The Rise and Fall of Justin Marks

[Bug-Eyed Earl]

Article discussing the career trajectory of myself and theVileOne's favorite writer:

http://getinmedia.com/articles/film-tv/man-action-figures?page=0,0

By virtue of his trade, Justin Marks is a man of many worlds: Eternia, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, a maximum-security prison for superheroes, you name it. As the one-time proprietor of at least a half-dozen of the galaxies, fantasias, and subterranean hellholes that have occupied the hearts and minds of sci-fi fans for decades, it’s Marks’ charge to inhabit those places, scope them out for adventure and report back onto the blank page. Sometimes he never wants to leave; other times he can’t wait to escape. Every time, there are two realities that await him on the other side: Hollywood, and the online community’s approximation of Hollywood. The two couldn’t be more different.

“We live in such a cynical world—that is, the Internet—and it’s created a culture that’s very risk-averse,” says 30-year-old Marks, speaking comprehensively for the first time about a screenwriting career that’s still in its infancy yet has set the blog world abuzz. “If you do something and you fail, it lives on in infamy for a very long time. Not to say that people should be taking risks all the time, but sometimes you want to see [something] other than dried-out, cookie-cutter movies that are dead on arrival. Sometimes a train wreck is more interesting.”

It’s the “train wreck” part that drove Marks to therapy, and defines the unreality (“the Internet,” a term he comes back to over and over) that he’s had to learn to come to terms with. In mid-2007, comic-book-to-screen master David S. Goyer (Dark City, Batman Begins) mentioned his involvement with a Green Arrow movie entitled Super Max and said that the script would be written not by him but by a newbie called Justin Marks, at which point fan sites everywhere began clamoring to hold Marks’ credibility to the harsh light of geekdom. Surveying his IMDb page, blogs called him “the most gainfully employed professional fanboy on the planet.” “Who the hell is Justin Marks?” asked another.

Meanwhile, in what Marks considers the real-world Hollywood—though some would argue that net-points, first-dollar world might be described as an alternate dimension at best—young Justin Marks quietly, perhaps too quietly, amassed a project slate that would be the envy of any upcoming screenwriter. Within a year and a half, Marks submitted screenplay drafts to various producers of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Super Max, Voltron, and Grayskull, a larger-than-life update of the He-Man property. That was only the beginning: Marks’ script for Street Fighter had been widely circulated between production companies and studios, along with Grayskull, a leaked draft of which had been deemed a “fanboy masterpiece” by well-known script-review site Latino Review. Marks’ reputation—and mystique—grew exponentially.

“I’m definitely not media-averse or anything like that,” says Marks. “I talk when I’m spoken to. I’m just not spoken to that much.”

Still, Marks could feel the heat of his increasing buzz and the dizzying swirl of expectations getting out of control. “There are many other writers with many more credits who’ve been very successful, so I hope to be one of those guys. I do think, because of the types of jobs I was booking several years ago, they tend to be the kinds of projects that get my friends excited—which is to say the Internet.”

Marks grew up in New York with the same kind of lonely, movie-obsessed childhood that’s defined so many of cinema’s epic storytellers. When it came time for college, however, he “was bitten by another bug”—architecture—which he pursued at Columbia University. There he worked on weekend doodles, like a design for a super-maximum security prison, and larger projects, like what he calls “hack-assembled architecture”—“where you pull together separate component parts of buildings or objects and put it together into something else and reappropriate it,” says Marks. (Parts, like, say, mechanical lions?)

But the Hollywood bug never fully left him. He spent summers on “fact-finding missions” to Los Angeles, crashing on friends’ couches and interning wherever he could. “I can literally trace a straight line between one person I interned for, who recommended me to another person, and then on up to where I am now,” says Marks. “It was, you know, one step at a time.”

Upon graduation, Marks moved to Los Angeles to work as an assistant at Single Cell Pictures, run by Sandy Stern and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. “They did Being John Malkovich, and when I worked for them they were in the middle of production on a movie called Saved! with Mandy Moore and Macaulay Culkin.” A typical assistant, Marks did tasks ranging from reading scripts to finding projects to develop, “the whole kit and kaboodle.”

