr. Moresco
• Mr. Moresco's bio
• VetStage

E-mail a friend

Tavis: Bobby Moresco is an Oscar-winning writer who now serves as the co-creator and executive producer of the new NBC series, "The Black Donnellys." The show is based on real-life events from his childhood in New York City, Hell's Kitchen, to be exact. The show debuted this past Monday night and will remain on Mondays at ten p.m. Here now a scene from NBC's "The Black Donnellys."

[Film Clip]

Tavis: Wow! Bobby Moresco, nice to meet you.

Bobby Moresco: Tavis, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Tavis: My pleasure. I want to talk about this show, "The Black Donnellys" in a moment. First, though, growing up in Hell's Kitchen. What was that like?

Moresco: You know, we were on Tenth Avenue and Fifty-First Street right in the middle of Manhattan. Two blocks south were the docks, two blocks the other way - what's that? North? It was Broadway. So we're stuck between Broadway and the docks. It was a world unto itself. It was nothing like growing up on the west side in Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a great life.

We felt like we were the center of the world. Every day you woke up, you read the newspapers and there was something in the newspapers, something on television, something on the news channel about your neighborhood. You felt like you were at the center of the world. It was great.

Tavis: What's the most abiding lesson you've taken out of that childhood experience for your career, for your life?

Moresco: That's a great question. The most abiding lesson that I think I've taken is that you pay a moral price for each and every act and each and every choice you make in life. You don't know what that price is going to be, but you're going to pay it.

Tavis: That's a nice segue into "The Black Donnellys," is it not? You like that?

Moresco: I like that (laughter).

Tavis: That's a nice segue (laughter). So you got these four brothers in "The Black Donnellys." Tell me about the series.

Moresco: The series is about these four kids. You know, me and Haggis - you remember the show "Easy Streets"? Me and Haggis did the show called "Easy Streets" and I used to sit and tell him stories about what it was like growing up in Hell's Kitchen.

Tavis: Let me jump in right quick because you just said Haggis. Friends do that. They kind of throw these names out. That would be Paul Haggis who won the Academy Award along with you for the screenplay for "Crash." All right, go ahead.

Moresco: And he also wrote "Million Dollar Baby" which I worked with him on and won Best Picture the year before, which was great fun.

Tavis: Absolutely.

Moresco: So I used to tell Haggis all these stories about growing up on the west side, Hell's Kitchen. Then after "Easy Streets" was cancelled, I went and did another show and he went and did another show. Then one morning, I got a call and Haggis said to me, "I want to do your life story. You want to do it with me?" I said, "Damn right because you'll do it without me if I don't." (Laughter) And he would have too. That's where the show started.

I had five brothers growing up. We made this show four brothers. When we found the show, we realized that it was going to be a coming of age story. Four kids wind up in the world of the Irish mafia. You remember a group called the Westies? Everybody knows about the Westies, the Irish mob. A lot of them were my friends and family, people I knew growing up. These four kids wind up in that world and they just don't know how to exist there. They're incapable of surviving except by counting on each other and depending on each other.

Tavis: But the four of them, as you might expect, though, have different personalities and they all have different -

Moresco: - different personalities. You know, Tommy is the kid who wanted out. Tommy is the kid who had a way out. Unfortunately, he had a sin that he committed ten or twelve years earlier that he wasn't able to escape from.

Jimmy is the kid who's a drug addict. He's got real problems because he thinks that he was the cause of his father's death and, indeed, he might have been.

Kevin believes he's the absolute luckiest person on the face of the earth. He has never won a bet. Makes one every day of his life, never won a bet, but I'm lucky. You can't convince him he's not lucky (laughter).

And Sean is the good-looking kid who gets all the girls. He steals all his brothers' girlfriends. These four kids, they're good guys. They don't belong in this world and circumstances that take place during the course of the pilot put them in this world.

Tavis: What are you trying to say to us through this series?

Moresco: I'm trying to say what I said to you earlier which is, no matter what the intention that you have behind the actions that you take, you will pay a moral price no matter what.

Tavis: Tell me how you decided to go at this? What I mean to suggest by that is that I wrote a book last year that talked about some lessons I've learned along the way. On the one hand, you would think that would be easy to do, writing about or doing a television series or screenplay about your own life. On the one hand, you might think that's easy to do because you know you better than anybody else.

On the other hand, there is a certain level of challenge that comes along with figuring out what stories to tell, how to tell those stories, how to craft - You know what I'm getting at?

Moresco: Oh, absolutely.

Tavis: Tell me about the challenge of doing this.

Moresco: Well, first of all, I want to make something clear. We didn't write a biography.

Tavis: It's not about you exactly, but drawn from experiences in your life.

