Marc Cushman

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Marc Cushman
Marc Cushman.jpg
Personal Information
Birth NameMatthew Marc Cushman
GenderMale
Career
Awards for Trek1 Saturn Award
RolesWriter, Star Trek author

Matthew Marc Cushman (born 22 November 1954; age 70), generally credited as "Marc Cushman", is a writer who wrote together with Jake Jacobs the original story for the Star Trek: The Next Generation third season episode “Sarek”. Cushman's and Jacobs' unpublished story was later rewritten by Peter S. Beagle who also wrote the teleplay.

Cushman is also the primary co-author of the unlicensed reference book These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One, which was released in August 2013. The follow-ups of the book, dealing with the second and third seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series respectively, were released in 2014 and 2015 respectively. Cushman embarked on the project in 1982 when he, "(...) was happily assigned the job of meeting with Gene Roddenberry and interviewing him for a television special I was hired to write on the Star Trek phenomenon. This was in 1982 for a Los Angeles-based company that made programs of that type for local TV. Gene was wonderfully gracious and giving, with both his time and materials – he provided me with all the scripts from TOS, along with numerous other documents." [1] Amazed at the sheer amount of documents Roddenberry still had in his possession, the idea germinated, spurred on by Roddenberry by giving Cushman a letter of endorsement, to have all these incorporated into a book about the production of The Original Series.

Ultimately, the project would become three decades in the making, with frequent meetings with Roddenberry and other Original Series production staffers, like Robert Justman and D.C. Fontana. It was during one of his many meetings with Roddenberry that Cushman pitched his story for "Sarek". His three-tome magnum opus has earned him a 2014 Saturn Award in the category "Special Recognition Award", with The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films citing his work as "one of the great achievements of 2013/2014 in literature". [2] Cushman embarked in the same vein on a follow-up two-volume series project, the first volume of which, These Are the Voyages: Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek in the 1970s, Volume 1 (1970-75), published in February 2019.

On "Sarek", Cushman was interviewed in a special feature on the 2013 feature-length Unification Blu-ray disc release.

Career outside Star Trek[edit | edit source]

Marc Cushman was born in San Diego, California, but spent his childhood traveling throughout the United States, due to the fact that his father was constantly relocating in search of job opportunities. Out of necessity, Cushman learned to entertain himself through writing. As a youth in the 1960s he had to persuade his parents to let him see the original run of Star Trek, but it did turn him into a "trekkie". In 1982 he settled in Los Angeles to pursue a career in television writing, and as happenstance would have it, his first professional assignment for a small production company was to write an one-hour local television special on the Star Trek phenomena, which brought him into contact with Gene Roddenberry. [3] The special itself though, never got produced.

Cushman, former four time president of the Alameda Writers Group, wrote in 2006 with fellow writer Linda J. LaRosa the reference book I Spy: A History And Episode Guide to the Groundbreaking Television Series. Other written work includes the short projects Pal 201: A Vehicular Odyssey (1981), Heart, Soul and Plastic (1982), and The Magic of Christmas (1987), several episodes of the television series Channel K (1986-1988), Bachelor Pad (1986-1990), Diagnosis Murder (1999), and Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction (1998-2002), the drama Midnight Confessions (1995), the documentary Desperately Seeking Paul McCartney (2008), the mystery thriller In the Eyes of a Killer (2009), and the family movie The Magic of Christmas II (2010).

He also worked as producer on the series Bachelor Pad and Channel K and worked as composer and director on the documentary Desperately Seeking Paul McCartney (2008).

Aside from his contributions to mainstream Hollywood, Cushman, under the pseudonym "Cash Markman", a play on his name, has from the mid-1980s onward, been concurrently engaged in a parallel career as writer, producer and director in the adult motion picture industry[dead link], and as such has over 500 adult movie credits to his name, including the nine Star Trek themed outings, the Sex Trek-series (1990-2007) in particular.

Star Trek interview[edit | edit source]

Bibliography[edit | edit source]

External links[edit | edit source]

 
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