John Fusco

John Fusco is an American screenwriter, producer, and television series creator born in Prospect, Connecticut. His screenplays include Crossroads, Young Guns, Young Guns II, Thunderheart, Hidalgo, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and The Highwaymen. He is also the creator of the Netflix series Marco Polo. Fusco is also a blues musician and a prose fiction author. Career John Fusco was raised in the small town of Prospect, Connecticut, leaving home and high school early to travel the American south as a blues musician and blue collar laborer. He later attended and graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts where his writing mentors were Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner, Jr., and Lorenzo Semple. He won back-to-back honors in national screenwriting competitions his junior and senior year, twice winning the top prize of a Nissan Sentra and a contract with the William Morris Agency. His bachelor's thesis became the Columbia Pictures Delta blues movie Crossroads (1986), directed by Walter Hill, and went into production while he was still a student at NYU. Fusco has gone on to write numerous motion-pictures, an ABC mini-series, a long-form TV series, and two novels. He created the Netflix original series Marco Polo, which ran for two seasons from 2014 to 2016. Fusco also wrote the screenplay for the Lionsgate film The Shack which premiered on March 3, 2017. The film was a modest hit, grossing nearly $100 million worldwide against a $20 million budget. It was panned by critics but it earned favorable audience reviews. In 2011 it was announced that Fusco was adapting the acclaimed Peter Guralnick biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis, for Fox 2000.