An interview with Justin Marks: Part I - Breaking in and the road to STREET FIGHTER

Despite being a working screenwriter for over 10 years, this Friday brings the release of only the second produced feature film from Justin Marks, THE JUNGLE BOOK. The writer's only previous credit was the critically-despised 2009 film STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI. If one were to assess a screenwriter based only on their credits, that might appear to be an unusual career trajectory, but IMDb pages never tell anywhere close to the complete story when it comes to screenwriting.

A few years ago, Justin chronicled some of his career and a few of the two-dozen scripts he's written in a piece for The Hollywood Reporter called "My Life as a Screenwriter You've Never Heard Of." Fans of geek properties might find his name familiar, as he was the writer behind the never-produced VOLTRON, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, and Green Arrow spec SUPERMAX.

I recently sat down with Justin to discuss how he got his start, how one maintains a career as a writer between produced projects, and of course, the unusual process behind writing THE JUNGLE BOOK.

I wanted to reach back and touch on how you first broke in and first got repped.

I moved out here from New York and I’d been interning a lot, so I made some contacts through an internship and my first summer after graduating college I got an assistant job through those contacts and worked for a producer for three and a half years, Michael Stipe and Sandy Stern, who at that time had done Being John Malkovich. When I was working with them it was on the movie Saved!

I was just answering phones at that time and going home and writing every night, getting my scripts together. I was collaborating with a directing friend who has also carved out a career in his own right, Brad Fuhrman. But it was through my boss, Sandy, who introduced me to my first agent at William Morris. Sandy had read a script after I’d worked for him for about two years, which is about right.

Yeah! You didn’t ask on the first week, “Hey, read my script.”

I knew I had a lot of craft to work on and I had a job that was paying me while I could work on it, and I could be exposed to the process of filmmaking from production to post-production to releasing a movie and looking for new material so I had the perfect job.

Sandy read one of my scripts and passed it to a young agent who he’d been working with on some other clients. This agent read it and liked it, so I went in for a meeting with him and we just hit off. I think one of the things that agent said to me was, “It’s not about that script, or even the next script you write or the next three scripts you write. What’s important is we work on not just your craft and getting scripts that the marketplace is going to like, but these meetings and how you self-identify as a writer – what you like, what you don’t like, how you’re going to differentiate yourself from other writers.” He’d say, “you’re building a version of yourself that you want the industry to see, so you need to make conscious choices about who you are and what you’re going to sell about your life experience and point of view.

They’re not hiring a writer, they’re hiring a best friend, someone who’s going to go in and solve the problem for them or just listen to their problems about the script. They have to trust you. This is where the old “Don’t be an asshole, don’t be crazy” thing comes in. Yes, it’s about the work, but it’s about the process too, and the trust you’re building with your collaborators. That’s studio screenwriting. That’s just the job.

To go back for a second, you said it was a newly-minted agent. Did you have any hesitation about his lack of experience?

No, not for a second. You just hit it off with someone. In fact at that time I had a young manager who’s still my manager today, Adam Kohlbrenner, who when I started with him, had just left his assistant job to strike out on his own. Especially at that young age, I felt that if someone was a very successful agent, they wouldn’t pay attention to me because to be honest, I had a lot to learn. This manager had gotten some interest from other agents who’d been working for several years, and [they were trying to sell me on them]. And I said I’d rather go with the other guy. He represent the kind of writer I want to be and that’s what I think is most important. More than the big agent, it should be the person you like.

Having said that, I do think the agent or person you like should at least be at a reputable place. Which is to say, don’t go with that agent who isn’t even in L.A.

So you’re repped, you’re writing specs, I think VOLTRON is the first one—

Which is about a year and a half after I started my relationship with my agent.

That was it! That was where I was going with that! Now, was that a spec or an assignment?

In the time that I was working with my agent and manager, I generated a spec called STRAW MEN that was sort of a calling card script. It was DOG DAY AFTERNOON in a deli. It got me meetings and Craig and Adam would send me out to meet execs. I met one who worked for the Mark Gordon Company and they’d recently gotten the rights to Voltron. This was a time before TRANSFORMERS, when no one really knew what these properties may or may not be.

So this is about 2005?

Yeah, 2005. And remember, at this time I was still an assistant so I was still working my day job and after two and a half years, my boss was – it’s kind of like that Ben Affleck thing in GOOD WILL HUNTING, “I look forward to the day when I call into the office and you don’t pick up anymore.” My boss was so great about letting me go on those meetings. Provided work still got done at the office, I could leave once a day for a general.

