The Hook has an interview with Alan Ball where he discusses his main works: American Beauty, Six Feet Under and, obviously, True Blood. Alan will host a screening of True Blood at 10:30 am Sunday, November 8, at UVa’s Culbreth Theatre. At noon that day, also at Culbreth, he will introduce American Beauty, which will be followed by a Q&A.
When Alan Ball wrote the satirical screenplay American Beauty, he didn’t specifically mean it as a scathing commentary on suburban life.
“I happen to live in suburbia,” Ball, 52, told the Hook recently. “And I like it.”
His script dealt more with the zeitgeist of suburbia, and he intended his account of middle-class dad Lester Burnham’s dissolution “to be an indictment of the shallowness of American values that [Americans] are basically conditioned from birth to accept as gospel,” he explains.
“In that regard,” he says, “I don’t know if there is any more scathing indictment of American culture than American culture itself.”
Thanks for the interview.
Check out the comments after the interview! Bookies trying to justify Eric again! They just don’t understand and have forgotten that AB had a vision about Bill and Sookie and based the show on that vision. It is his baby!
I have a question for Alan Ball – I loved the Angela character in American Beauty, she was funny and raunchy in a way that is rare amongst high school girls – and I always thought she lied about being a virgin, which I thought was hilarious (“if you’re gonna lie, lie big”). However, studying the movie in college, the standard interpretation seems to be that she actually was a virgin. Thus, I thought I’d consult the source for clarification on this one.