Carlton Cuse

At 65 years old, Carlton Cuse has this physical status:

Arthur Carlton Cuse (born March 22, 1959) is an American screenwriter, producer, and director best known for the American television series Lost, for which he was included in the Time magazine top 100 most influential people in the country in 2010.

Cuse is best known for his transmedia storytelling, collaboration, and mentorship of several screenwriters who went on to become showrunners of television series.

Early life and education

Cuse was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to American parents. His father was employed in Mexico for Cuse's grandfather, who owned a machine-tool manufacturing plant. Cuse's paternal grandfather was Latvian of Baltic German descent. His parents immigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, after a few years in Mexico City. Cuse's father took up teaching in Tustin, California, where Cuse attended El Dorado Private School in Orange a few years ago. Cause was born a Roman Catholic. He began attending the Putney School in Vermont. The school was located on a working dairy farm, and it placed a large emphasis on arts, music, and the outdoors education. Cuse said he was determined to be a writer at Putney School.

Cuse attended Harvard University (class of 1981) and was recruited by Ted Washburn for the rowing team. He became "a hardcore fan" in his words. Cuse's initial intention was to attend medical school, but he instead concentrated on American history. Cuse's junior year at Harvard, he arranged a test screening for the Paramount film Airplane! The producers wanted to capture the audience reaction to time the final cut of the jokes in the film. Cuse said it was then that he started thinking about a film career.

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Career

Cuse co-founded Power Ten, a Harvard classmate, and produced a film about rowing at Harvard. He convinced actor, writer, and fellow Harvard graduate George Plimpton to narrate the film. After graduating, Cuse went to Hollywood and worked as an assistant to a studio's chief and then as a script reader. Cuse said he gained insight into what made good scripts work by being a reader.

Cuse began working as an assistant producer for Bernard Schwartz in 1984 and then spent a year and a half on Sweet Dreams, directed by Karel Reisz, starring Jessica Lange and Ed Harris. He described the experience as his version of film school. Cuse was hired as a writer on the Michael Mann series Crime Story by a friend, David J. Burke. Cuse wrote two teleplays for the series in 1986.

Cuse formed a company with feature writer Jeffrey Boam, with whom he produced Lethal Weapon 2, Lethal Weapon 3, and the Last Crusade.

Cuse wrote the screenplay for San Andreas, a 2015 disaster film. Brad Peyton, starred Dwayne Johnson, was the film's director, and it was released in the United States on May 29, 2015. In 2015, San Andreas became the most expensive film for Warner Bros, grossing $473.5 million globally.

Cuse and Ryan Condal rewrote Ryan Engle's screenplay version of Rampage's video game franchise. In early April 2017, New Line/Warner Bros began production in early April 2017, reuniting Cuse and Condal with San Andreas producer Brad Peyton, producer Beau Flynn, and actor Dwayne Johnson. The film premiered on April 13, 2018, and was the number one film in the United States in its first weekend, grossing $35.8 million. Its global sales reached $426 million. Rampage also had one of the best shows for a video game version ever.

Robert Greenblatt, a Fox executive, and Indiana Jones, asked Cuse and Boam if they'd be interested in producing a television version of the old movie serials, as a result of his involvement with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Yes, and wrote The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., about a Harvard-educated bounty hunter who wants to revenge his father's death, the most popular lawman in the Old West. Fox approved the project. Brisco also had a science-fiction component in the form of a mysterious orb that appears in several episodes. Boam returned to making films, leaving Cuse to write and serve as the sole showrunner of the critically acclaimed film. Bruce Campbell, who played Brisco County, Jr., Jr., Jr., was given a large amount of credit for the show's success, according to Cuse.

Don Johnson, who had a pledge from CBS to produce a new series, was among Brisco's Cuse's who met Don Johnson. Cuse went off and wrote the pilot for Nash Bridges with Johnson's permission. Johnson loved it and CBS followed it, ordering 14 episodes off the show without having to make a pilot. Les Moonves was the first series to be able to view Nash Bridges as the head of CBS. It lasted for six seasons and 121 episodes. The original Nash Bridges film, which was broadcast on November 27, 2021, was not available on USA Network, but Cuse was not interested in the revival.

Cuse was prompted to sign a 20th Century Fox Television contract because of Nash Bridges' popularity. Cuse created and executive produced the CBS series Martial Law, starring Arsenio Hall and Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, one of martial arts legend Jackie Chan's closest friends and coworkers. In a tale about a Shanghai cop who joins the LAPD on a prison exchange program, Cuse converted the world of Hong Kong cinema to American television. A team of eight top Chinese stuntmen and coordinators was recruited from Hong Kong. The pilot was directed by Stanley Tong, who had produced many of Jackie Chan's most popular Hong Kong films. Sammo Hung, a Hong Kong film actor, has been cast as the lead in an American television series. Cuse was co-producing 46 episodes of television in a single network season, writing and delivering both Nash Bridges and the first season of Martial Law at the same time. Cuse stepped back from the second season of Martial Law to concentrate solely on Nash Bridges in order to reduce his workload to a manageable degree. Cuse believed there were some other factors, including creative differences with Sammo Hung over the Martial Law's future direction.

