When I first meet Mark Titus ’90, he greets me with a big bear hug. That’s just the kind of guy he is. Warm, charming, smart, reflective, engaging, bigger than life. I soon learn that this fisherman, turned actor, turned screenwriter, turned businessman, turned conservationist, is full of surprises.

MARK’S EVOLVING SUCCESS is punctuated by profound moments—an early childhood fishing trip, a Prep education, an accidental acting role, a fishing guide job, an attorney’s conviction, a boat captain named Lenny, and triumph over alcohol addiction. 

But every experience along the way has pointed to his North Star—salmon. Mark’s love and reverence for this quintessential Northwest sea creature has informed who he is, what he does, and how he impacts the world around him.

Mark recalls fishing with his dad, as a two-year old, in Neah Bay. “I used to think we got cheated by not having warm water with lots of colorful fish like in Hawaii,” he says. But over the years he has developed a deep appreciation for what he calls, ‘the mysterious beings underneath the water’ with their glittering purple and silver jewel-like scales. 

Mark says, “there’s something that I appreciate about the fecundity of the water, the rivers that support life and the salmon who bring that life back into the territory, into the land. It really is in the unique nature of the darkness and depth of the water—that calling something forth. It makes it more profound to think about the possibility of what can come out of that water.” 

With lingering memories of the sea and its salmon, Mark attends Seattle Prep high school in 1986. Here he is influenced by Collegio English teacher Denny Olson. “I knew I wanted to write because of Denny,” Mark says. “He was a huge mentor and inspiration to me. He had a commanding presence, and I listened to everything he said. I remember him saying, “If you can’t figure out what to write, wait, write one true sentence, and then write another and write another. He broke down these things that were seemingly impossible to me.” 

With the assistance of College Counselor Kathy Krueger, Mark finds himself at St. Olaf College. Mark revels in walking the school corridors chosen as a setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic The Great Gatsby. He is determined to be an artist and tell stories. But fate has other plans for him. 

“I had a teacher at Prep who kept telling me I should try theater, but I didn’t have time for it in high school with sports,” Mark says. But then at St. Olaf his roommate convinces him to audition for a show and he gets the role. “I fell head over heels in love with acting,” says Mark. “It was a way to get into my body and out of my head.” 

“I fell head over heels in love with acting. It was a way to get into my body and out of my head.” 

With this new-found interest, Mark transfers to the University of Oregon to pursue acting. He leaves school early after a beloved professor sees him struggling to make ends meet working two jobs and paying out-of-state tuition. He tells Mark he has the talent to get an agent and start getting paid for acting. So, Mark returns to Seattle to work as a professional actor. Fast forward. There is a flurry of paid commercials, agents, and hopeful aspirations for the Hollywood dream. He auditions for a role in the biographical movie Prefontaine, about a runner from Oregon. He gets four callbacks but eventually loses the role to someone who actually is a long-distance runner. “I got kind of ticked off about it and thought I could write a better script.” he says. Inspired by the wave of indie films and directors such as Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, Mark decides that he will write and star in his own movie. He teams up with his best friend and writes his first script titled Too Far Down, a humorous portrayal of two buddies working in an Alaskan cannery. Mark says, “It was absolutely unreadable. Terrible. But I learned a lot about writing a screenplay.” 

Mark continues to draw inspiration from his Alaskan travels, odd fishing jobs, and a wise boat captain named Lenny. “When I was 21 years old and working in a fish cannery, I remember a poignant evening out on this boat in Bristol Bay. The sun is starting to dip below the horizon. There are beluga whales in the river next to us. Time stopped. And I said, ‘Uncle Lenny, I am so in love with all of this, and I just want to be a part of it so badly. And he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘little brother you already are. You just have to say thank you.’” 

The exchange serves as a momentous life lesson about humility, grace, and surrender.

Three years later, Mark is encouraged by his best friend from Prep, and his older brother, to get a Coast Guard license and become a fishing guide at East Bay Lodge. Here, 100 miles from the city lights of Ketchikan, Alaska, there is only wilderness—rugged mountains, big rainforests and deep, dark waters. There are no roads. Access is by boat or small plane. And it is here where Mark’s next transformation begins to take shape. 

He says, “I like to call this bio-region salmon country, and I knew when I saw it that I was home, and I knew my place in the world. And I knew what I wanted to do with my life, which was somehow centered around channeling this deep, deep love I have for this place, and the beings in this place, into art that spoke for the place. I knew I wanted to be a storyteller, a filmmaker, and yet I didn’t know exactly how that was going to happen.”

“I knew I wanted to be a storyteller, a filmmaker, and yet I didn’t know exactly how that was going to happen.”

