Arthur Carlton Cuse (born March 22, 1959) is an American screenwriter, showrunner, producer, and director, best known for the American television series Lost, for which he made the Time list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010.
Early life and education Arthur Carlton Cuse was born in Mexico City, Mexico. His father was working in Mexico for Cuse's grandfather, who had a machine-tool manufacturing business.Interview with Carlton Cuse By Gregg Sutter (2010). Cuse's paternal grandfather was Latvian, of Baltic German heritage. After a few years in Mexico City, his parents moved to Boston, Massachusetts. A few years later, his father accepted a job in Tustin, California where Cuse attended El Dorado Private School, in Orange. Cuse was raised a Roman Catholic. "LOST" AND FOUND By Tony Rossi (2008). He went to boarding school at the Putney School in Vermont. The school was on a working dairy farm, and placed a strong emphasis on an education in the arts, music, and the outdoors. At the Putney School, Cuse said that he realized he wanted to be a writer.
Cuse attended Harvard University (class of 1981) and was recruited at freshmen registration by Ted Washburn for the rowing team. In his words, he became "a hardcore athlete". Cuse's original plan was to attend medical school, but he instead majored in American history.Carlton Cuse By Reed B. Rayman, The Harvard Crimson (6/5/2006). During his junior year at Harvard, Cuse organized a test screening for the makers of the Paramount film Airplane!. The producers wanted to record the audience reaction to time the final cut of the jokes in the film. Cuse said then was when he started thinking about a career in film.15 Questions with A. Carlton Cuse '81 By Tobias S. Stein and Logan R. Ury. The Harvard Crimson, April 3, 2010.
Career Cuse is known for his groundbreaking cross-genre storytelling, pioneering work in interactive media, collaborative achievements, and mentorship of many screenwriters who went on to become showrunners of television series.
Beginnings Cuse teamed up with a Harvard classmate, Hans Tobeason, and made a documentary about rowing at Harvard called Power Ten. He convinced actor, writer, and fellow Harvard graduate George Plimpton to narrate the film. After graduating, Cuse headed for Hollywood, and worked as an assistant to a studio head, then as a script reader. By working as a reader, Cuse said he gained insight into what made good scripts work.
In 1984, Cuse took a job working as an assistant producer for Bernard Schwartz and then spent a year and a half working on Sweet Dreams, directed by Karel Reisz, starring Jessica Lange and Ed Harris. He described the experience as his version of film school. After helping a writer, David J. Burke, with a feature script, Cuse was hired as a writer on the Michael Mann series Crime Story, for which David J. Burke wrote the pilot. In 1986, Cuse wrote two teleplays for the series.
Film Cuse formed a partnership with feature writer Jeffrey Boam, with whom he helped develop the films Lethal Weapon 2, Lethal Weapon 3, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
San Andreas (2015) Cuse wrote the screenplay for the 2015 disaster film San Andreas. The film was directed by Brad Peyton, starred Dwayne Johnson, and was released in the United States on May 29, 2015. San Andreas was the #1 film for Warner Bros in 2015, grossing $473.5 million worldwide. In a 2026 industry analysis, Puck noted that San Andreas (2015) grossed $474.6 million worldwide on a $110 million budget and “reigns … as the top-earning live-action original to come out of Hollywood in the past decade.” The film was not based on pre-existing IP and, at the time of the report, remained one of the highest-grossing non-franchise live-action releases of its era.
Rampage (2018) Cuse and Ryan Condal rewrote Ryan Engle's screenplay adaptation of the video game franchise Rampage. The film, reuniting Cuse and Condal with San Andreas director Brad Peyton, producer Beau Flynn, and star Dwayne Johnson, began production in early April 2017 for New Line/Warner Bros. The film premiered on April 13, 2018, and was the number-one film in the U.S. its opening weekend, earning $35.8 million. Its global gross was $426 million. Rampage also had one of the best showings ever for a video game adaptation.
Television The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993–1994) Because of his involvement with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, an executive at Fox, Robert Greenblatt, asked Cuse and Boam if they would be interested in doing a television version of the old movie serials. Cuse said yes and wrote The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., about a Harvard-educated bounty hunter who wants to avenge the death of his father, the most famous lawman in the Old West. Fox gave the go-ahead for the series. Brisco also had a science-fiction element, in the form of a mysterious orb that appears in several episodes. Boam went back to making features, leaving Cuse to write and serve as sole showrunner of the critically acclaimed series. Afterwards, Cuse gave much of the credit for the show's success to actor Bruce Campbell, who played Brisco County, Jr., the lead character. Today, 32 years later, Brisco County, Jr. holds a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes—a testament to its lasting appeal, genre-bending creativity, and Bruce Campbell’s standout performance.
