David Koepp

David Koepp (; born June 9, 1963) is an American screenwriter. He is the ninth most successful screenwriter of all time in terms of U.S. box office receipts with a total gross of over $2.3 billion. Koepp has achieved both critical and commercial success in a wide variety of genres: thriller, science fiction, comedy, action, drama, crime, superhero, horror, adventure, and fantasy. Some of the best-known films he has written include the sci-fi adventure films Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008); the crime film Carlito's Way (1993); the action spy films Mission: Impossible (1996) and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014); the superhero film Spider-Man (2002); the sci-fi disaster film War of the Worlds (2005) and the mystery thriller Angels & Demons (2009). Koepp has directed seven feature films over the course of his career: The Trigger Effect (1996), Stir of Echoes (1999), Secret Window (2004), Ghost Town (2008), Premium Rush (2012), Mortdecai (2015), and You Should Have Left (2020). Early life and education Koepp was born in Pewaukee, Wisconsin as the youngest of four children, to Donald Koepp, who owned a billboard company, and a family therapist mother. While attending Kettle Moraine High School in Wales, Wisconsin, he worked evenings and weekends at the McDonald's restaurant in Delafield. Originally studying to become an actor, first at the University of Minnesota for a year and afterwards at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for two years, he enrolled in the film school of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1984. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in film from UCLA in 1990. Career As a writer, Koepp worked on blockbuster Hollywood films such as Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider-Man. He had a cameo appearance as the "Unlucky Bastard", a minor character devoured by a T. rex roaming San Diego in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which he co-wrote and was second unit director of. Although Koepp did not write Jurassic Park III, he did devise the film's basic storyline. Koepp later declined an offer to write a script for the series' fourth film, Jurassic World, as he felt he had nothing left to contribute to the series.