I met this exec in a general who said “We’re looking for a take for VOLTRON.” We worked together for months. I came in with something he liked, we reworked it, brought it in to his boss, who said “Sure, go with it.” We had a pitch that we took out to every studio in town and ever studio passed on it, whether it was because my pitch was terrible, or no one really knew what to do with it… it’s probably a combination of the two.

Also, now we’re at the point where everybody who grew up on VOLTRON is at the executive level, but in 2005 you have to figure those people were lower on the totem pole.

Exactly. You had to educate people about VOLTRON. So what Mark and this exec did was find independent financing, this guy who would pay me guild minimum to write the script. That was enough to get me out of my day job and write for a living and go to more meetings than I ever went to, and be ready for it. A year later, after a few rewrites we took it out as a spec and New Regency bought, and by that point it had kinda started my career. I knew enough people that I could start going in on other pitches and building on it.

Did this brand you as sort of the toy-adaptation franchises guy, because MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE was soon after this?

These weren’t franchises at the time, they were just toys that no one what to do with. They still are. Look at HE-MAN. We’re talking about movies that never got made. And also I liked this stuff like anyone our age who grew up on it. It seemed like they wanted young people to write it because the older, more experienced writers weren’t taking those jobs. So I was just getting the leftovers of the leftovers of the leftovers and doing whatever I could to keep making a living as a writer so I could keep writing other specs and doing other, more serious things on the side.

And were your other specs different from HE-MAN or VOLTRON?

Oh my god, yeah! One I wrote was called BORDERLINE, which is now called COME SUNDOWN, which is one I’m still working on with a great director named Elgin James. It’s set in New Hampshire and it’s just about a family taken hostage in a car by fugitives trying to get across the Canadian border. It’s a battle of wills between this doctor and this criminal who find they actually share more in common than they ever knew. I wanted to do a story where basically the villain is the character you cried for at the end of the movie.

So I would do that stuff on that time and I think that would continue to boost what I was doing for money which was getting a job to write HE-MAN for Warner Bros and doing that kind of thing.

And then STREET FIGHTER came along.

STREET FIGHTER was in the middle of that. STREET FIGHTER was a job I got after VOLTRON. I wrote it for Hyde Park. It was something that Capcom was really keen on making and I think they financed half of it. So they had a lot to say about the story so I think they just wanted a writer who’d maybe say “yes” to everything. I was a 25 year-old kid - you say “yes” to everything. Today I look back on that as a mistake, but honestly—

“What else could you have done?”

And I don’t have any regrets. It kept me going. It gave me another year’s pay that would keep me looking for the next job, so in spite of the creative regrets that one might have with it, I still look back on that one fondly.

And just to underline this, how long from when you got repped to your first produced movie in STREET FIGHTER?

I got repped when I was maybe 24 or 25 and I visited the set on when I was just shy of my 28th birthday so..

So probably around four years from repped to produced? That’s actually a pretty good rate in this town!

Yeah, very fast!

And probably many specs in between there too.

A lot of them. Every year, doing a spec. And it’s fast to the point of being too good to be true, as STREET FIGHTER is evidence. The kind of first movie a guy would write within a couple years of being repped is gonna be something like that. You take the good with the bad.

We'll continue my chat with Justin tomorrow, with a discussion of assignment work and SUPERMAX.

Part II - Assignments and SUPERMAX
Part III - Making THE JUNGLE BOOK
Part IV - Showrunning COUNTERPART for Starz

THE LEGO MOVIE - not judging a book by its cover

It's a little hard to get to the heart of why THE LEGO MOVIE works without getting into some really huge spoilers about the final act.  As always, consider this your warning that if you read this before seeing the film, plot secrets will be present in this review.

"They just made the movie to make money" has to be one of the most ignorant criticisms laid on any film.  It's not as if mulch-national corporations are in the business of staking a massive sum of wealth on an investment that isn't likely to pay off.  That's not to say that there aren't films made as cynical cash-grabs.  (I've been a bystander to a few of these in my time in the industry.  Sometimes they work.  Sometimes they don't.)  It's not that I don't understand the gut impulse to dismiss THE LEGO MOVIE as such, but I do think it's important to recognize how close-minded that assertion can be.

I can't help but think of He-Man, which was one of the first toy-to-cartoon franchises.  When you delve into the history of the series, you're left with what appears to be a pretty clear-cut case of "We have these toys, now let's make a show to market them so the kids will be interested in buying them."  It's afternoon cartoons as half-hour toy commercials, pretty much the opposite of Bugs, Daffy, Scooby Doo and so on.

