Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [17]
Sam Trammell and Nelsan Ellis show Charlaine Harris some big love at Comic-Con. (Eileen Rivera, www.BiteClubShow.com)
Nothing Is Certain but Death and Sex
Alan Ball’s Creative Process
“At one point, HBO asked, ‘What is the central theme of this show?’ I don’t think in those terms. I just think, ‘Am I entertained? Am I interested? Am I compelled?’ . . . So, I said [True Blood] is about the terrors of intimacy. And in retrospect, I think that’s kind of true.”
— Alan Ball
Alan Ball is no stranger to success, but when he came across Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels, he was a relative stranger to vampires, confessing — oh, the horror! — that he’d never seen an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and wasn’t particularly a fan of the genre. Why on earth then would he helm a show about vampires? Possibly for the same reason that he created a show about funeral directors? It’s a great place to start a story. “A vampire walks into a bar . . .”
Ball was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 13, 1957. His father, Frank, was an aircraft inspector and his mother, Mary, a homemaker. He attended the University of Georgia and Florida State University, graduating in 1980 with a degree in theater arts. He joined the General Nonsense Theater Company in Sarasota, Florida, as a playwright. From 1994 to 1998, he worked as a writer on the comedies Grace Under Fire and Cybill. In 1999, he turned suburbia in on itself, penning the dark satire American Beauty. He describes the script as dealing more with the zeitgeist of suburbia than a condemnation of it. He had nothing against suburbia when he wrote the script, realizing regardless that he’d presented “an indictment of the shallowness of American values that [Americans] are basically conditioned from birth to accept as gospel.”
American Beauty won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, a Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, and a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. Ball landed a development deal to create the cult HBO series Six Feet Under, which, aside from winning a host of awards including a Producers Guild of America Award for Dramatic Series, was responsible for turning morticians into sex symbols. He also wrote and directed the controversial Nothing Is Private (a.k.a. Towelhead) about a 13-year-old Arab-American girl with a sexual obsession and a strict father.
After Six Feet Under ended, Ball signed a two-year development deal with HBO to produce original programming. The resulting project was the pilot for True Blood, which Ball wrote, directed, and produced with Anna Paquin, Ryan Kwanten, Sam Trammell, and Stephen Moyer announced as regular cast members in early to mid-2007. They shot the pilot early that summer, with HBO officially ordering the series after Rutina Wesley replaced Brook Kerr as Tara Thornton. Two more episodes into production, the Writers Guild of America strike resulted in the production shutting down until the strike was resolved in 2008. When the show premiered in September 2008 it had one of the lowest viewership of any new HBO series, and yet that audience grew exponentially over the following weeks. After only two episodes had aired, HBO ordered a second season of twelve episodes.
Stephen Moyer captivates Anna Paquin and Ryan Kwanten while Alan Ball marvels at his sexy cast. (B. Henderson, www.alexander-skarsgardfans.com)
With the Bon Temps vampires, Alan Ball had created a new sex symbol. Well, that’s hardly new, you might say. But we’ve never seen vampires like this, especially not like Bill Compton. Complicated. Domestic. Monogamous. And, on the flip side, impulsive, lustful, and hungry. Nor