Ian Maxtone-Graham

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Ian Maxtone-Graham
Born	July 3, 1959 (1959-07-03) (age 50) New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Television writer
Nationality	American
Writing period	1983 - Present
Influences Mad Magazine, National Lampoon

Ian Maxtone-Graham (born on July 3, 1959 in New York City) is an American television writer and producer. He has written for Saturday Night Live (1992-1995) and The Simpsons (1995-present), and has also served as a co-executive producer and consulting producer for The Simpsons. He is currently an executive producer of the show.

Family and earlier work

Maxtone-Graham was born in Boston, but raised in New York City, the son of naval historian and author John Maxtone-Graham and author Katrina Maxtone-Graham (née Kanzler), and the great-nephew of the British author and poet Joyce Maxtone-Graham (pen name Jan Struther). His younger brother is Guy Maxtone-Graham, a onetime writer and actor for Beavis and Butthead.

He attended Trinity School on New York's Upper West Side, where he was co-captain of the swim team. He went to Brown University (although most of the other writers of The Simpsons went to Harvard). While at Brown, he wrote for and later served as Editor-in-Chief of the Critical Review, Brown's student publication of course evaluations. He entered Brown with the class of 1981 but graduated in January 1983.

Maxtone-Graham is a triathlete, and swims with the UCLA masters team. He also kayaks.

After graduating from Brown, he worked at Hydrolab, a research facility in the U.S. Virgin Islands, as a support diver to a subaquatic biosphere. He worked there for one month before moving to Southern California and writing for the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Saturday Night Live

While at Saturday Night Live, Maxtone-Graham co-wrote the first version of The Chanukah Song with Adam Sandler and according to Alec Baldwin in the DVD commentary of "SNL: The Best of Alec Baldwin", was one of the writers of the infamous sketch, "Canteen Boy Goes Camping" (where a scoutmaster [played by Alec Baldwin] seduces Canteen Boy). Maxtone-Graham once dumped a cup of water on Norm Macdonald's head for smoking in the writer's room. Macdonald responded by punching Maxtone-Graham, who went home and did not return for a week. Maxtone-Graham considered filing charges against Macdonald for assault and battery, and against NBC for not enforcing the no-smoking policy, but decided against it.^{[citation needed]}

The Simpsons

Maxtone-Graham was one of several writers recruited to The Simpsons from the pages of George Meyer's short-lived Army Man magazine. He joined the Simpsons crew in the seventh season (though he only began writing episodes in the eighth season) and has since written some important episodes, such as "Alone Again, Natura-Diddily," in which Maude Flanders dies. In 2005, he won a Writers Guild of America award. The Simpsons' most recent Emmy Award-winning episode, "The Seemingly Never-Ending Story", was also written by Maxtone-Graham. In 2007 he also won an Annie for the episode. In 2008, he won an Annie for the episode "24 Minutes," which he co-wrote with "Simpsons" writer Billy Kimball. Altogether, Maxtone-Graham has won six Emmys, two Annies and a Writers Guild of America Award.

However, Maxtone-Graham has also become unpopular among some fans of The Simpsons on the Internet. The animosity kicked off in 1998, when he stated that he had never watched the show prior to working on it. In the same interview, he contrasted the Simpsons writers' somewhat lackadaisical approach (saying, for example, that they sometimes confused Rod and Todd) with the Internet fans' apparent obsession with continuity, and remarked, "That's why they're on the Internet and we're writing the show." The interviewer Charlotte O'Sullivan expressed discomfort with his assertion that female writers were not often part of the writing staff, as the "guy humor" of Bart and Homer dominated the show's plotlines over the characters of Marge and Lisa. The design of the occasionally-appearing Simpsons character "Very Tall Man" (his most notable appearance being "22 Short Films About Springfield") is based on Maxtone-Graham, who in real life measures in at 6'6".

The Simpsons episodes

Among the episodes he has written are:

Season Eight

• "Burns, Baby Burns"

Season Nine

• "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson"
• "The Trouble with Trillions"
• "Trash of the Titans" (200th episode, winner of a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program For Programming less than One Hour)

Season Ten

• "Lisa Gets an "A""

Season Eleven

• "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)"
• "Alone Again, Natura-Diddily"

Season Twelve

• "Tennis the Menace"

Season Thirteen

• "The Blunder Years"

Season Fourteen

• "Large Marge"
• "Dude, Where's My Ranch?"

Season Fifteen

• "Catch 'Em If You Can"

Season Sixteen

• "The Heartbroke Kid"

Season Seventeen

• "The Seemingly Never-Ending Story" (winner of a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program For Programming less than One Hour and an Annie Award for "Best Writing in an Animated Television Production")

Season Eighteen

• "24 Minutes" (with Billy Kimball as co-writer)

Season Twenty

• "Dangerous Curves" (with Billy Kimball as co-writer)
• "Gone Maggie Gone" (with Billy Kimball as co-writer, nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program For Programming less than One Hour)

External links

• Ian Maxtone-Graham at the Internet Movie Database
• The Simpsons Archive explains Maxtone-Graham's unpopularity.
• Maxtone-Graham's infamous interview. - {deadlink}
• Another interview
• Maxtone-Graham family tree
• An excerpt from Jay Mohr's book "Gasping for Airtime" describes the fight between Norm Macdonald and Maxtone-Graham.