Moresco: Exactly. Me and Haggis took all of these different stories, all of these different characters, my brothers, myself, lots of different things, threw it into a pot and then created a whole new world that's contemporary. That's not Hell's Kitchen. That's a fictionalized world in New York City and it's a contemporary timeless setting that may have been in the 1970s and 1980s, but maybe tomorrow.

But the point of view, that's the big question. When you create anything, what's the point of view? What's the inroad to telling a story? In this case, when Haggis and I found out that we were telling a coming of age story within a mobster genre, then we had it. We said, “Okay, this is the show we want to write.”

This is about four kids who are in the world of mobsterdom, as it were, and they don't know what the hell they're doing there. This is not organized crime. This is disorganized crime. Then we realized, okay, now we got a show to tell. It's totally different, we think, than any other "mob show" because it's about these four kids who don't know what the hell they're doing there.

Tavis: What's the age range of these kids?

Moresco: Eighteen to twenty-two. Handsome kids, thank goodness (laughter). You know, it means something. You want to have an audience that wants to spend time with these kids and the fact that they're attractive gets an audience to first look. That's going to last about five seconds, but once they look, hopefully you attract them with the work.

Tavis: So the weird thing about Hollywood is that you can make these guys more attractive than your own brothers, in fact (laughter).

Moresco: That's the truth, although my brothers were fairly good-looking. I was the only dopey-looking one (laughter).

Tavis: Yeah, through the splendor and wonder of Hollywood. I'm fascinated here. We talked at the beginning of our conversation about you growing up in Hell's Kitchen. How did you navigate your way from that place to here? How did you become a screenwriter, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, no less? As I've read about your background and the twenty-four years - well, I'll let you tell the story, but you've worked hard to get here.

Moresco: Yeah. You know, I worked real hard to get here.

Tavis: Driving a cab?

Moresco: Drove a cab, was a bartender for a long time, I was a security guard, I parked cars underneath Madison Square Garden, I was a construction worker. I had a wife and two children. We got married young. Even though you have dreams, you got to work.

Tavis: Yeah, got to pay the rent.

Moresco: Yeah, the rent, the baby's got to eat, the kids got to eat. Both my daughters are older now. But what it was - listen, there's an old adage in show business. "If you can do something else and be happy, go do that." It's too hard. You know that. It's too hard. I couldn't do anything else. I always loved this stuff. When I was growing up, I used to listen to songs and I'd write my own lyrics because I thought they were better (laughter).

Tavis: (Laughter) No shortage of confidence here. I got the answer to my question. Extreme confidence.

Moresco: But they weren't better. That's not my point. I thought they were better (laughter). There were six kids in a little tenement on Fifty-First and Tenth Avenue. My mom was a switchboard operator in St. Claire's Hospital. My dad was a longshoreman. I kid you not, there was something called "The Million Dollar Baby" back then. Remember that?

My mom used to put us all into the living room after dinner, turn out all the lights, put on "The Million Dollar Baby" and she'd say, "Okay, no talking during the movie." I mean, this is six or seven nights a week, so I grew up loving movies. That was my education. Back then, we all quit school early, so I left school early.

I didn't have a real education. Everything I learned, I learned from movies and television. Then I went back after I decided to try to learn something about writing. I went back and got an education for myself. But early on, it was just about movies. It was only about movies.

Tavis: It's a nice journey, though, from Hell's Kitchen to this day at the Academy Awards.

Moresco: It was great. Lots and lots of hard work, like you say. I started writing plays. That's what got me into writing movies. For about five or six years, I studied all the great playwrights, the great philosophers, the great poets. I just read every night of the week after bartending. I tried to learn something about not only the human condition, but the point of view from other great writers. Plays led me to Haggis and "Easy Streets" and then it led to movies.

Tavis: Tell me right quick about this project. Is it Vet Stage that you're involved with?

Moresco: Thanks for asking about that. It's a tremendous thing. There's a group - Sean Huze is a young writer, director, actor. He spent time in Iraq, came back home, wrote some plays about his experiences in Iraq, formed a theater company solely for veterans to come and explore what happened to them over there. Mostly Iraqi veterans, some Afghanistan veterans, some Vietnam, all the way back.

These guys have a place to go and to write and to explore emotionally through the theater work what they went through. I think it's a tremendous thing. We're having a benefit for them tomorrow afternoon and hopefully you've got some stuff you'll put up there in terms of - vetstage.org, I think it is - for a graphic. But it's a great, great opportunity.

Listen, no matter what you feel about the war, you know, left side, right side or the aisle, you got to support these guys. It's the big mistake we made in Vietnam. We didn't support the guys. It's not their fault. We all have our own opinion about the war, but these guys are serving.

Tavis: So Vet Stage. That's vetstage.org if you want to get more information about that. "The Black Donnellys," Monday nights at ten p.m. on NBC. Nice to meet you, Bobby Moresco.

Moresco: Tavis, thank you for taking the time.

Tavis: Glad to have you here.