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A US Air Force Veteran, Peterson utilized G.I. Bill benefits to attend Columbia Film School. Early in his career, he worked part-time as Quentin Tarantino's script typist. Just before filming began on "Wedding Crashers" (2005), he spent a week in a private room taking notes while director David Dobkin, Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughn rewrote the entire script. In tribute to the band "The Exploding Hearts," Peterson licensed their song "Throwaway Style" for his short film "Stalker Party Tonight!".
Reflecting on his sobriety in 2001, he said: "Before that day, I viewed the world through shattered sunglasses. Listened with headphones made of jelly donuts. Embraced life wearing oven mitts." A 2016 off-road motorcycle racing accident forced him to pause filmmaking and focus on writing during his recovery.
His debut feature, the horror comedy "Vampire Knights," was filmed on 16mm in seven days with a $7,000 budget. The early comedy "Girlfriend from Hell," which evolved into a cult classic through frequent late-night Comedy Central airings, was adapted into an Off-Broadway musical parody by New York stage director and fan Sean Matthew Whiteford.
Peterson’s indie film "Backroad Motel," a nine-story anthology about the desperate and doomed inhabiting a rundown motel along Route 66, attracted Jonathan Taplin, producer of Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets." Taplin transformed it into one of the internet’s first webisode series, premiering it on his pioneering Video on Demand site, Intertainer.
In the late 1990s, Peterson worked as a bodyguard, chauffeuring private dancers to late-night gigs around Los Angeles. This experience inspired "Have Love, Will Travel," a film he wrote and directed depicting his dark descent into the violent world of the city's underground mobile skin trade. The film was invited to premiere at the CineVegas Film Festival by Sundance Film Festival programmers Trevor Groth and Mike Plante.
Coming from a long line of Downtown Los Angeles entertainers dating back to the 1800s, Peterson’s grandmother, Juanita Larieux, was an accomplished dancer by age four, performing at local city fiestas in the early 1900s. During the Great Depression, she danced in "scandalous" downtown LA burlesque shows to support herself.
Born in Long Beach, CA, Peterson’s mother, a WWII US Navy veteran, worked at the now-closed Long Beach US Naval Shipyard in Civil Service, assigned to the supply department. She retired after 36 years as a civil service supply department supervisor.
A Roman Catholic like his mother, Peterson recalls her telling him that as a girl growing up in Lincoln Heights, CA, and attending the old St. Vibiana Cathedral in Downtown LA, she once dreamed of becoming a nun—until she grew older and met his father, who explained what being a nun meant. Peterson included this story in the eulogy he delivered at her Funeral Mass, where his father, now divorced from his mother, was present and shared laughs with family, mourners, and the priest. Peterson jokes that he might have even heard a faint laugh from her urn resting on the altar beside him.
