Superhero-Loving Silver Screen
A funny thing happened to David S. Goyer on the way to becoming a homicide detective. He became a screenwriter. And a busy one at that. Goyer wrote "Blade," the new vampire movie starring Wesley Snipes, participated in a round-robin screenwriting contest hosted by the Turner-produced Web site Rough Cut and has a slew of other projects in the works. Among them are penning a script for Eddie Murphy, producing TV shows and collaborating on a comic book series for DC Comics.
Goyer's is a career that many superhero-loving, sci-fi obsessed young people dream of having. But when he was a youth himself, growing up in Ann Arbor, Mich., he had an entirely different career mapped out. What he really wanted to do was . . . detect.
Instead of spending his days and nights crafting filmworthy stories about good guys, bad guys and otherworldly mayhem as he does now, Goyer imagined he'd use his energies solving very earthly mysteries as a homicide detective. He had never gone to the best film schools.
"I was in fourth or fifth grade," Goyer, 32, recalls over a morning muffin at Mel's Drive-In on West Hollywood's Sunset Strip, "and I read an article in Time magazine about the rising crime rate in America. I became outraged and vowed that I would do something to fight for justice. I knew it was incumbent on a certain number of people to stem the tide of horror that I imagined was sweeping the country."
This realization, coupled with his appreciation of the vigilante ethics of his favorite comic-book heroes like the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man, pointed Goyer toward a crime-fighting career. His high school teachers, however, had a different path in mind for this young man, who had already won national awards for his short fiction. Their hopes were heightened after Goyer was accepted to film school at USC. "I applied on a lark," he recalls, "but I still couldn't go because my family didn't have the money. So my high school teachers got together and raised the money for my first year's tuition." The psychological challenges of homicide work still fascinated Goyer ("Trying to figure out how the perpetrator would think, that puzzle aspect of it all, intrigued me," he says), but film school won out. Now, 14 years later, Goyer explores many of the same themes that inspired his crime-fighting ambitions, except that he writes outlines with his laptop rather than body chalk. In fact, after cutting his screenwriting teeth on action fare for Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, Goyer has made his mark as a writer of intelligent science-fiction and comic-book-inspired film scripts, usually featuring a troubled hero who must overcome an inner struggle before conquering darker outside forces.
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