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A US Air Force Veteran, Peterson used G.I. Bill benefits to attend Columbia Film School. One of his early film jobs included working part-time as Quentin Tarantino's script typist. Shortly before shooting began on "Wedding Crashers" (2005), he sat in a private room for a week taking notes while director David Dobkin, Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughn brainstormed through a rewrite of the entire script. In honor of the band "The Exploding Hearts", Peterson licensed their song "Throwaway Style" for his short film "Stalker Party Tonight!".
On becoming sober in 2001: "Before that day, I viewed the world through shattered sunglasses. Listened with headphones made of jelly donuts. Embraced life wearing oven mitts". An off-road motorcycle racing accident in 2016 forced Peterson to temporarily step away from filmmaking and focus on writing during recovery.
His first feature, the horror comedy "Vampire Knights", was shot on 16mm film in 7 days for $7,000. Early feature film comedy romp transformed into cult favorite via regular late night screenings on Comedy Central, "Girlfriend from Hell" was adapted into an Off-Broadway musical parody by New York stage director, and avid fan of the film, Sean Matthew Whiteford.
Peterson's independent film, "Backroad Motel", a nine story anthology featuring various dregs, druggies, and the doomed inhabiting a dingy motel room somewhere along Route 66, caught the attention of Jonathan Taplin, producer of, among other films, Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets". Taplin transformed "Backroad Motel" into one of the Internets first "webisodes" by premiering on his own technologically groundbreaking Video on Demand website, Intertainer.
In the late 90s, Peterson worked as a bodyguard driving private dancers to late-night appointments throughout Los Angeles. That experience eventually became, "Have Love, Will Travel", a film he wrote and directed chronicling his dark journey into a disturbing and violent world inside the city's underground mobile skin trade. The film was invited by Trevor Groth (Director of Programming Sundance Film Festival) and Mike Plante (Programmer Sundance Film Festival) to world premiere at their own CineVegas Film Festival.
From a long line of Downtown Los Angeles entertainers dating back to the 1800's. In the early 1900's, his Grandmother, Juanita Larieux, was already an accomplished dancer by the time she was 4 years old, performing at local city center fiestas. Eventually, as a young woman during the depression, she found herself dancing at "scandalous" downtown LA burlesque shows to make ends meet.
Peterson was born in Long Beach, CA where his mother, a WW2 US Navy veteran, worked at the since-closed Long Beach US Naval Shipyard. She worked in Civil Service assigned to the supply department. She later retired after 36 years working for the Navy as a civil service supply department supervisor.
He is a Roman Catholic like his mother who would often tell him that since she was a little girl growing up in Lincoln Heights, CA and attending the old St Vibiana Cathedral in Downtown LA, she wanted to be a Nun until she became older and met his father who explained what "Nun" meant. It was a story Peterson included in the eulogy he spoke at her Funeral Mass where his father, since divorced from his mother, was in the audience who laughed along with family members, various mourners, and the Priest. Peterson claims he might have also heard a faint laugh as well coming from her Urn sitting on the alter next to him.