Nash Bridges (1996–2001) After Brisco, Cuse met Don Johnson, who had a commitment from CBS to make a new series. With Johnson's blessing, Cuse went off and wrote the pilot for Nash Bridges. Johnson liked it and CBS did, too, ordering 14 episodes off the script without making a pilot. Nash Bridges was the first series that Les Moonves greenlit as the head of CBS. It ran for six seasons and 121 episodes.The long 'Lost' interview with Lindelof and Cuse, Part 2: The Squeakquel The Chicago Tribune, January 24, 2010 On November 27, 2021, USA Network aired a two-hour original Nash Bridges film, but Cuse was not involved in the revival.
Martial Law (1998) The success of Nash Bridges prompted Cuse to sign an overall deal with 20th Century Fox Television. Cuse created and executive produced the CBS series Martial Law, starring Arsenio Hall and Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, one of martial arts legend Jackie Chan's closest friends and collaborators. Cuse adapted the world of Hong Kong cinema to American television in a story about a Shanghai cop who comes to the LAPD on an exchange program. A team of eight top Chinese stuntmen and coordinators from Hong Kong was hired. Stanley Tong, who had directed many of Jackie Chan's biggest Hong Kong features, directed the pilot. Cuse cast Hong Kong film star Sammo Hung, making him the first Chinese actor to star as the lead in an American TV series. Cuse was showrunning both Nash Bridges and the first season of Martial Law simultaneously, writing and producing 46 episodes of television in one network season. To reduce his workload to a manageable level, Cuse stepped back from the second season of Martial Law to focus exclusively on Nash Bridges.
Lost (2004–2010)
Cuse was an executive producer and joint showrunner on Lost with Damon Lindelof. They met during the sixth season of Nash Bridges. Cuse hired Lindelof, giving him his first staff-writer job on a television series. A few years later, Lindelof and J. J. Abrams wrote the pilot for Lost. Shortly after it was shot, Abrams left the show to do Mission: Impossible III with Tom Cruise. Lindelof had no experience as a showrunner and called Cuse for showrunning advice on the side. Cuse's interest in the material and a conviction that he could turn Lost into a long-running series led him to opt out of a lucrative studio deal elsewhere to take the job as showrunner. He subsequently trained Lindelof to be his co-showrunner, and together they led the show for all of its six-year run.'Lost' soul mates By Bill Keveney, USA Today April 10, 2006.
The Cuse/Lindelof partnership was very productive. They wrote roughly a third of the episodes together, as well as showrunning the series in tandem, overseeing all the creative work on the series, including all story construction, rewrites, casting, production, editing, music, and marketing. The Ringer ranked a Lost episode, "The Constant" written by Cuse and Lindelof, as the top TV episode of the century.
While ostensibly about a group of plane crash survivors trying to return to civilization, Cuse and Lindelof said the show thematically was about people who are metaphorically lost in their lives and seeking to find themselves again. Cuse said that Lost "showed that it was possible on network TV to tell a highly complex, serialized narrative with intentional ambiguity‚ leaving the audience room to debate and discuss the meaning and intentions of the narrative‚ and still find a large audience."
Lost has regularly been ranked by critics as one of the greatest television series of all time. The first season had an estimated average of 16 million viewers per episode on ABC. During its sixth and final season, the show averaged over 11 million U.S. viewers per episode. Lost was the recipient of hundreds of industry award nominations throughout its run and won numerous of these awards, including the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 2005, Best American Import at the British Academy Television Awards in 2005, the Golden Globe Award for Best Drama in 2006, and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Drama Series.
Lost was the first program with an official TV podcast, with the showrunners breaking down episodic details weekly. Lindelof and Cuse helped start the trend of showrunners becoming celebrities, often as prominent as the actors themselves in TV series.
Cuse says he wanted to use other media to tell stories that would never make it onto the network show. Cuse and Lindelof created the first alternative reality game (ARG) that connected as a narrative into a network TV show. Cuse believes this ARG redefined the way in which the internet and a TV show could be integrated, and broke new ground in how a TV show could be marketed.Transmedia Storytelling in Television 2.0 by Aaron Smith, Thesis for Middlebury College, Spring 2009 Lost was also the first TV network series show to create original content for mobile phones. Their last ARG, Dharma Wants You‚ won an Emmy in 2009 for Creative Achievement in Interactive Media.
The Writers Guild of America, in citing Lost as one of the 101 Best Written TV Series, described the show as "A pastiche of genres...co-mingled to intoxicating effect...[pushing] the idea of how much narrative ground you could cover in television...The ingenuous structure worked both as drama and metaphor. The emotional and psychological mapping of the characters conversed with the show's more elusive map, the one that would get the castaways off the island."
In May 2023, Cuse and Lindelof were accused of fostering a "toxic workplace" by several cast members and writers during their tenure on Lost. Lindelof acknowledged responsibility for creating the culture and apologized, citing his personal failings during this time period.