Mark Bacus

Mark Bacus works at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and enjoys the occasional opportunity to edit someone's script or co-write new ones with fellow writers and directors. He has won a number of writing awards including the New Century Writers and CITA for "Sometimes a Light Surprises" and "Slow Takes the Dance Floor," St.Louis Int'l Film Fest's Cinemaspoke for "Harlan Poe," Tiburon Int'l Film Festival, and WorldFest Int'l Film Fest's Silver Remi for "Win Each Way." "Sometimes a Light Surprises," (Bacus' biopic regarding the life of slave trader turned Anglican vicar, John Newton) was one of the original ten "seed" scripts at Francis Coppola's virtual studio workshop, American Zoetrope. There, Bacus was recognized as a prolific writer by "The Independent," a magazine devoted to the process of independent film making. Through Coppola's workshops, Bacus met Jeff French [together, they wrote "Win Each Way"] and Wayne Baimbridge of Elysium Studios [together they have written the feature length western, "Rock Creek" and a short, "A Familiar Face]. Through Zoetrope, Bacus also met his current writing partner, Martin Nowak. Together, Bacus and Nowak have developed a number of short and feature length scripts and will shoot another short film called "If You See Kay" in the summer of 2005. Bacus has also written a number of stage plays including "Two Hours Before the Ford" and "It's a Living." He was the writer, director, and project coordinator for C-SPAN's seventh Lincoln-Douglas Debate re-enactment which was broadcast live (six hours of interviews, discussion, and live re-enactment with a cast of hundreds) in Alton, Illinois in October 1994. Recently, he researched and wrote the liner notes for "Hymnsongs," an album by world-renowned, virtuoso guitarist, Phil Keaggy (released by Word, Inc., 2002).