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Justin Marks is creator, writer, executive producer and showrunner for the Starz Original Series Counterpart.

Early Life

Marks' love of film developed early in life. He describes going to movies with his mom after his family moved to Texas when he was a kid [1] and how he would stalk Blockbuster Video and other outlets seeking interesting movies to fill his weekends.

In college at Columbia University, Marks studied architecture because he felt the whole "film school" thing wasn't the best way to become a screenwriter and filmmaker. He says the idea of building structures still greatly informs his work.

While in New York for college, Marks started working with filmmaker Brad Furman. The pair made a number of short films and then, after college, headed off to Los Angeles together.

Career

Having visited Hollywood and interned  throughout college, Marks made enough industry connections to land an assistant job at Single Cell Pictures in 2002. He spent three years in the role, made more connections and friends in the business, and, through his boss at SCP, met his first agent.[2]

His agent sent out one of Marks' scripts as a calling card to various producers. After six months of meetings with different companies, he was hired in 2005 to write Voltron for the Mark Gordan Company. While the project never went beyond the script phase, the job allowed Marks to quit his day job and pursue writing full time.

Marks' second assignment, 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun‑Li, did get made. It wasn't the writer's original vision that ended up on screen, but the project paid and gave him his first onscreen writing credit.

Marks continued to work mainly on projects that never saw the first day of production like Green Arrow: Escape From Supermax and the unproduced 2011 Suicide Squad.

Through his work writing more than 20 movie screenplays, Marks developed a reputation for quality inside entertainment circles but remaining largely anonymous to anyone outside Hollywood. This quiet career led to a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter: My Life as a Screenwriter You've Never Heard Of.

Marks' relative anonymity ended when he was hired in 2013 to write Disney's risky Jungle Book live action adaptation. While the feature turned out to be a huge hit, that was far from a sure thing and and the uncertainty generated quite a bit of buzz around the writer and director John Favreau . Many credit Marks' script, successfully merging elements of both the original Rudyard Kipling novel and the 1967 animated film, with the project's ultimate box office success.

Counterpart

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