When Marks made enough inroads with producers, he took the next step of showing one of his screenplays to his boss, Stern, who passed it along to an agent. “It was kind of a modern-day Field of Dreams. Kind of It’s a Wonderful Life set in New York City, with this big, big world and giant mythology about a limo driver who gets involved with the ghosts of history’s most famous figures, who live in this secret society where they affect modern events,” remembers Marks. “It was ambitious. I think at the time I was very proud of it, but you grow out of it.”
Cut-and-paste Salvation

It would be a couple of years before Marks landed his first real screenwriting assignment, one that he worked on for over a year before word really got out: “My first script was called Voltron,” he says matter-of-factly. Of course, very few writers’ first jobs are mega-budget, highly coveted properties based on popular toys. Then again, in those pre-Transformers days of 2005-2006, it wasn’t a coveted project at all.

“Nobody wanted that job! Transformers was still milling about—they couldn’t get that movie made—and nobody wanted to do a giant robot movie,” says Marks. “We actually got the money for me to write it independently. It wasn’t even done at a studio yet because we wanted to develop the script and see what we had first. It feels like a thousand years ago. We’re about to see Transformers 3 now. But at the time, the vocabulary for those kinds of movies just didn’t exist.”

Part of that development was figuring out the tone. The final Voltron script, a bleak, post-apocalyptic tale in which giant “robeats” that emit sonic screams pick off survivors of a man-versus-machine war, describes itself as “a cross between Escape From New York and a Vonnegut apocalypse fantasy.” But there are also moments of geeky humor and nodding references that feel like infusions of lightness from an earlier, more Spielbergian draft. (In one of the “a-ha!” moments, ’80s leftovers like Speak & Spells and Simon game boards are used as “intermediary devices” in Voltron’s assembly.)

“We tried many versions of that story,” says Marks. “It was a feeling where I didn’t want to screw it up. I really wanted to feel like you could just constantly step away and think to yourself, ‘If I were a kid watching this, would I have the same thrill that I had for the original property?’ It started with the Spielbergian incarnation, and then once people started to get a sense of what Transformers was gonna be about, we said, ‘Oh my god, we can’t do that. They’re already doing that movie.’ The last thing you want to do is be the second thing out in the marketplace in the summer that movie came out.” One of the more unusual sources of inspiration came from Neptunes producer and N.E.R.D singer Pharrell Williams, who was on the Voltron project even before Marks was. Williams had big ideas for the film and, of course, the soundtrack.

“It sent my head spinning,” remembers Marks. “I was saying, ‘Oh, I see. We can think outside this box. We’re not just repackaging a Star Wars story. How can we take what Voltron is and bring it into where we are today?’ Well, something like Pharrell’s music; the sampled style, the cut-and-paste style. That’s very much, to me, what went into the theme of Voltron, where you’ve got these people cutting and pasting their salvation through these machines.”

The script was good enough to land Marks a meeting with toymakers Mattel and the Warner Bros. studio to pitch his vision of He-Man, a mythic yet human interpretation that saw bony Skeletor as a sympathetic villain, “a flawed and ambitious man who wanted nothing less than the whole world.” In the economically worded, broadly visual script, He-Man doesn’t become He-Man until nearly the very end. Instead, we see a young prince whose father, the King of Eternia, is murdered and overthrown by the forces of evil; Prince Adam barely survives and is forced into exile, where he’s trained by Yoda-like Zodak until he’s ready to take on Skeletor and stake his rightful claim to the throne. It was a high-pressure situation for Marks, one that would ready him, like Adam, for his own battles down the road.

“That one was the first time where I was thrown into a project where you’ve got many different factors to balance: You’ve got Mattel, Warner [Bros.], Joel Silver as producer. It was a very, very strenuous script to write because of how many cooks were in that kitchen. It was a hell of a script to write.”

The leaked version of the script received rave reviews from the fanboy community and seemed destined for a fast-track production. It was a high time, and Marks got the most out of it. He could feel clouds gathering on the horizon.

Walking Through Raindrops

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li was a desperation job for Marks. He’d spent years attempting to bring Voltron to life and was just about broke. He took the job to avoid working as an assistant again, and to this day feels proud of the job he did on the first draft. It’s everything after that completed draft that went downhill, and when the first trailers and photos came to light, all eyes turned to Marks. “I’m honestly worried that this will have a great script, courtesy of Marks, but poor direction … and will be nothing exciting in the end,” read one fan’s online guess months before the film opened.

When Street Fighter was released—unleashed, perhaps?—in February 2009, the reaction could not have been more fiercely unkind or financially disastrous. The $50 million film never hit double digits in the gross and merited only a 4 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the worst showings of the decade for that site and just barely higher than Battlefield Earth. The puzzling direction was compounded by some of the campiest, downright hilariously bad acting this side of Rollerball. A major source of bizarre choices was its star, Chris Klein, now infamous for his goofy Mamma Mia! audition. Many of Klein’s line readings in Street Fighter have become YouTube-famous, including the coup de grâce, “This guy walks through the raindrops.” (The line, along with many others, was not in Marks’ script.)