The next two years he splits between summers guiding fishermen and winters holed up as a lodge caretaker. In 1998, he enrolls in a Vancouver B.C. film school and begins to write a series of screenplays; one debuts at the Seattle International Film Festival; in 2004 Mark wins the Washington State screenplay competition with his script, “Tsonoqua—The Wild Woman.”

A few months later, Mark gets a phone call; Hollywood is interested in his screenplay. He goes to Los Angeles to meet with agents. “I thought, oh my God, here we go. It’s happening,” he says. The producer who optioned the script was Arnold Kopelson, credited with hit movies such as Platoon and Se7en. Mark continues, “I’m like, okay, sweet. We’re done. And of course, it never works that way. A project with Michael Douglas came along and they dropped my film.”

But, a local producer, by the name of John Comerford, options the script and the two men devote the next five years to the project. Meanwhile, Mark forms August Island Pictures, a production company, through which he writes, directs, and produces commercials for corporate clients such as Amazon, Microsoft, and the Nature Conservancy. It is during a plane ride to Sacramento, California, to film a commercial, that he has his next aha moment. 

“I’m reading Mountain in the Clouds, by Bruce Brown,” he says. “It’s about the threat to salmon in the Northwest. I read the forward and recognize the name of an attorney, a family friend. I had this moment of clarity and knew that my work needed to focus on salmon conservation.”

The attorney, Russ Busch, had been a leading advocate for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe for over 40 years in in an attempt to save their historic village from destruction and remove the dams on the Elwha River. 

Russ was also battling stage four brain cancer.

“I was like, Oh, my God, I have to interview Russ before he dies,” he says. And he does. They have three interviews together and quickly become very close friends. “He becomes a big mentor to me. And he did live long enough to see the dams blown up,” says Mark.

This relationship was the basis for The Breach, Mark’s first feature documentary—a love story for wild salmon and an ode to the lifetime work of Russ Busch. In 2014, Mark premiered the film at the Galway International Film Festival in Ireland, where it won best international feature documentary. He says, “The old people in the theater were weeping when they watched this movie because they remembered the wild salmon they had in their rivers, which are now gone. The voice of the narrator in the movie is Irish and she represents the salmon of wisdom from Irish mythology. She tells the audience you have screwed up every single time that you’ve come into salmon country. But there is a little place left to get it right—Bristol Bay, Alaska.

In Bristol Bay, 60 million sockeye return from the ocean each year. Fishing nets are held back from the water to allow the salmon to swim upstream to spawn. Mark says, “There are actually guys with clickers, standing on towers, counting the number of salmon that go by to make sure that enough of them escape past the tower. They are physically withholding fishing until millions of fish get up into the river to make the next generation.”

Mark and his crew embark on a promotional 25-city tour financed by Bristol Bay’s fishermen. And it is here that Mark hits another critical juncture in his journey. “Alcohol was a part of the social fabric of my life,” he says. “I had been drinking my whole life. It was this elixir that made me feel comfortable in my skin, and on stage. But I notice on tour, as I’m addressing audiences of 500 people, that I’m drinking more and more, and I start going down a slippery slope.”

In 2016 he hits rock bottom. 

In the course of three days, Mark’s grandma is put on hospice, his mom is diagnosed with breast cancer, and Donald Trump is elected president of the United States. 

“I experience grief I had never known was possible,” he says. “I didn’t care as much about the politician as much as I knew what the politics meant for salmon and what it meant for Bristol Bay. The news sends me spiraling. 

In January he calls Swedish Hospital and checks himself into a detox program.

Fifty-five days later, Mark is on a boat in Bristol Bay, Alaska, filming his second film, The Wild.

This very personal documentary uses the metaphor of addiction and overlays it with the reality of current environmental issues. It also addresses the potential construction of a copper and gold mine at the headwaters of the world’s last fully intact wild salmon system, Bristol Bay.

“There’s $500 billion worth of copper and gold in this resource,” Mark says. “And greedy humans are licking their chops to be able to set up shop there. In 2013 the Biden administration’s EPA put a preemptive veto on the necessary dredging drill permits, citing Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The tribes, who have been there for 10,000 years, have been fighting this for the last three decades.” 

Every time Mark shows the film to people, they ask, ‘What can I do to help?’ “And the best thing I had to offer them at the time,” he says was “well, write your legislator and give to your favorite nonprofit environmental org. But no one was satisfied with that, especially not me.”

So, in 2020 he founded Eva’s Wild. The company promotes sustainable salmon consumption and supports salmon conservation efforts. It partners with a regenerative fishery in Bristol Bay that has been in operation for 150 years. Look closely at the logo and you will see that Eva’s spelt backwards is SAVE. It is also Latin for “Mother of Life.” Save Wild Salmon became the next stop on the journey. Most importantly, Eva’s is a social purpose corporation, devoted to giving back 10% of its profits to the Bristol Bay Foundation, which gives four-year college scholarships and trade school scholarships to Bristol Bay’s indigenous young people.

