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Alan Ball Reveals Ideas for Two Upcoming Projects

by Kevin Powers
September 30, 2008
Source: SlashFilm

Writer/director Alan Ball won an Academy Award back in 1999 for American Beauty and then went on to create the HBO series "Six Feet Under," which also won a number of awards (3 Golden Globes and 9 Emmys), as well as the recent series "True Blood". With a track record of winning like that, it's a real shame that the 51-year-old's most recent film, Towelhead, snuck in and out of the box office with nary a sound, earning less than $300K so far. Will a similar fate befall two possible future projects that have surfaced via SlashFilm? Hopefully not, because Ball deserves much better for his immense creative talent.

First, Ball has already written and hopes to bring to the screen a "screwball comedy/romantic farce" set in the 1930s in which "two incredibly wealthy egomaniacal people negotiate their sexual relationship within standards of that time, with that language, and with all the trappings of 1936." That doesn't exactly get me excited, nor does this other statement that it will be "very stylized, but fun." It all sounds a bit too much like Down with Love, although that was the '60s; that period was a pretty intriguing time, if you ask me, proven even moreso with the recent hit show "Mad Men". So what would a comedy about progressive sexual themes in the '30s look like? I'm picturing a lot of really bad underwear.

The second project is "a dark, dark comedy" wherein "a woman who just gets fed up with being a doormat... snaps and decides to become a vigilante." Ball elaborates by saying the film has "a body count!" The first thing that comes to mind here is Serial Mom, but I doubt Ball will be going in such a campy direction. Whatever the eventual path, I'm sure Ball has the chops to up the ante on traditional dark comedies. American Beauty certainly had it's share of both. But if I might ask a question, does Ball have the, ahem, balls to pull off a hit, especially if he's directing? Obviously he'll write for both projects, but there's no word on if he will direct, much like he did with Towelhead.

Ball seems quite solid in the TV space, but he's not doing so well when it comes to feature films. And as an aside, if you haven't caught "True Blood" yet, you need to! Hopefully these two projects come to fruition soon, as Ball needs to keep bringing great writing to both the big screen and the small screen.

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