Cuse was both a producer and joint showrunner on Lost with Damon Lindelof. They met in Nash Bridges' sixth season. Cuse introduced Lindelof to his first staff-writer position on a television show. Lindelof and J. Abrams wrote Lost's pilot a few years ago. Abrams and Tom Cruise ended the show shortly after it was shot, as they did Mission: Impossible III. Lindelof had no experience as a showrunner and asked Cuse for showrunning assistance. Cuse's fascination with the subject and a sense that turning Lost into a long-running series led him to abandon a lucrative studio contract elsewhere to become a showrunner. Lindelof was then trained by him to be his co-showrunner, and the show then continued for the entire six years.

The Cuse/Lindelof collaboration was extremely fruitful. They produced about a third of the episodes together, as well as showrunning the series in tandem, oversawing all of the series's creative production, including story rewrites, casting, editing, music, and marketing. The Ringer ranked a Lost episode "The Constant," written by Cuse and Lindelof, as the best television episode of the century. "A great relationship will result in great television," Cuse said. It turned out great in the case of Lost; I could not have chosen a more reliable partner than Damon."

Although the film ostensibly focused on a group of plane crash survivors trying to recover to civilization, Cuse and Lindelof said the focus was about people who have been metaphorically lost in their lives and trying to discover themselves again. Cuse said that Lost "showed that it was possible on network television to tell a highly layered, serialized story with intentional ambiguity," causing the audience to debate and discuss the narrative's meaning and intention and hopes while still having a large audience."

Lost was the first show with an official TV show, with the showrunners reporting on episodic news every week. Lindelof and Cuse were among the first showrunners to become celebrities, often as popular as the actors themselves in television series.

Cuse says he wanted to use other media to tell stories that would not make it to the network show. Cuse and Lindelof created the first alternative reality game (ARG) that incorporated a tale into a network television series. This ARG, according to Cuse, has reimagined the way internet and TV shows could be combined, as well as breaking new ground in how a TV show could be sold. Lost was also the first television network series show to produce original material for mobile phones. Dharma Wants You, their last ARG, received an Emmy Award in 2009 for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Media.

"A pastiche of genres...co-mingled to intoxicating effect...[pushing] the possibility of how much narrative ground you could cover in television..." the writer's Guild of America characterized the program as both drama and metaphor. The characters' emotional and psychological maps were discussed with the show's more elusive map, the one that would bring the castaways off the island."

Cuse was the writer, scriptwriter, showrunner, and executive producer of Kerry Ehrin's A&E series Bates Motel, which premiered on March 18, 2013 on the A&E Network. The film was described as a "contemporary prequel" to the 1960 film Psycho, and it follows Norman Bates' formative years and his relationship with his mother, Norma, before the events depicted in the Hitchcock film. Vera Farmiga (Norma Bates) was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2013. The series continued to air for five seasons with ten episodes each, totaling 50 episodes. The New York Times' list of the top 2016 TV episodes and "Forever," a Bates Motel episode written by Kerry Ehrin, topped The New York Times' list of memorable 2016 television shows and the best 2016 television episodes. Bates Motel has also been named in 2017 People's Choice Awards for Favorite Cable Drama and Favorite Actor and Actress for Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga. Cuse himself appeared in a cameo role in the fifth and final season, opposite R&B sensation Rihanna as a highway patrol officer. On the rating website, Rotten Tomatoes, both Seasons 4 and 5 of Bates Motel have received unsurpassed, 100% satisfaction.

Cuse was the showrunner, executive producer, programmer, and writer of The Strain, an FX drama series based on Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's vampire novel trilogy. Del Toro co-wrote and directed the pilot episode. On July 13, 2014, the Strain appeared at its premiere. With The Strain's third-season finale, Cuse made his directorial debut. After the fourth season of their own initiative, Cuse and del Toro decided to end the series, deciding that it was the right time to bring the story to an end on their own terms. "When we first introduced it, we knew it would be going to do three seasons of the show." It seemed like we needed to increase the storytelling speed and finish the story going into season four."

Cuse was showrunner, co-developer, writer, and executive producer of The Returned, based on Fabrice Gobert's award-winning French suspense film They Came Back, directed by Robin Campillo. Raelle Tucker has also appeared as showrunner and executive producer. On March 9, 2015, the 10-episode premiered. The series was based on a small town that has been turned upside down as a result of the return of several local people who had been long suspected dead. In association with Haut et Court TV SAS, the French series's producer, A+E Studios and FremantleMedia North America co-produced the Returned. In June 2015, the show was cancelled after one season.

