Michael P. Moran
2 min read
Michael Patrick Moran (February 8, 1944, Yuba City, California - February 4, 2004, New York City) was an American actor and playwright who spent much of his career in New York's downtown theater world. Because his father was a U.S. Army officer, the family moved frequently, and Moran eventually graduated from Passaic Valley Regional High School in Little Falls, New Jersey in 1962. He later moved to the Lower East Side of New York City and trained at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He became a member of the experimental Manhattan Project theater company and the Cooper-Keaton Group, both of which staged plays he wrote, including Call Me Charlie, which featured Danny DeVito.
Moran's most widely seen film role was as Nick "the Pig," a loyal drug-dealing enforcer to Al Pacino's Tony Montana, in Scarface (1983). Further supporting and character work followed through the late 1980s and 1990s in both comedy and drama.
In Ghostbusters II (1989), Moran played Frank, listed in the film's credits as "Frank the Doorman," though the character himself explicitly corrects anyone who uses that title. The scene appears near the opening of the film: Frank is giving instructions to a repairman doing maintenance on the building when Dana Barrett arrives and asks him for help with her groceries. He tells her he is not the doorman but the building's superintendent, though he eventually obliges. As Dana and Frank speak, Oscar's baby carriage is set rolling by Psychomagnotheric Slime, kicking off the film's central peril. This distinction between doorman and superintendent is also confirmed by the November 27, 1988 draft of the screenplay. Moran died of Guillain-Barre syndrome in a New York hospital on February 4, 2004, four days before his sixtieth birthday.
