Leslie Bohem Daylight

Leslie Bohem (born September 25, 1951) wrote the screenplay for Daylight (1996). Before entering the film industry, Bohem was a bassist in new wave bands -- he played with Gleaming Spires and briefly with Sparks in the early 1980s. His transition to screenwriting began with uncredited work before he adapted his father's unfinished 1935 script into Twenty Bucks (1993), a comedy-drama anthology that traced a twenty-dollar bill through multiple owners. (wikipedia, imdb)

Bohem's screenplay follows the disaster-movie template with one structural innovation

Daylight's script is built on the Poseidon Adventure model -- assemble a cross-section of strangers, introduce a catastrophe, thin the group while forcing survivors toward an exit. What Bohem added was a protagonist who is not a professional rescuer arriving from the outside but a disgraced one returning to the work that destroyed him. Kit Latura's backstory -- the South Bronx building collapse, the dead men, the institutional exile -- gives the disaster formula a redemption arc that the 1970s templates lacked.

The script also loads the opening with a double-criminal catalyst: toxic waste smugglers exploiting the tunnel as a disposal route and diamond thieves using it as a getaway corridor. Neither group knows the other exists. The screenplay drops this causal thread entirely once the survival plot begins -- a choice that multiple critics flagged as a missed opportunity.

His career spanned genre films and prestige television

Bohem's other screenwriting credits include Nowhere to Run (1993), a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle, and The Alamo (2004). His most acclaimed work came in television: he created and produced Taken (2002), Steven Spielberg's science-fiction miniseries, which won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries in 2003. He later created Shut Eye for Hulu and wrote episodes of Extant, another Spielberg-produced series. (wikipedia)

Bohem's father left behind the script that launched his writing career

The origin of Bohem's screenwriting career is itself a story: his father, a screenwriter, died leaving an unfinished 1935 script. Bohem completed it decades later as Twenty Bucks, which was produced by Endre Bohem's original concept with updates by his son. The film attracted a cast including Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi, and Christopher Lloyd, and established Bohem as a writer who could handle ensemble structures -- a skill that served him directly on Daylight. (imdb)