Homegrown comic Moore prepares Hollywood debut

Local fans remember him from the exploding hay bales, giant talking cardboard box and edgy sketches that got his hometown comedy television show canceled, or from the comic strips with the wisecracking cow, duck and deer that ran in The Daily Progress for years.

Starting Friday, a wider national audience will know him as the director, writer and star of a new feature film.

Trevor Moore’s Fox Searchlight film, “Miss March,” will be released nationwide Friday. Moore collaborated on the movie with Zach Cregger, his colleague from the comedy sketch troupe the Whitest Kids U’Know.

The R-rated “Miss March” is part buddy movie, part road picture and all sex comedy. Moore said it centers around two best friends from high school.

Cregger plays Eugene Bell, a buttoned-down, straight-and-narrow type who believes in abstinence, while “I’m the guy who’s obsessed with Playboy,” Moore said of his more laid-back character, Tucker Cleigh.

Eugene awakens after four years in a coma to discover that his high school girlfriend is a Playboy bunny, and he and Tucker hit the road to find her.

“It’s a sweet, dirty movie,” Moore said with a chuckle during a recent telephone interview from a promotional tour stop. “It’s a filthy, filthy movie with a lot of heart.”

Moore said that Playboy is hosting a big party for the movie’s release in Las Vegas. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner appears as himself in the film.

“The script was sort of unorthodox in how it came to be. Fox actually came to us,” Moore said. “We weren’t crazy about the script, but Fox said we could completely rewrite it. It was like a road-trip sex-movie writing exercise.”

Moore said he and Cregger were given plenty of freedom with the story as long as they kept the coma plotline and the angel-is-the-centerfold surprise that greets the awakening Eugene.

There have been dozens of details to keep track of, Moore said. “We had to join the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild,” he said.

Moore, who turns 29 next month, is a 1998 Covenant School graduate who majored in film at the School of Visual Arts in New York, graduating in 2003. He became the youngest published cartoonist when he released “Scraps,” a book of cartoons, at age 12. He began his weekly “Cuddy” strip at age 16 in the now-defunct Charlottesville weekly the Observer.

His “Trevor Moore Show” started in 1996 on Charlottesville Public Access and moved over to a former PAX-TV affiliate, where it was canceled for offensive content.

Moore spoke for this story while he was in Miami last week, on his way to Texas, as he and Cregger have been promoting the film on a hectic six-week comedy tour of colleges. Each stop on the promotional tour includes a film screening, question-and-answer time and comedy.

So what have tour audiences thought of “Miss March” so far?

“It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” Moore said, adding that attendance for the promotional tour events has been strong. “It’s been, like, overwhelmingly good.”

Moore said he tried to get a Charlottesville stop planned for the promotional comedy tour, but scheduling simply didn’t work out because they couldn’t line up a local venue in time for the available dates.

Hopes are high that the national release will help Moore, Cregger and their Whitest Kids U’Know teammates to get their comedy troupe on the big screen as well.

“We’re just hoping this will do well so we can do a Whitest Kids movie,” Moore said. “We’ve already done another [Whitest Kids U’Know] season after we finished the movie. We’ll probably go back and do another season.”

Although Moore and Cregger’s tour won’t be coming to Charlottesville, by coincidence another “Miss March” cast member — comedian Craig Robinson — is coming to town this weekend.

Robinson, known for his work as Darryl in the hit NBC comedy “The Office,” will present a comedy show at 7 p.m. Saturday in the Chemistry Auditorium at the University of Virginia. Film fans also have seen him in “Knocked Up” and “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”

Tickets for Robinson’s show are $10, $5 for students, and they’re available at Newcomb Box Office, online at http://www.uvaupc.com/musictoday and by phone at 1-800-594-TIXX (8499).

This article was edited to remove a sentence from the caption.