Due to Writer’s Guild of America restrictions, Marks is not able to discuss much about what happened in the script-to-screen process. But his wounds are evident. “That was a movie that was made during the [2007-2008] writer’s strike. Because I was a Writer’s Guild member, I was not able to be a part of the [production] process,” says Marks. “For me, watching that movie come out and, when I first saw that movie and I first heard a voice-over on that movie … my script didn’t have a voice-over. Your heart breaks.” He did, however, get a free trip out of the deal. “That was still the most worthwhile experience. I’d never gotten a free trip to anywhere before. I got one to Bangkok, Thailand—which was a little weird, because I’d written it to be set in Hong Kong.”

Marks says the script did not go through the WGA arbitration process, in which a committee reads every draft and revision and compares them to the final product in order to determine screen credit, but he hints that that was more because he wasn’t a Guild member at the time he wrote it than a final determination on his contribution. He also can’t say whether he was allowed any on-set rewrites, which is typical of major productions, but he confirms he was only on set for a couple of days, hardly long enough to fix any major damage that had been done to his original draft.

“At the end of the day, it belongs to them. I gave them a product and they did what they needed to do with it,” says Marks, who found a little ray of optimism in the shrug-it-off attitude of Klein. “The week the movie came out, I had seen it a week prior, so I knew what it was. … But my girlfriend and my friends were like, ‘If you don’t go to a movie theater and see your name on the screen once, you’ll always regret it.’ So we went out there, and I bought a flask to get through it, and showed up at the theater. I came out of the elevator and as I walked to Mann’s Chinese, where it was showing that night, the elevator door across from me opened and it was Chris Klein and all his friends. He was so excited to see the movie! He was like, ‘Of course! It’s a movie! That I worked on! It’s fun! We’re all going to watch it!’ Just the fact that he showed up on opening night with all his friends—I’ve gotta give it to him.”

Klein’s enthusiasm couldn’t shield Marks from the backlash, however. Months later, when it was announced that Marks would pen the screen adaptation of the video game Shadow of the Colossus, online opinion of Marks had turned tepid at best. A sampling: “Now for the potentially bad news. The script is being written by Justin Marks.” “I still don’t trust Marks … @Marks: Prove yourself.” “This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” Even Marks’ successful scripts were retroactively downgraded: “I have to admit it’s kind of funny that if you do a quick search for the screenwriter Justin Marks, you will get ‘the guy they brought in to **** up He-Man’ in your results (probably not very funny to him, but what can you do?),” read one brutal assessment of Marks’ Colossus prospects.

“Look, I grew up reading these sites and being part of this thing, but it was so heartbreaking to see the hostile reception, in the sense of suddenly everyone’s equating your name with this movie that you feel like was this thing that just happened to come out while you existed that you had written a draft of a long time ago,” says Marks in one long breath. “And now, suddenly, everything you do is tainted by that. It’s taken a lot of therapy to get through the Street Fighter experience.”
Surfing the Setbacks

Despite Street Fighter’s failure, work kept coming in for Marks, based on the strength of that film’s original script and the glowing reception within the industry to his version of He-Man. First came the opportunity to take a pass at Hack/Slash, comic book writer Tim Seeley’s Buffy-esque series about a tough, sarcastic high-school girl who hunts monsters known as “slashers.” Even better, the studio responsible for the picture, Rogue Pictures, did not expect Marks’ version to be a definitive draft by any means. Many well-known writers had taken their stabs at the property and more have since Marks. He likens the experience to a hit-it-and-quit-it scenario.

“I had just been working on He-Man for the last year of my life, and frankly, I needed to get out of Eternia,” says Marks. “I like to say it’s comparable to being in a very intense relationship for a year and, when the relationship ends, you go to Vegas with some beautiful girl and just disappear for the weekend.”

Within a couple of months of Street Fighter, Marks had been officially announced as the writer of four upcoming films, all adaptations. Along with Hack/Slash, he was confirmed as writing the scripts for Suicide Squad, a Dirty Dozen–style DC Comics league best known from the comic-book series of the 1980s; the aforementioned Shadow of the Colossus; and, most exciting of all, a new version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Terminator: Salvation director McG at the helm.

