Biography

Alan Ball

Jump to

Alan Ball is an American writer, director, and producer who is known for writing the acclaimed film American Beauty and creating the HBO series True Blood starring Anna Paquin. He also wrote the films Towelhead and Uncle Frank. He also created Here and Now, Six Feet Under, and Banshee. He won awards for American Beauty and True Blood.
- IMDb mini biography by: Christian Frates

Characters often deal with themes of death
Almost every project he has written or produced features one or more gay characters and gay subject matter

He is outspokenly gay and his work often includes gay issues or characters such as "David Fisher" in Six Feet Under (2001); "Lafayette Reynolds" in True Blood (2008); and "Frank Bledsoe" and "Wally" in Uncle Frank (2020).
He had an older sister who died in a car accident the year he was 13. He was a passenger in the car, his sister was driving, it was her twenty-second birthday, and she died in front of him.
Graduate of Florida State University School of Theatre
Wrote a play called "Five Women Wearing the Same Dress." It is about bridesmaids avoiding a wedding reception in Knoxville, Tennessee.
He is the domestic partner of actor/producer Peter Macdissi and Macdissi is a producer of and/or appears as an actor in many of Ball's works.

On his early TV career: "The shows I were on were all about serving the star's egos. I had this free-floating rage... It's factory work. I had no emotional connection with what I was writing."
Beauty is in the strangest places. A piece of garbage floating in the wind. And that beauty exists in America. It exists everywhere. You have to develop an eye for it and be able to see it.
I want to write a play - my playwriting career was just beginning to take off when I got the offer to come to Hollywood and write for TV. I'm also sitting on a couple of screenplays I've written which I would like to direct when Six Feet Under comes to an end. I'm also looking to start a family with my partner, get better at meditating, read all the great books I haven't yet read, and hopefully write a novel myself before I die.
We can make movies like There's Something About Mary (1998), using semen as hair gel, and it's a huge hit - but to show a bloody tampon is considered shocking. I think that says a lot about our culture's attitude towards women and towards female sexuality.
I think there's a lot of interesting stuff on TV. I feel much more optimistic about TV than I do about movies. There will always be good movies but I think, for the most part, it's always going to be a huge fight to get those movies made. TV is the best place to be as a writer, I think. TV is really, in terms of if you have a series, it's really a writer's medium.