Baitz is a playwright and screenwriter known for his semi-autobiographical plays and for the TV show he created, Brothers & Sisters.

The son of an exec for Carnation Milk, Baitz spent his childhood living in Brazil and Durban, South Africa. He and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was a teen, and he attended the infamous star factory Beverly Hills High School. After the success of his 1985 one-act play Mizlansky/Zilinsky or Schmucks, based on his experiences in L.A., Baitz moved to New York. In the late 1980s his plays began to generate critical acclaim, particularly the 1987 off-Broadway production of The Film Society (starring Nathan Lane) and 1991's The Substance of Fire with Ron Rifkin and Sarah Jessica Parker (which was made into a 1996 film of the same name). Baitz's semi-autobiographical 1996 play A Fair Country earned him a Pulitzer nomination, and although he's continued to write plays like 2011's Other Desert Cities, he's also branching out into film and TV writing. On the movie front, his work includes 2003's People I Know, which starred Al Pacino as a haggard New York publicist (reportedly based on PR legend Bobby Zarem). As a writer for the small screen, he wrote scripts for The West Wing and Alias, and in 2006 created the ABC family drama Brothers & Sisters, starring Calista Flockhart, Rob Lowe, Sally Field and, like almost every project Baitz has been involved with, Ron Rifkin. [Image via Getty]