"It was never in the series, but it came out later that he was the ghost of a runaway slave, correct?
Exactly. He was teaching runaway slaves to read and write. They were caught by bounty hunters with dogs. He was killed by the bounty hunters, and his spirit went into the book he had been reading with the other escaped slaves.
Did you guys know his origin from the conception of the show, or was it developed later on?
It was part of it from the beginning. We thought that the audience would be really interested in this story, and so at some point we thought we would do an origin story. But we never actually did it because we discovered that kids loved the mystery so much. We got tons of mail from kids with guesses as to who Ghostwriter was and we didn't want to prove anyone wrong, so we never revealed it...
As a quick side note, Samuel L. Jackson was in the first episode (as Jamal's dad). Did you realize at the time that he was going to be a big actor?
Absolutely!... Sam Jackson hadn't done Pulp Fiction yet. That was what really made him a megastar and he had to resign from Ghostwriter...
we hired some hand doubles that would do the handwriting. We'd have a chunk of handwriting [shots] at the end of the day, so the kids could do their homework. We'd shoot children writing with document cameras, because it had to be a child's hand, and it had to be exactly perfect. It was sometimes not the most interesting thing to do."
The dreams of the 90s ;) I loved this show when I was little.
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