Mark is a screenwriter, director, producer, and makeup expert with over 30 years of experience in film and television. He fell in love with movies after seeing Dr. No and How the West Was Won on the big screen at age six. Growing up in Hong Kong, his fascination with films—in particular, monster movies—was further deepened by meeting Boris Karloff's widow there in 1970. Four years later, he experienced filmmaking for the first time, spending an evening on the set of the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun.
Thinking about makeup as a career, in 1976 he began to correspond with Planet of the Apes (1968) makeup designer John Chambers, who encouraged him but also advised that he consider other areas of filmmaking. In late 1979, Mark arrived in Los Angeles, ready to dive into the film business. He had a suitcase, $300, and didn't know anyone in the city. After being rebuffed by the makeup union, Mark phoned Chambers and met with him to show his meager portfolio. Unknown to Mark, Chambers was working at the time on Argo for the CIA, but found time to meet with Mark several times and generously gave him his first contacts and assistance in the business.
Answering a Dramalogue ad, Mark began his career in earnest ('my high school in filmmaking') in 1980 at the American Film Institute on the Oscar-winning film Violet and half a dozen other shorts. After a stint assisting Rick Baker on Videodrome, he dived into 'film school college' hands-on with three movies at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and five for producer Sandy Howard. Within a few years, he became one of the premier FX artists of his generation, helping genre directors Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon, Don Coscarelli, Sean Cunningham, and Tobe Hooper to realize their celluloid nightmares. His celebrated creations on Evil Dead 2 are highly regarded today (and often copied) and Mark still gets fan mail regarding his work on this movie at least three times a month.
Turning to directing, Mark designed, storyboarded, and co-directed the Tall Man's famous melting scene in Phantasm II, and second unit directed the pivotal mid-story effects sequence in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. After a recommendation from cinema legend Dick Smith, Mark directed Laurel Entertainment’s TV show Monsters! Around this time, he tried screenwriting for the first time, coauthoring a script with Bram Stoker nominated novelist Philip Nutman.
In 1993, Mark met Michael Westmore (the Westmores of Hollywood film royalty) who told him to call the moment he got in the union. Mark did, and was thrust into working on Generations, Deep Space Nine, and designing Star Trek Voyager simultaneously. His 'graduate school' was 67 episodes of Voyager in three years, working with countless directors and writers to creatively push the show to new bounds. For his efforts there and on The X Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he received four Emmy nominations in four years, winning with three of them. In his film work, he won a Sitges Award and garnered four Saturn nominations, as well as making major contributions to the Oscar-winning/nominated makeups in Dick Tracy, Life, and Men In Black.
Mark put away his makeup kits and returned to screenwriting in 2011. His first screenplay, the film noir Black Sleep, placed semifinalist in both the Nicholl Fellowships (top 1%) and the Chesterfield Writers Film Project at Paramount. Three of his scripts became Second Rounders at Austin Film Festival’s 2016 Screenplay Competition, making Mark one of only five writers in the history of the festival to place three in a single year.
His scripts are used to train actors at the Bernard Hiller Acting Studio and The Actors Playpen cold reading workshop. He has lectured on film history at the American Film Institute. Most recently, Mark executive produced Shudder’s Behind the Monsters with Fangoria editor Phil Nobile Jr. and Kelly Ryan of Stage 3 Productions.