Simon Moore is a British screenwriter, director, and playwright. He is best known as writer for the 1989 six-part BBC miniseries about the international illegal drug trade, '' Traffik'', the basis for the 2000 American crime film ''

Traffic Traffic is the movement of vehicles and pedestrians along land routes. Traffic laws govern and regulate traffic, while rules of the road include traffic laws and informal rules that may have developed over time to facilitate the orderly an ...

'' and the 2004 three-part USA network miniseries by the same name. Moore won a

Primetime Emmy Award The Primetime Emmy Awards, or Primetime Emmys, are part of the extensive range of Emmy Awards for artistic and technical merit for the American television industry. Owned and operated by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS), the P ...

in the Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries category for his script for ''

Gulliver's Travels ''Gulliver's Travels'', originally titled ''Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships'', is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clerg ...

''.

Career

In 1984 Moore submitted a pilot script to the BBC, about female ex-convicts struggling to carve out a life for themselves after release from prison. Within a week, he was commissioned to write a six part serial, Inside Out, which was transmitted on BBC2 in early 1985. Moore wrote and directed the 1991 film noir '' Under Suspicion''. He wrote the 1995 cult Western '' The Quick and the Dead'' in late 1992, writing it as a homage to the

Spaghetti Western The spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's filmmaking style and international box-office success. The term was used by foreign critics because most o ...

s of

Sergio Leone Sergio Leone ( ; ; 3 January 1929 – 30 April 1989) was an Italian filmmaker, credited as the pioneer of the spaghetti Western genre. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. Leone's film-making style ...

, particularly the ''

Dollars Trilogy The ''Dollars Trilogy'' (), also known as the ''Man with No Name Trilogy'' (), is an Italian film series consisting of three spaghetti western films directed by Sergio Leone. The films are titled '' A Fistful of Dollars'' (1964), '' For a Few ...

'' starring

Clint Eastwood Clinton Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor and film director. After achieving success in the Western (genre), Western TV series ''Rawhide (TV series), Rawhide'', Eastwood rose to international fame with his role as the "Ma ...

. Moore decided the lead character should be a female, stating that "when you introduce women into that kind of world, something very interesting happens and you have an interesting dynamic straight away." The names of the lead villain ( Herod) and the town (Redemption) were intentional allusions to the Bible. Moore considered directing his own script as an

independent film An independent film, independent movie, indie film, or indie movie is a feature film or short film that is film production, produced outside the Major film studios, major film studio system in addition to being produced and distributed by independ ...

and shooting ''The Quick and the Dead'' on a $3–4 million budget in either Spain or Italy.

Sony Pictures Entertainment Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. is an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment studio conglomerate that produces, acquires, and distributes filmed entertainment (theatrical motion pictures, television programs, and rec ...

purchased Moore's script in May 1993. Moore wrote the teleplay for the 1996 miniseries adaptation of ''

'', which won five Emmys, including Outstanding Miniseries and Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries for Moore. He also wrote the fantasy miniseries '' The 10th Kingdom'' and '' Dinotopia''. As a playwright, he adapted

Stephen King Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author. Dubbed the "King of Horror", he is widely known for his horror novels and has also explored other genres, among them Thriller (genre), suspense, crime fiction, crime, scienc ...

's novel '' Misery'' for the stage, with the play premiering in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

West End theatre West End theatre is mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres in and near the West End of London.Christopher Innes"West End"in ''The Cambridge Guide to Theatre'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1194–1195, ...

in 1992 and revived in London in 2005.Wolf, Matt
"Shock Novel `Misery' Comes to the London Stage"
deseretnews.com, December 22, 1992

Personal life

Moore lives in

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

References

External links

* 20th-century British dramatists and playwrights 20th-century British screenwriters 21st-century British screenwriters British film directors British male television writers British male screenwriters Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Primetime Emmy Award winners {{UK-screenwriter-stub