Ryan Murphy (born November 9, 1965) is an American film and television screenwriter, director, and producer. He is best known for creating/co-creating the television series Popular, Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, and The New Normal.
Background
Murphy grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, in an Irish Catholic family. He attended Catholic school from first through eighth grade, and graduated from Warren Central High School (Indianapolis). He has described his mother as a “beauty queen who left it all to stay at home and take care of her two sons.” She wrote 5 books and worked in communications for over 20 years before retiring. His father worked in the newspaper industry as a circulation director before he retired after 30 years. After coming out as gay, he saw his first therapist, who found nothing wrong with him other than being “‘too precocious for his own good.’”Murphy performed with a choir as a child, which would later inform his work on Glee.
Murphy attended Indiana University, Bloomington. While at college, he was a staff member of the school newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student, and he was a member of the school’s “Singing Hoosiers” show choir.
Career
Murphy started as a journalist working for The Miami Herald, The Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Knoxville News Sentinel and Entertainment Weekly. He began scriptwriting in the late 1990s, when Steven Spielberg purchased his script, Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn?
Television
Murphy started his career in television in 1999 with the teen comedy series Popular. The show aired on The WB for two seasons.
Murphy is the Golden Globe-winning creator of Nip/Tuck, which aired on FX and was both a commercial and critical hit. He produced, wrote, and directed many episodes; in 2004, Murphy earned his first ever Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series.Murphy took the show’s signature line, “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself”, from a plastic surgeon he met when he was a journalist researching an undercover story on plastic surgery in Beverly Hills.
Murphy has also created a couple of failed pilots. The WB sitcom pilot St. Sass starring Delta Burke and Heather Matarazzo was not picked up. In 2008, Murphy wrote and directed the FX pilot Pretty/Handsome, which also was not picked up.
One of Murphy’s current projects is the FOX musical comedy-drama Glee, co-created with Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Fox aired a preview episode on May 19, 2009, following the season finale of American Idol; the show aired its first regular season episode on September 9, 2009. The show’s early success in its planned thirteen-episode run led the network to order an additional nine episodes for the spring, making it the first new fall series in 2009 to get a full season order of twenty-two episodes. It was announced during the last half of the first season that FOX had ordered a complete second and third season of Glee due to high ratings and positive feedback about the show and the characters. He won his first Emmy for directing the pilot episode of Glee, while the show received a record nineteen nominations including Outstanding Comedy Series, although it lost the latter to Modern Family while winning in four categories.The show was nominated for twelve Emmys for its second season, and has been renewed for a fourth season.
Murphy is working on another project with Falchuk, American Horror Story which premiered on FX on October 5, 2011, and ran for twelve episodes, with its finale on December 21, 2011. The show was renewed for a thirteen-episode second season on October 31, 2011, although the new season will feature different characters and a setting elsewhere in the US.
Murphy is one of four executive producers on the reality television series The Glee Project, which premiered on Oxygen on June 12, 2011. The show features a group of contestants vying for the prize of a seven-episode arc on Glee, with one being eliminated each week until the winner is chosen from those remaining on the final episode. The show has been renewed for a second season.
Murphy and Glee co-executive producer Ali Adler have created The New Normal, a half-hour comedy that “centers on a gay couple and the surrogate who will carry their child”, and is set to air on NBC beginning in the fall of 2012. According to Entertainment Weekly, there was a bidding war in October 2011 between ABC, NBC, and FOX for the project. The announcement that NBC had officially ordered a pilot episode for the series was made on January 27, 2012, and a series order followed on May 7, 2012.
Films
In 2006, Murphy wrote the screenplay for and directed the feature film Running with Scissors. Based on the memoir by Augusten Burroughs, the movie version starred Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin and Brian Cox, and, as the young Burroughs, Joseph Cross. In 2010 Murphy directed Julia Roberts in an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love. The film was a box office success but a critical failure, receiving harsh reviews criticizing its pacing and lack of credibility. To date, the film has grossed $204,482,125 worldwide.
On January 20, 2012, it was announced that the next film Murphy would be directing is a screen adaptation by Larry Kramer of his Broadway play The Normal Heart, starring Mark Ruffalo, Roberts, Baldwin, Matt Bomer, and Jim Parsons.
As of 2011, Murphy has several films in development: Dirty Tricks, a political comedy; Face, a plastic surgery thriller; and Need, an erotic thriller. —Wikipedia
