Perry Moore, who played a critical role in bringing the Narnia stories to the big screen, died of an apparent accidental overdose of OxyContin last week, it has been reported. He was 39.
Moore, an executive producer on the three Chronicles of Narnia films that have released since late 2005, was found unconscious by his partner, Hunter Hill, in the bathroom of his Manhattan home on Thursday and died later in hospital, according to police, who do not suspect foul play. Moore apparently had chronic severe back pain, and was scheduled for back surgery later this spring.
Moore’s 2007 book, Hero, about a gay superhero, won a Lambda Literary award. He also wrote and directed the 2008, Lake City, starring Sissy Spacek.
Moore played a key role in bringing the Narnia films to the big screen, starting with a 2001 letter to the C. S. Lewis Company seeking film rights to the Chronicles for Walden Media. He was just 29 at the time. Five years later, the self-professed “Narnia geek” saw his dream come true when The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe hit the big screen. Moore chronicled his journey in, The Official Illustrated Movie Companion for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe(HarperSanFrancisco).
“I’m just the ultimate fanboy living out a fan’s dream, because this was my favorite book as a kid,” Moore told CT in 2005, just before LWW released. “Narnia kicked off my lifelong relationship with storytelling, with wanting to read everything I could get my hands on—certainly fantasy, though I like to call it ‘literature of the ideas.'”
