Don Payne (writer)
| Don Payne | |
|---|---|
Payne at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con panel for The Simpsons
|
|
| Born |
William Donald Payne May 5, 1964 Wilmington, North Carolina, United States |
| Died | March 26, 2013 (aged 48) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Bone cancer |
| Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Occupation | Writer, producer |
William Donald "Don" Payne (May 5, 1964 – March 26, 2013) was an American writer and producer. He wrote several episodes of The Simpsons after 2000, many of these with John Frink, whom he met while studying at the University of California, Los Angeles. The duo began their careers writing for the short-lived sitcom Hope and Gloria. Payne later moved into writing feature films, including My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), and co-wrote Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), Thor (2011) and its sequel Thor: The Dark World (2013). Payne died from bone cancer in March 2013.
Payne was born William Donald Payne on May 5, 1964 in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States. He attended New Hanover High School, graduating in 1982; he had been class president. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then transferred to and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also received a master's degree in screenwriting. Payne later taught on the course.
He began his career as a writer for several sitcoms together with his writing partner at the time, John Frink. The two met at UCLA, where Frink was the boss of the Media Laboratory in which Payne worked. Payne has said to the website TheFutonCritic.com that "one day we were both trying to write individually so I said, 'why don't we pool our resources and write together and see what happens?'" In 2006, Payne told the Los Angeles Times that "I hooked up with a writing partner, John Frink, out of college. I wanted to do films. He wanted to do television." The pair reached the agreement that they would pursue a career in the medium that they first got a job offer in—whether it be film or television. They eventually ended up writing for television sitcoms such as Hope and Gloria (1995–1996), Men Behaving Badly (1997) and The Brian Benben Show (1998). These sitcoms were short-lived and Payne has deemed them as failures.
...
Wikipedia