Faces to Watch

David S. Goyer

Screenwriter

David S. Goyer is a comic book junkie, and his habit has been very good to him. His screenplay adaptation for the Wesley Snipes movie “Blade” helped the 1998 film reinvigorate the comic-book movie genre. While the current trend shows signs of weakening (“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”), he’s looking to revive it again with a one-two punch -- writing and directing “Blade: Trinity,” the third (and final) film in the series, and writing the fifth “Batman” movie for “Memento” director Christopher Nolan.

For Snipes’ vampire slayer, the 36-year-old Goyer decided to put the comic back in comic book. Adding “Best in Show” performers Parker Posey and John Michael Higgins to the cast, he’s allowing more improvisation in a self-referential deconstruction of the vampire genre. “If you’re going to do the third permutation of something, you have to do what the audience won’t expect. They won’t expect comedy, especially from me,” says Goyer, whose screenplay for “Dark City” was anything but sunny.

Although Warner Bros. made Goyer sign a “heinous nondisclosure agreement,” he can reveal that “Batman’s” fifth outing will be “a superhero movie that will win Academy Awards.” Expect the Dark Knight to get a little darker.

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Amy Poehler

Actor

TV viewers who complain that “Saturday Night Live” isn’t “live” enough can take heart knowing they will soon see the result of much of cast member Amy Poehler’s downtime. “ ‘SNL’ has a loose schedule where you’re off for a couple of weeks at a time, so I’ve been fortunate to be working a lot,” she says.

Next year the 32-year-old Poehler will play Jack Black’s nouveau-riche wife, running for Congress off the profits from his poo-evaporating invention in Barry Levinson’s “Envy.” She’ll also play a scheming mother in “Mean Girls,” written by “SNL” anchorwoman Tina Fey, and appear as a crazed bank teller with “SNL” alumni Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay in “Anchorman.”

“I’ve been working with a lot of my friends, which is great. Adam let me improvise forever,” she says. Although her former comedy group, Upright Citizens Brigade, went off the air three years ago, they reunited to film a totally improvised film, “Wild Girls Gone,” about the making of a “Girls Gone Wild” video, which will soon be making the festival rounds in hopes of finding distribution. One more reason to go out to the movies on a boring Saturday night.

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Shia LaBeouf

Actor

Fans of the Disney Channel series “Even Stevens” have known Shia LaBeouf’s star potential for awhile. It wasn’t until the release last spring of the surprise hit “Holes” that adults began to catch up. Since that film’s release, the 17-year-old LaBeouf has only had three weeks off from the world of big-budget summer moviemaking.

He’ll be pulling detective sidekick double duty next year, first as the comic relief to Will Smith’s police detective in “I, Robot,” based on the book by Isaac Asimov, then as the assistant to Keanu Reeves’ supernatural investigator in “Constantine,” based on the comic book “Hellblazer.”

The only thing assured about LaBeouf’s projects after that: They’ll be unpredictable. “The hardest thing for me now is choosing which scripts to do,” he says. “The other day, I had two scripts that were both equally [bad], but I had to pick one, because I’d already said no so many times. So I put the scripts on the floor and put two pieces of turkey on top of the scripts and brought my dog in. Whichever one he ate first, that was the script I was going to pursue.”

-- Patrick Day