To no one’s surprise, media personality Mark S. Allen shows up for a lunchtime interview camera-ready: impeccably attired in a striped blue-and-black suit complete with a red pocket handkerchief, dress shirt, tie and spotless white Vans. He turns heads as he strides to a table at the Sutter Club Grill. 

What may surprise his many longtime fans throughout the region is that Allen, who has won eight Emmy awards, also spends a great deal of time behind the camera. He’s either directed, produced or written eight feature films over the past seven years, sometimes doing all three jobs.

His favorite genre is horror, he says, but he’s also created sensitive, serious coming-of-age comedies. (See selected filmography below.)

Some of his films have opened to big theater premieres in Los Angeles, while others have gone straight to streaming. His dream project is to write, direct and produce nothing less than an epic biopic of two of the 20th century’s greatest innovators. More on that in a moment.

“I fell in love with movies when I was a little kid growing up in Odessa (Texas),” he says in a voice that’s commandingly deep for someone who’s known to get silly on the air. As he self-deprecatingly puts it, “I’m probably best known as being an idiot-about-town.”

He projected his fun-loving personality for 20 years on the Sacramento CBS affiliate “Good Day, Sacramento.” In 2015, he swam nonstop from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge on live TV. For context, this happened just days after the first recorded great white shark attack in the San Francisco Bay. 

The following year, he moved to the ABC-TV affiliate KXTV, joining the on-air hosts of “The Morning Blend.”  

In 2024, ABC 10 launched “Take a Look,” a 30-minute celebrity interview and movie critique show hosted by Allen on Friday mornings. He’s interviewed A-list guests including the three Toms — Tom Cruise, Tom Holland and Tom Hanks — as well as two Ryans, Gosling and Reynolds. He also interviewed director Christopher Nolan about his 2026 blockbuster movie “The Odyssey,” as well as cast members Matt Damon, Zendaya and Anne Hathaway in what Allen calls a big movie year.

Mark S. Allen has either written, directed or produced eight movies, sometimes doing all three jobs.

• “APParition,” starring Mena Suvari and Kevin Pollak and filmed at the historic 1890 Preston Castle in Ione
• “Ballbuster,” starring Jerry O’ Connell and filmed at a studio in McClellan Business Park, with one scene filmed at the Golden 1 Center
• The franchise films “Fear PHarm” and “Fear PHarm 2,” shot in Dixon, Davis and Sacramento
• “Notorious Nick,” based on the true story of mixed martial arts champion Nick Newell
• “616 Wilford Lane,” with Eric Roberts, made in El Dorado Hills and Auburn
• “Don’t Answer,” in which a disturbed delivery man seeks victims in a small California town; filmed in the Woodlake area of Sacramento and Nicolaus in Sutter County
• “Amy’s F**k It List,” filmed almost entirely in Sacramento, which won the award for Best Dark Comedy at the 2022 World Film Festival in Cannes

Early in his career, as an awareness charity stunt to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association, he lived 24/7 on a billboard for a month — even though, on the third night, some partying yahoos yanked him off the sign. Allen had lowered a bucket by rope to collect their promised donation, and they used it instead to pull him from his perch. He broke bones in both legs and feet. The American River Fire Department was called — and after being fitted in casts, Allen returned to the roost. For an “idiot about town,” the man has true grit. He also wrote “100 Things to Do in Sacramento Before You Die.”

Mark S. Allen was born Mark Allen Stell 61 years ago in Amarillo, Texas, and raised in Odessa (Texas), whose population at the time was about 91,000. Allen pursued two of his loves: radio and aviation. He disposed of his Odessa accent before becoming a radio personality in big-city Dallas and Los Angeles. Moving to Sacramento, he hosted shows at KSFM 102.5. 

From early on, Allen scored high in television’s “Q” rating, a measurement tool most stations deny they use, which used to consist of someone in a well-populated area, such as a shopping mall, showing you a photo of a local media personality and asking you to identify him or her. If you knew the person was on TV but had no other details, that was OK. If you knew what channel they were on, the rating increased. If you knew the person’s name, you — and the media personality — hit the jackpot, because it meant the station’s gamble on hiring the person had paid off. 

