Craig Mazin Knows A Thing Or Two About Ted Cruz

In a rather off-putting development in Ted Cruz's presidential run, news erupted on Wednesday that the U.S. Senator from Texas once defended a ban on dildos. Yes, back during his days as a Texas solicitor general, a federal judge ruled that selling sex toys was not a constitutionally-protected right. When the plaintiffs appealed, Cruz and his team took to defending the law via a 76-page brief, which at one point stated, "There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship." Well, Craig Mazin, Ted Cruz's roommate at Princeton University, had a few words relating to that whole matter. So who exactly is this champion of the anti-Cruz movement?

As it turns out, Mazin is a Hollywood screenwriter. In fact, he's in part responsible for the the last two Hangover movies. His IMDb page states that he has nine credits as a writer — including two Hangover films, as well as Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 — as well as producer, soundtrack, director, and actor credits. His genre of preference is apparently comedy, which could explain many of his tweets roasting his ex-roommate.

To backtrack a bit, Empire Online states that Mazin was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 8, 1971. Like many Brooklynites, he went the way of living in Staten Island, New York and then onward to New Jersey — starting in Marlboro, and eventually heading off to college at the prestigious Princeton, where his fateful meeting with Mr. Cruz occurred. He graduated magna cum laude in 1992 with a degree in psychology.

Post-college, he began his entertainment career in marketing with the Walt Disney Company. He wrote and produced campaigns for Disney studio films. In 2004, he was elected to the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, West, a labor union that represents film, television, radio, and new media writers. His term expired in September 2006, and he never sought reelection.

He also engaged in the extracurricular running of a website with fellow former WGA board member Ted Elliott, called "The Artful Writer." It shut down in 2011, but during its run, the material focused on working screenwriters' issues. That same year, Mazin and John August, another screenwriter, began a weekly podcast called "Scriptnotes," which covers screenwriting as a craft and topics pertinent to the industry.

Most recently, Mazin is best-known for his roast-like tweets and disconcerting anecdotes about Cruz, occasionally citing the presidential candidate's behavior as a young man. Unfortunately for Mazin, it looks like these tweets are more interesting to Americans right now than any movie script. Perhaps that's telling of American humor, but hey, he's a writer, and the tweets are pretty funny.