John Fusco

John Fusco is an American screenwriter, producer, and TV series creator born in Prospect, Connecticut. His screenplays include Crossroads, Young Guns, Young Guns II, Thunderheart, Hidalgo, and the Oscar-nominated Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Fusco is also a martial artist and a prose fiction writer.

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 would later attend and graduate 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 eleven major motion-pictures, an ABC mini-series, a long-form TV Series, and two novels. He is best-known today as the creator of the popular Netflix Original Series Marco Polo.

While known for Western and Native American themed films, Fusco recently drew on his lifelong background in martial arts to write The Forbidden Kingdom, starring Jet Li and Jackie Chan. The movie opened #1 at the box office on April 18, 2008 and broke opening day box office records (at that time) in China.

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