Utah native trades Wall Street for Hollywood
Park City UT Record 23Jan99
By Stephanie Howell: Record Guest Writer

33-year-old David Moreton arrived back in his home state of Utah Thursday evening to attend the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. A self-proclaimed "born and bred Utah boy" who "grew up skiing in Park City," David is no stranger to Sundance as he often frequented past festivals with his brother and sister. What is different this year is the MBA business grad and former Wall Street money man left that life to become a starving aspiring filmmaker. This year, the film "Edge of Seventeen," which Moreton produced and directed is screening in the American Spectrum program.

David followed a fairly untraditional route toward a film making career. A graduate of Olympus High School in Salt Lake City, he studied English at the University of Utah. Film classes interested him, but practicality won out, and he "took the safe route" by pursuing a "real job." After several years in the business world, he attended the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) a top-ranked business school, from which he received a master's degree in business administration. "I ended up on Wall Street and hated it," David explained. "I realized I had given up the one thing I really wanted to do, which was film."

When the timing was right, David quit his business job, downsized his life and started making his first film, a documentary called, "Straight Up and Down." The film centers on a group of inner city high school students on the Lower East Side of New York, who deal with issues of sex, drugs and violence through their work in a theater group.

While editing his documentary, Moreton met Todd Stephens ,who is the screenwriter for "Edge of Seventeen." David was impressed with Stephen's script and signed on to produce the film.

"Edge of Seventeen" is basically a coming of age story. The film, set in a small town in Ohio in the 1984 and follows a teenage boy through his first sexual experience, his coming out of the closet, (homosexuality) and his realization that he doesn't fit in. It is about the complications that arise when people are honest with each other. Filmed entirely on location, it captures a certain time and place. "It really feels like it's Ohio. It really feels like it's 1984", David said.

Originally, David was only slated to be the producer and hoped to use the experience as a training ground, eventually moving on to direct his own films. But when the director backed out at the last minute, David stepped up to the plate. "I had never done this before," he said. "And we were in the middle of nowhere in Ohio." With no time to waste on nervous jitters, he threw himself into the project. Looking back on the experience, Moreton calls it "one of the most intense experiences I have ever had."

"Edge of Seventeen" has experienced measurable success in the film world at Outfest in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Gay Film Festival (a festival attended by Moreton's "somewhat conservative" though thoroughly supportive Mormon parents). Picked up by Strand Releasing, it will be released theatrically in May.

With a distribution deal firmly in hand, it appears that David has successfully completed the transition from a Wall Street mutual fund marketer to a Hollywood filmmaker. Perhaps the gap between he two may be smaller than it appears.