Colony for the USA Network was created by the creators, showrunners, and executive producers of the Colony, a co-production between Legendary Television and Universal Cable Prods, as Cuse and Ryan Condal. Colony "is a family drama/thriller about life in Los Angeles after a 'foreign' occupation, as well as the attempts by the proxy government to destabilize the growing resistance movement" has portrayed the family's revolt. Juan José Campanella, a Academy Award-winning Argentinian filmmaker, was in charge of the pilot. Josh Holloway and Sarah Wayne Callies of Colony appear in Colony. On January 14, 2016, Colony's ten episode first season premiered. Colony's second season was ordered by USA Network on February 4, 2016, which featured thirteen episodes. Colony was one of the top ten scripted first season dramas on ad-supported television. On Thursday nights, Colony was the most viewed programme on total viewers in season 2. Colony's third and final season was announced on April 4, 2017, with production shifting from Los Angeles to Vancouver.

Susan Brennan, a writer from the 1980s, created a television series based on Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst character created by novelist Tom Clancy in the 1980s. Cuse appeared as the showrunner for the first two seasons of the series. The show was an original tale that borrowed from rather than being a reversal of any of Clancy's works. "An up-and-coming CIA analyst as he uncovers a pattern of terrorist communications that places him into the midst of a deadly gambit involving a new breed of terrorism that threatens global destruction." Amazon Video gave the series an eight-episode, straight-to-series order. Cuse co-wrote, directed five of the eight episodes for the first season and four others. In season two, he co-wrote three episodes. The series was revived for a third season on February 13, 2019.

After Jack Ryan's second season's day-to-day showrunner duties, Cuse revealed in March 2019 that he was taking a break from day-to-day showrunner duties to concentrate on other projects. Jack Ryan will continue to be active as an executive producer. On November 1, 2019, season two premiered. According to Nielsen, Jack Ryan is the most watched series on Amazon Prime Video to date.

Cuse is the showrunner, executive producer, engineer, and writer of Locke & Key, an extension of Joe Hill's comic-book book series. The series is produced by the Cuse's Genre Arts production company and IDW Entertainment. Cuse, Aron Eli Coleite, and Meredith Averill created the series, which was later developed by Hill and developed by Meredith Averill. Locke & Key is a horror/fantasy series that revolves around three siblings, who fled to Massachusetts after their father's horrific murder only to discover that the house has magical keys that grant them a wide variety of abilities and abilities. Little does anyone know that a scheming demon also needs the keys and will refuse to obtain them.

Locke & Key, a Netflix affiliate, was given a 10-episode order after Hulu's March 2018 expiration. Cuse redeveloped and recast the series on Netflix, but did not use any of an existing Hulu pilot. On February 7, 2020, the series debuted on Netflix. On the television time chart for the weeks ending February 16 and February 23, 2020, Locke & Key was the top binge show on the show. In addition, Forbes announced that Locke and Key was number two on the most watched Netflix original and limited series of 2020. Locke & Key was revived for a second season. In Toronto, production began on September 21, 2020. Locke & Key was renewed for Season 3 on December 18, 2020, ahead of the Season 2 premiere. Based on Google search results, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos revealed on a quarterly investor call that Locke & Key was ranked in the top ten shows globally for 2020. On October 22, 2021, Season 2 premiered. Locke & Key was one of Netflix's most popular titles on Netflix right from its introduction of Season 2 on Netflix. The No. 1 series debuted just short of its debut. Netflix's top ten TV shows list, as well as the Top ten overall list for movies and series, has a number 3 on Netflix's Top ten TV shows list, as well as the top ten overall list for movies and series. With an 86% score, Season 2 beat the Season 1 ratings of 76% from certified Rotten Tomatoes experts. Locke & Key was the most watched show by minutes on Netflix one month after its debut in Locke & Key, which was the highest viewed show by minutes on Netflix.

All eight episodes of Five Days at Memorial were written by Cuse and John Ridley together. Two of the three films were produced by Cuse, three of whom were produced by Ridley, and three of them were directed by Wendey Stanzler. For the eight hour limited series, Cuse and Ridley served as showrunners. It is based on Sheri Fink's book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. Her original reporting for the Times and ProPublica, depicting the challenges a New Orleans hospital faced after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the city, resulted in her being named Pulitzer Prize winner.

Susan Mulderick appears in the series Dr. Anna Pou and Cherry Jones as Susan Mulderick.

On AppleTV+, the first three episodes of Five Days at Memorial were released on August 12, 2022, followed by a new one every Friday until September 16, 2022.

Since Cuse, the character of Carlton (Alfonso Ribeiro) on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was revealed. Andy and Susan Borowitz, the series's designers, were both friends and acquaintances of Cuse's at Harvard.

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