Stuart Blumberg

Stuart Ethan Blumberg was born and raised in Cleveland, OH. He attended Yale University in New Haven, CT, and graduated in 1991 with a bachelor's degree in history. After working as a New York City-based investment banker for a few years, he started writing and directing off-Broadway plays. Blumberg spent a season as a writer for the sketch comedy series "MAD TV" (Fox, 1995-2009) in 1996, while also working on a draft of a story about a priest and a rabbi who are best friends. After he completed the draft in 1997, Blumberg showed it to actor Edward Norton, who was also his former roommate at Yale. So impressed was Norton that he ended up collaborating with former roomie and turning the script into the 2000 hit comedy, "Keeping the Faith." The movie told the story of two longtime friends - one a Roman Catholic priest (Norton); the other a rabbi (Ben Stiller) - who vie for the attention of a successful Manhattan executive (Jenna Elfman). Blumberg even had a small role in the movie as the coworker and fawning admirer of Elfman's character.In 2004, Blumberg penned another romantic comedy, "The Girl Next Door," about a straight-A high school senior (Matthew Kidman) who falls for his porn star neighbor (Elisha Cuthbert). While the movie was a teen sex romp by all measures, Blumberg managed to slightly elevate its entertainment value with a well-written script that actually had a running plotline versus a collection of gags pieced together. His follow-up work had more serious undertones; he coproduced the critically acclaimed documentary "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama" (2009), alongside Ed Norton. In 2010, Blumberg suddenly took the indie world by storm with the feature "The Kids Are All Right," about a lesbian couple (Julianne Moore and Annette Bening), whose lives are turned upside-down after their children meet their sperm-donor father (Mark Ruffalo). The idea for the story reportedly came from the personal experiences of director Lisa Cholodenko, who had a child with a sperm donor, as well as Blumberg himself, who had been a sperm donor while in college. The cowriters spent months working on the script together, and the result was a deeply personal, funny, and refreshing take on the experiences of a post-modern family. Critics and viewers alike gave the well acted comedy heaps of praise, acting nods for its two leading ladies, and for Blumberg and Cholodenko, Golden Globe and Oscar nods for Best Original Screenplay.