There is a third and final film underway in Mark’s salmon trilogy. It’s called The Turn. It is a reference to the mysterious, nearly mystical migration of salmon, who once they are way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean turn at a certain point to go home, which is where they will die and sacrifice themselves for new life. It also doubles as a reference to the human race. It asks the question, “Are we able to make the turn and find a way of living with our planet in a way that sustains us or are we going to die for the profit of a few.”

The film ties up all the storylines between The Wild and The Breach and focuses on the breaching of the lower four Snake River dams. “If we do this,” says Mark “we will open up 5,500 miles of habitat for wild salmon who are currently blocked and dying behind these dams.” 

“Ninety percent of Washington voters say they want salmon to stay for future generations,” says Mark. “So, when it comes time to write the check or vote, do it! The salmon are not going to be here for another 30 years if we don’t.” 

Mark plans on submitting The Turn to the Sundance Film Festival. If accepted, this documentary would be an apt finale to his conservation trilogy.

Underwater Bristol Bay Lake by Jason Ching

In January he calls Swedish Hospital and checks him-self into a detox program.

Fifty-five days later, Mark is on a boat in Bristol Bay,Alaska, filming his second film, The Wild.

This very personal documentary uses the metaphor of addiction and overlays it with the reality of current environmental issues. It also addresses the potential construction of a copper and gold mine at the headwaters of theworld’s last fully intact wild salmon system, Bristol Bay.

“There’s $500 billion worth of copper and gold in this re-source,” Mark says. “And greedy humans are licking their chops to be able to set up shop there. In 2013 the Biden ad-ministration’s EPA put a preemptive veto on the necessary dredging drill permits, citing Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The tribes, who have been there for 10,000 years, have been fighting this for the last three decades.”

Every time Mark shows the film to people, they ask,‘What can I do to help?’ “And the best thing I had to offer them at the time,” he says was “well, write your legislator and give to your favorite nonprofit environmental org.But no one was satisfied with that, especially not me.”

So, in 2020 he founded Eva’s Wild. The company pro-motes sustainable salmon consumption and supports salmon conservation efforts. It partners with a regenerative fishery in Bristol Bay that has been in operation for150 years. Look closely at the logo and you will see thatEva’s spelt backwards is SAVE. It is also Latin for “Mother of Life.” Save Wild Salmon became the next stop on thejourney. Most importantly, Eva’s is a social purpose corporation, devoted to giving back 10% of its profits to theBristol Bay Foundation, which gives four-year college scholarships and trade school scholarships to BristolBay’s indigenous young people.

There is a third and final film underway in Mark’s salmon trilogy. It’s called The Turn. It is a reference to the mysterious, nearly mystical migration of salmon, who once they are way out in the middle of the PacificOcean turn at a certain point to go home, which is where they will die and sacrifice themselves for new life. It also

doubles as a reference to the human race. It asks the question, “Are we able to make the turn and find a way ofliving with our planet in a way that sustains us or are we going to die for the profit of a few.”

The film ties up all the storylines between The Wild and The Breach and focuses on the breaching of the low-er four Snake River dams. “If we do this,” says Mark “we will open up 5,500 miles of habitat for wild salmon who are currently blocked and dying behind these dams.”

“Ninety percent of Washington voters say they want salmon to stay for future generations,” says Mark. “So, whenit comes time to write the check or vote, do it! The salmon are not going to be here for another 30 years if we don’t.”

Mark plans on submitting The Turn to the Sundance Film Festival. If accepted, this documentary would be anapt finale to his conservation trilogy.

“My Prep education opened my eyes and profoundly changed my life.”

Mark mentions several Jesuit sayings that he has taken to heart: virtus in arduis(virtue in hard work), ad majorem dei gloriam(for the Glory of God) and Men and Women for Others. “I feel that these values resonate with the work I have been doing,” he says. “My Prep education opened my eyes and profoundly changed my life.”

Coming full circle Mark is focused on sustaining what matters—the creatures obscured in those ‘mysterious, deep dark waters.’ “When I get the privilege of being out in the water, it’s this profound sense of freedom,” Mark says. “You can be a mile offshore looking back at the city, and it feels like you’re in a completely different place. It’s quiet, especially in the early morning hours. And there is this pregnancy of anything that could happen. You don’t know what mystery is going to be revealed, whether it’s catching a fish or seeing something beautiful come out of the water such as an orca or a humpback whale spouting in the distance. Anything is possible in that moment.”