“The two things I loved more than anything growing up were movies and aviation,” Allen says. He put in most of the hours required for a pilot’s license, squeezing in practices in a 1947 Cessna despite a schedule that sees him in Southern California “at least twice a week” to “take” meetings on film projects. (People in Hollywood don’t “hold” or “attend” meetings or lunches.) He also scouts potential film locations and is on set for every one of the movies he’s involved with, yet still manages to more than fulfill his Sacramento obligations for ABC 10.    

Allen’s wife, Lisa, whom he’s been married to for a little more than a year, owns a private investigation firm. “Don’t you love that?” he says over lunch. He has three children from a previous marriage: daughter Madison, 29, and sons Carson, 25, and Jackson, 22, all of whom have appeared in at least one of his films.

In the spring of 2021, Jackson was critically injured in an accident at an outdoor prom gathering. Someone accidentally poured gasoline on a dying campfire and it exploded, sending flames across the fire pit, engulfing Jackson and another young man. “Both suffered burns over nearly half their bodies,” he says.

The next few months were difficult for his son, Allen and his family as Jackson underwent multiple surgeries at the UC Davis Burn Center. “As a parent, watching your child go through that kind of pain is —” He breaks off here before resuming his still-difficult-to-recount story.

The accident occurred about 16 weeks before shooting was to begin on “Amy’s F**k It List.” His partner suggested they wait a year to make the film. “With my son’s blessing — and my family’s — we stayed on schedule. I took meetings and production calls from the hospital because, in a strange way, it gave us all some normalcy.” 

Both boys recovered. Jackson started college on time and even played a small role in the film. 

“Today, all the surgeries are behind him. He lives on his own, pays his own bills and is living a great Gen Z life. I couldn’t be prouder.”

Many of Allen’s fans know about another dark, though brief, chapter in his career, sparked, he says, by his mother’s death. 

“I was never an alcoholic, but I most certainly drank too much for a few years,” he says. A second DUI citation is believed to have cost him his gig with “Good Day, Sacramento” — though his being hired within the year by ABC 10 to do another show, on which he’s now been for a decade, indicates that station managers recognized that audiences were going to follow him through thick and thin.

“Those DUIs became a real turning point in my life,” he says. “The way I was living wasn’t healthy or completely honest, and I needed something to make me look at all of it and change it. It was painful, but looking back, it may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me. It made me correct the course of my life.”

Allen has befriended the officer who cited him and each year, Allen does a report warning of the dangers of drunk driving. And one of his favorite charities is the Firefighters Burn Institute. 

Allen is highly recognizable around Sacramento, even actively adored. At this interview lunch, Joelle DeVega, the supervisor of the Sutter Club Grill, saunters by the table, gets a few feet away and does a double take worthy of a silent film comedian before rushing over and saying to Allen, “You’re him! You’re him!”

It may be helpful to note that the club has hosted presidents, governors, movie stars and other celebrities since its founding in 1889. Both the staff and members are pretty used to the presence of what are sometimes called boldface names in its building. For his part, Allen is delighted by DeVega’s reaction, extends his hand for a shake, confirms that “it really is” him and asks her name. She blushes, tells him and adds, “But I’m nobody special.” “Oh, you’re wrong about that,” he says, with a smile unlike that of his TV persona, which is always a tad smirky, as though he’s in on the fact that what he’s doing may be kind of silly.

One thing Allen is dead earnest about is that aforementioned dream movie project: a biopic of the Wright brothers, the young men who became the first to fly in 1903. Allen, whose movies have been made for as little as $250,000, says he feels he can deliver a first-rate film on a budget of only $25 million. For comparison, Martin Scorsese’s film about Howard Hughes, “The Aviator,” had a production budget of $110 million. 

“It’ll get done,” Allen says. “I think Timothee Chalamet would be perfect as one of the brothers, don’t you?”

After the interview, Allen responds to my email seeking clarification of something or other and mentions what he feels is the most important priority in his event-filled career. “Tomorrow,” he writes, “my two sons and I are going to see ‘The Odyssey’ together. After almost losing one of them, I don’t take a single moment like that for granted.”

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