“Some of those things had been booked the summer before and got delayed being announced for whatever reason. But for me, the high point was getting to work at Disney on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was this incredible experience of getting to work on a big-budget Disney blockbuster movie with a bunch of great people,” says Marks. Somehow, he found time during all of this to fly once a week to Montreal to work as a writer for Electronic Arts, Army of Two sequel The 40th Day. “I wrote three levels, but then I went on to go to Disney and I think EA wrote the last three levels after I left.”

By the end of 2009, however, things had turned sour once again for Marks. In September, Warner Bros. announced they were canceling work on Grayskull, Marks’ He-Man script, and were walking away from the property altogether. In November, Hack/Slash moved on to another writer, and in April of 2010, the rights-holders to Voltron announced they were throwing out Marks’ development and starting at square one. The final blow to Marks came this May, when Disney stated they were letting go of Marks and McG and had hired David Fincher to craft an entirely new vision of the Jules Verne novel.

“The only real disappointment I’ve had in the last few months is 20,000 Leagues, and the way that all went down,” insists Marks. “It was something everyone was very high on, and the studio leadership changed very suddenly and things went south from there. I was planning my vacation in Mexico when suddenly we found out there was a new head of the studio.

“You have to detach and take it for the work and the work alone. It’s something that’s been, over the last couple of years, the hardest thing to learn. … You have to take every project with the only thing you can control, which is that little brief moment before you finish your first draft. Everything else is putting your fate in a studio that isn’t concerned with whether your movie gets made, but whether they have the right slate for a given year.”

In the meantime, Marks seems to have endured the wave of disappointment and come out on the other end intact. Super Max, the project that first put his name on the lips of so many geeks, is still a go. In it, DC hero Green Arrow finds himself locked up in an impenetrable prison with some of the supervillains he helped put away. Marks also has high hopes for Shadow of the Colossus, which he’s writing now.

Now that he’s proven himself as a marketable screenwriter—even if he’s not quite cemented his reputation in the fanboy world—Marks feels comfortable giving advice to up-and-coming writers. The most important first step: move.

“Being an assistant is the best film school you can ever have,” says Marks. “You’ve gotta be in L.A. If you want to work in politics, you go to Washington, D.C. If you want to work in film, you crash on a friend’s couch for a couple of months and see what it’s like. I think it’s an essential part of the business. You’re working on your craft at the same time, as a writer, but you’ve got to hear what people are talking about at dinner tables, as far as what people want. You’ve got to be meeting with other people who are trying to move up like you and build a community of friends who come up together.

“As far as the process is concerned, the best thing is just to be genuinely intimate with the material, and fully embrace what you’re trying to do and disappear into it. The best material is the stuff that [reads] like someone really fell in love with what it is they’re trying to write. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but it’s something that’s undeniable.”

 

[Bug-Eyed Earl]

Thoughts:

1. It seems a lot of the positive buzz came from El Mayimbe's(AKA Mr. "I Love Everything") review and advanced his career. Just goes to show what damage a review like that can inflict.

2. I legitimately hate this guy for his Grayskull script- it was so stupid that I have to wonder at Marks' own intelligence.

3. I posted the text because I worried that the article might not be around forever. I find it legitimately fascinating because of how there are two different worlds- the world of the article, that takes it for granted that he's a great writer and it was studio interference that ruined Street Fighter, and the world of the online community, which paints a far less rosy picture of his writing ability.

 

[The Guard]

A master of his craft he is not.

So he had to go into therapy because, even though he's not a good writer, he was getting tons of big movie opportunities that then fell through because of leadership changes?

Riiight.

He pretty much flat out says in the interview that the only reason he got a shot was because he knew people from his internships.

When I see a well written script I'll give him credit for being a good writer.

 

[TheVileOne]

Well I will say that a lot of about being in the business is based on relationships and how well you know people more so than actual talent and skill. The old saying is, "its about who you know."

I thought it was funny how a few years ago some people were making him out to be the geek second coming of cinema. Moriarty even gushed about how Marks was working on all these cool genre properties. Then nothing ever got made . . . except Street Fighter which El Mayimbe also gushed about. I think maybe that El Mayimbe is one of the people Marks knew and El Mayimbe was homering for Marks.

I'm still worried that his awful Voltron script will get made at some point.

 

[Octoberist]

El May is good at getting scoops. But I agree that his reviews are often poor.

Hell, I don't know what he does for a living. He can't be working for Latino Review full time as a writer because he has like...2 articles per month. I don't think he co-created/owns the site (that's Kellvin and Ron). So what does he do?

If you read his tweet, he just talks about working out, football, and going to clubs. Literally that's it.