Kloves began writing professionally after being rejected by the film department at UCLA and taking a job delivering scripts for an agency. His third screenplay became his first credit, "Racing With the Moon" (1984), a touching story of young love with Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth McGovern set during WWII, likably offbeat given the more brash tone of most of the teen films of that period. The film set the pattern for Kloves' subsequent efforts: character-driven stories with a cynical edge, measured in their pacing, based to some extent around competitive triangular or parallel
