Auteur Watch - Stephen and David Koepp

God Damn! Are we ever going to get out of the 'K's? Probably not. Anyway, on to the next sibling team. Well, clearly David is the alpha Koepp in this equation. All Stephen's done in the last 20 years is The Paper and go on The O'Reilly show on Fox News.... Someone wants royalties!!!
So let's get back to this David guy. Which do you think is his favorite decade? Was it the 80s, the lean, hungry decade? Mohawks and Sally Cruikshank, in the wake of All That Jazz, and Koepp was working with a bloke by the name of Martin Donovan, clearly in the apprentice role... well, who's the apprentice now?
And then came the 90s and, just as Spielberg claimed Dean Cundey as his own from protegé Zemeckis, so too did Koepp get swiped up for Jurassic Park, no less! Good move on Koepp's part. Not long before he was a damn director in his own right, directing a West-coast Fargo, so to speak... The Trigger Effect, it was called. Certainly more handsome people than Fargo, and more of the kind of bullying behaviour that the American public can understand and appreciate. He musta did something right as 1999 brought his version of The Sixth Sense with that six degrees of Kevin Bacon thrown into the mix for good measure... what was that damn thing called? Stir of Echoes, that's it.
Or maybe the 2000s is Koepp's fave decade. Higher screenplay salaries, and he still gets to play director. 2004 brought his O Brother Where Art Thou to the screen, or Secret Window. Turturro goes from getting redress for a watch stolen from his kin to a story stoled'd from his own damn self! And this time, Turturro's not playing Larry to George Clooney's Moe: he's the whole damn show his own damn self... or so I've been told. And then, 2008 gave us Koepp's The Sixth Sense meets About Schmidt with a touch of Brit, called ... Ghost Town? That's it.
But perhaps the 2010s will be the bestest decade of all for David Koepp. The stench of Indiana Jones 4 behind him, he's ready, willing and able to bring his version of 16 Blocks to the big screen, and it's so far called Premium Rush, the story of a bike messenger being chased by a dirty cop. It's all well and good, but David knows what's coming: the next phone call to his mom, and he's gotta collaborate with Stephen again, even though Stephen went on Fox News. Try and get along with your sibling!