Bobby Moresco grew up in New York's Hell's Kitchen, a poor working-class neighborhood on Manhattan's West Side. But Hell's Kitchen lies right next door to Broadway, and the bright lights attracted Bobby from the time he was a teen. Being stage-struck was hardly what a street kid could admit to his partners. Fearing their making fun of him, he told no one, not even his girlfriend, when he started taking acting lessons at age 17. If you were a kid from the neighborhood, you became a cop, construction worker, longshoreman or criminal. Not an actor. Moresco struggled to make that long walk a few blocks east. He studied acting, turned out for all the cattle calls  -- and during the decade of the 1970s made a total of $2,000. "I wasn't a good actor, but I had a driving need to do something different with my life," he says. He moved to Hollywood, where he drove a cab and worked as a waiter. " My father said, 'Stop this craziness and get a job; you have a wife and daughter.' "But Moresco kept working at his chosen career. Then in 1983 his younger brother Thomas was murdered in a killing. Moresco moved back to his old neighborhood and started writing as a way to explore the pain of Hell's Kitchen. Half-Deserted Streets, based on his brother's killing, opened at a small Off-Broadway theater in 1988. A Hollywood producer saw it and asked him to work on a screenplay. His reputation grew, and he got enough assignments to move back to Hollywood. By 2003, he was again out of work and out of cash when he got a call from Paul Haggis, a director who had befriended him. Haggis wanted help writing a film about the country after September 11. The two worked on the writing Crash, but every studio in town turned it down. They kept trying. Studio executives, however, thought no one wanted to see hard lives in modern America. Crash slipped into the theaters in May 2005, and quietly became both a hit and a critical success. It was nominated for six Academy Awards and won three -- Best Picture, Best Film Editing and Best Writing (Original Screenplay) by Paul Haggis and the kid from Hell's Kitchen. At age 54, Bobby Moresco became an overnight success. "If you have something you want to do in life, don't think about the problems," he says, "think about other ways to get it done." Why Bobby Moresco did not tell anyone that he started taking lessons at age 17?
He wanted to give his girlfriend a surprise. His girlfriend did not allow him to do this. He was afraid of being laughed at. He had no talent for acting.