MARK A. ALTMAN is a television and motion picture writer/producer/director who is the showrunner/executive producer of the sci-fi series, Pandora, distributed globally by Sony Pictures Television. Previously he served as Co-Executive Producer of The Librarians (TNT), Agent X (TNT), Castle (ABC), and Necessary Roughness (USA) among others. He also recently completed work on the gonzo documentary spotlighting the pop culture touchstones of the seminal moviegoing year of 1982, Greatest Geek Year Ever!
His first motion picture was the award winning, Free Enterprise, starring William Shatner and Eric McCormack, which he wrote and produced and for which he won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Writer. In addition, Altman has sold numerous pilots and feature films and produced the $30 million film adaptation of the bestselling video game, DOA: Dead Or Alive, which was released by Dimension Films. He is also a producer of the House of the Dead series, based on the videogame from Sega, released by Lionsgate. In addition, he produced director Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and writer James Gunn's feature film, the superhero satire, The Specials.
Altman has also directed several comedy specials including Aries Spiers: Comedy Blueprint for NBC/Universal and Comedy Dynamics and in 2019, he launched the Electric Surge video podcast network with producer Dean Devlin (Independence Day, Stargate) which produces and distributes numerous podcasts spotlighting pop culture topics with notable experts in their field. The video podcasts which include The 4:30 Movie and Inglorious Treksperts, the only podcast for Star Trek fans with a life, which he co-hosts, along with Best Movies Never Made is also available on the streaming OTT platform, Electric Now, as well as through traditional podcast providers.
His bestselling two-volume book with Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, was released by St. Martin's Press in 2016 to unanimous critical acclaim, including raves in The Wall Street Journal, Booklist and Publishers Weekly. Altman and Gross have since collaborated on oral histories of Battlestar Galactica (So Say We All), the James Bond films and Spymania (Nobody Does It Better), and the complete Star Wars saga (Secrets of the Force).
Altman is a former entertainment journalist as well. In the past, he has contributed to such newspapers and magazines as The Boston Globe, Written By, L'Cinefage, Film Threat, The Guardian, Brandeis Magazine and many others, including the legendary genre journal, Cinefantastique for which he launched their independent film division, CFQ Films, which produced numerous successful genre features for both DTV and VOD release.
He has also spoken at numerous industry events and conventions, including ShowBiz Expo as well as the Variety/Final Draft Screenwriters Panel at the Cannes Film Festival. He was a juror at the prestigious Sitges Film Festival in Barcelona, Spain. He has been a frequent guest and panelist at Comic-Con held annually in San Diego, CA and a two-time juror for the Comic-Con Film Festival. In addition to being a graduate of the Writers Guild of America Showrunners Training Program, he is a member of the Television Academy.
