Weird Science

Few people would have pegged Alec Moore ’99 as a future screenwriter—including him. As an undergrad, he switched majors from English to sociology so he wouldn’t have to do so much writing. “Now, here I am, a writer,” he says.

Moore’s first feature-length indie comedy Advanced Chemistry recently landed on Amazon and Apple to rent and buy, after enjoying a bunch of one-off screenings across the country. In addition to writing the film, he produced and acted in it.

As an undergrad at Haverford, he took what few film courses were available, but never landed the lead in a school play, so he figured his chances of becoming a professional actor were slim. “I tabled any dreams of possibly doing that and went into the corporate world,” he says.

For the next decade-plus he worked in sales and marketing, first with a Connecticut baseball team called the New Britain Rock Cats, and then at several larger firms in New York City. It turns out he did enjoy writing, as long as it wasn’t term papers on English literature. He started working on pilots for TV shows in his spare time, and while none were produced, the results were encouraging. He wrote a spec script for the show 30 Rock that garnered enough attention to get him a manager.

The road to Advanced Chemistry began in 2012 when he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in UCLA’s screenwriting MFA program. By the time he graduated two years later, he had an early draft of the screenplay (then called Sexy, Sexy Science) and a connection with Etana Jacobson, who would go on to direct the film. Moore and his wife Jane Miller Moore would produce.

Inspired by comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Shakespearean switcheroos a la A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Moore’s film is a wild farce about endearingly awkward biochemist Allen, played by Samba Schutte of the cult-fave pirate series Our Flag Means Death on Max. Allen is working on a drug that compels “instant monogamy” in its test subjects—an idea Moore says was inspired by real-life research in voles. Studies conducted on the rodents found the brain chemistry of some to be naturally monogamous, while others got around a lot more. When scientists swapped genes between the two populations, they saw changes in these behaviors. “I was like, ‘That’s really interesting. What if we could do this with people?’” says Moore.

After Allen begrudgingly agrees to inject the drug into his best friend Marcia (played by standup comic Chaunté Wayans), a compulsive cheater who asks for help staying faithful to her wife, chaos and sexual hijinks ensue.

The rest of the cast is rounded out by several recognizable faces, including standup comic Kiran Deol, Sarah Burns (Barry), T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh (That’s So Raven, In Living Color), and Iqbal Theba (Glee, The Brink, Community). As for Moore, he plays the Chicken Man, a shaggy, substance-abusing forest dweller who pops up for a little mayhem before the denouement. Moore did not have himself in mind when he created the role, but he was happy to join in the fun on the scrappy three-week shooting schedule.

While he is currently busy promoting the film on social media, Moore has several new scripts completed—all comedies. “Comedy is the only thing I would have wanted to do,” he says.  He’s hoping that attention on Advanced Chemistry will lead to opportunities to make some of those other films, and if the current feedback is any indication, that’s not an unlikely scenario.

The film, which Moore calls “silly and smart” has garnered several nice reviews and what he describes as “big laughs” during the screenings, including several attended by his fellow Haverford alums. Its lighthearted tone is a refreshing change from a lot of the dark comedies and dramedies of recent years, even given the science-driven premise. “The success of Oppenheimer proved that audiences are interested in stories about scientists,” says Moore. “And our movie is even funnier than Oppenheimer!”