So does that mean that this cynical attitude filtered all the way down through every level of He-Man's production?  I'll let you be the judge.  Take all look at this interview with Michael Halperin, who developed the cartoon show:


Can you tell me some of your work on He-Man? 

In 1983, before "Masters" became a series, Mattel had produced the action figures. Once they were on the market, children contacted the company because they were confused. Who were the good guys? Who were the bad guys? Where did they come from?

What was your job? 

Mattel asked me to come in and create the back story (bible) for "Masters" that could act as a device for merchandising the figures as well as the premise for the TV series (Filmation had begun the process of designing the cartoon characters -- but they had no stories). I was Creative Consultant to the series during its first year (65 episodes) with the job of approving all story lines. I'm proud to say that I brought Larry DiTillio into the series. His Dungeons and Dragons gaming background proved invaluable as a writer. He was what I looked for in story creation.

What are the main stories you developed? 

I developed the story of how Prince Adam became He-Man; the origins of Teela; why Castle Grayskull existed in the first place; the "secret" of Castle Grayskull which I believe has never been revealed; how Queen Marlena arrived on Eternia; the topography and geography of Eternia; Snake Mountain, the abode of Skeletor; the origins of Evil-Lyn, Tri-Klops, and Beastman, etc. 

The whole interview is worth a read, but what I want to get at is that no matter what the "money men's" motivation was, Halperin and his staff seem genuinely determined to tell good stories and build a mythology using the toys as a framework.  I'd never claim that the He-Man cartoon was high art.  Certainly the animation was pretty weak, but the stories were rather solid, especially for a kid's show.

The bottom line is that it's dangerous to assume the motivations of the people putting up money for a creative project speak to the motivations of everyone involved in bringing that project to light.  If THE LEGO MOVIE sucked, it wouldn't be because it was based on a toy - it would be because the people writing and directing the film couldn't find anything worth saying with what they were given.

Writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller cleared that hurdle and then some.  They found a way into the story that would resonate with audiences on an emotional level.  In doing so, they might have produced a film with as much to say about a child's relationship with toys as the Toy Story trilogy.  What starts off as a seemingly Saturday-morning-cartoon level plot about the evil Lord Business scheming to destroy Lego World eventually reveals itself as an examination of how adults attempting to preserve their childhood by preserving their toys are losing touch with the whole reason toys exist in the first place.

One truly significant difference between this film and movies like Toy Story and Wreck-It Ralph is that those films built their narrative around entirely original characters as the main leads and used established licensed characters as supporting players and cameos.  Since Woody and Buzz weren't plucked from existing toylines, the inception of the project wasn't perceived as quite so naked a cash grab. 

For much of its running time, the story's drive is centered on Lego character Emmet as he and his friends attempt to deliver a "Piece of Resistance" to stop Lord Business's plan to freeze every Lego land with with a superglue device.  It's fairly standard hero's journey stuff... and then Emmet dives into some kind of dimensional rift and ends up... in our world.

The big twist of the film is that he finds himself in a basement containing several Lego buildings and lands that have been preserved on tables.  A young boy plays with his father's toys, ignoring "Do Not Touch" signs.  For you see, the father is a collector.  To him, his toys are museum pieces to be put on a shelf and left undisturbed, not something to take apart, rebuild and play with.  The father is so fixated on preserving his creations as he built them that he starts supergluing pieces together.  This drives home the point that Lord Business is the in-universe avatar of the father.

(I admit this raises some questions about the nature of free will in Legoland.  The connection between Lord Business and "Dad" is pretty clear, but the "real world" scene also contains a pretty heavy implication that everything in the movie is basically the result of the son playing with the toys.  So should we even regard the Lego characters as "real" or is the entire movie little more than the imagination of a child?  Perhaps, like the final scenes of St. Elsewhere, this isn't meant to be examined too closely.)

What makes this work is that it's a revelation aimed at two different segments of the audience.  The kids presumably identify with the frustration of their collector parents forbidding them from playing with certain vintage toys.  Conversely the adults get a bit of a jab right between the eyes, perhaps one that will promote some self-examination.

But the bottom line is that this film actually has something to say.  Compare that to BATTLESHIP, which had equally dubious source material.  BATTLESHIP failed not because it was based on a child's game, but because nothing in it had any real weight.

So in a broader sense, here's the lesson to you, dear Screenwriter: no matter what your project is, make sure you've got something you're trying to express through it.