David Moscow

The Boy Who Didn't Want to Be Tom Hanks

David Moscow was thirteen years old when the world watched him grow up overnight in a New York toy store. That giant piano scene in Big (1988) defined his public image before he knew what kind of actor he wanted to be.

It was not an easy process.

Playing the young version of a global star creates a shadow that is hard to handle during adolescence. In 1992, he appeared in Newsies, a Disney musical that was a resounding box office flop on its release. But time proved his most loyal fans right, and the film became an absolute cult favorite on home video.

Moscow played David Jacobs and provided the rational counterpoint to the charisma of a young Christian Bale. It was his last major bet on big-budget commercial cinema before he looked for other paths.

And then the phone stopped ringing as often.

A Haven for Independent Production

By the late nineties, he had decided he didn't want to wait for others to give him permission to work. So he moved to New York to focus on theater and on developing his own screenplays. In 1999, he took part in the play What Happened Was and began to understand that creative control was behind the cameras.

His move into producing wasn't a whim from a bored actor. In 2006, he produced I'll Believe You and began building a network of contacts in independent film that would let him finance risky projects. Moscow learned that money in movies rarely goes hand in hand with artistic freedom.

The reality is harsh.

In 2018, he produced Under the Silver Lake, a film that divided critics at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie cost about 8 million dollars and barely earned a fraction of that in theaters, but its cult status gave it a second life on specialty circuits. Moscow preferred to back David Robert Mitchell's vision over a sure box office hit.

The Obsession with the Origins of Things

His career moved away from the Hollywood spotlight and into sustainability and education. In 2020, he launched the documentary series From Scratch, in which he travels the world to gather every ingredient of a meal. He hunts, fishes and grows what he eats to understand the true cost of human food.

In 2022, he published the book From Scratch: Adventures in Harvesting, Hunting, and Foraging on a Fragile Planet as an extension of his field research. The book details the technical processes of agricultural production in more than ten different countries. Moscow's production company kept three active funding projects going through the winter of 2023.

Filming the second season of his documentary series in 2024 racked up more than 40,000 miles of economy-class travel.