14 DAY TRIAL // Don Payne, four time Emmy winning producer and writer on “The Simpsons,” has died. He was only 48 years old and, as The Hollywood Reporter confirms, he had been battling bone cancer.
Payne passed away at his home in Los Angeles and is survived by his wife Julie and three children.
His work went beyond television: he also wrote the script for “Thor” and the upcoming sequel, “Thor: The Dark World,” and had worked on other superhero projects as well.
“Payne, a self-professed ‘comic book geek,’ also was behind the scripts for My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006), starring Uma Thurman and Luke Wilson, Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and Columbia’s upcoming Maximum Ride, based on James Patterson’s young adult novel,” THR says.
“Payne started on The Simpsons in 1998 and wrote more than a dozen episodes of the long-running Fox series and served as a consulting producer on 100. He has two episodes in production that will air this fall in the show’s 25th season, including this year’s Christmas show, ‘White Christmas Blues’,” adds the same media outlet.