[3]After graduation from high school, Baitz did not attend college, instead he worked as a bookstore clerk and assistant to two producers, and the experiences became the basis for his first play, a one-acter entitled Mizlansky/Zilinsky.
Its 1987 success in Los Angeles led to an Off-Broadway production with Nathan Lane in 1988,[4][5] which earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding New Play.
This was followed by The Substance of Fire in 1991 with Ron Rifkin and Sarah Jessica Parker[6] and The End of the Day Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 1992, starring Roger Rees.
In 1993, he co-scripted (with Howard A. Rodman) "The Frightening Frammis", which was directed by Tom Cruise and aired as an episode of the Showtime anthology series Fallen Angels.
Two years later, Henry Jaglom cast him as a gay playwright who achieves success at an early age - a character inspired by Baitz himself - in the film Last Summer in the Hamptons.
His screenplays include the adaptation of his own Substance of Fire (1996), with Tony Goldwyn and Timothy Hutton joining original cast members Rifkin and Parker, and People I Know (2002), which starred Al Pacino.
[11] His play Other Desert Cities opened Off-Broadway at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater (Lincoln Center) in New York on January 13, 2011, starring Stockard Channing, Linda Lavin, Stacy Keach, Thomas Sadoski and Elizabeth Marvel.
Baitz defended his decision in a letter to the guild's leaders, stating that his agents at CAA had stuck by him during bad times, including both during, and after the 2007-2008 writers' strike.