Screenwriter and film director · Pewaukee, Wisconsin
David Koepp
Born Pewaukee, June 9, 1963; UCLA film BFA 1990; screenwriter of Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man; novelist and director
$4,000,000
David Koepp left Pewaukee with a Midwestern movie habit and became one of Hollywood's highest-grossing screenwriters. Born there on June 9, 1963, the youngest of four, he grew up watching Hitchcock with his therapist mother and Godzilla on late-night television while his father ran a billboard company. He tried acting at the University of Minnesota and at Wisconsin–Madison, then transferred to UCLA's film school in 1984 and took a BFA in 1990. His scripts powered the modern studio-blockbuster era: Jurassic Park and The Lost World for Steven Spielberg, Mission: Impossible for Brian De Palma, Spider-Man for Sam Raimi, War of the Worlds, and two later Indiana Jones entries. As a director he has delivered Stir of Echoes, Secret Window, Premium Rush, and You Should Have Left. Domestic box-office tallies place him among the top handful of writers in studio history, and he returned to dinosaurs with Jurassic World Rebirth after more than two decades away from the franchise. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park he also appears on screen as the unlucky San Diego man eaten by a T. rex, a cameo while he served as second-unit director. Columbia paid him about $4 million in February 2000 for the Panic Room package, among the richest single-script deals of its era. Writers Guild East gave him the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Career Achievement in 2013. He has published thrillers including Cold Storage and Aurora and keeps threading Wisconsin into the work through parent names, Midwestern settings, and the sense that ordinary places can hold extraordinary plots. Pewaukee remains the origin story he cites when asked how a kid from lake country ended up inventing Mr. DNA.