New Photo of Sookie and Bill in True Blood
We’ve grabbed a nice article from the New York Times about Alan Ball and True Blood. It comes with a new photo of Bill and Sookie we have not seen before. We’ll be looking out for the hi res version. Photo credit goes to John P. Johnson/HBO.
Alan Ball, seeking a break from the stress and high expectations that had accompanied the winding down of the high-profile series he created for HBO, the existential, darkly comic “Six Feet Under,” set in a Pasadena funeral home, was just looking for a light, entertaining diversion three years ago when he started reading Charlaine Harris’s “Southern Vampire” mysteries.
“It was such a romantic, sexy, scary, hilarious world,” he said of Ms. Harris’s best-selling goth-romance tales about a small-town Louisiana waitress with psychic powers who finds herself caught up in the culture of modern vampires who had “come out the coffin,” as she writes, after the invention of a Japanese synthetic blood product (Tru Blood) allows them to survive without having to feast on humans.
Although they still do, of course. The books are full of neck biting and bodice ripping, steamy nights, blood lust and Spanish moss. There are werewolves, shape-shifters and an assortment of undead characters, one of whom may or may not be Elvis.
“I just looked forward to every moment when I could sit down with the books and sort of lose myself in them,” Mr. Ball said. “I think after ‘Six Feet Under,’ which was so much about people wrestling with their own mortality, I was just ready for something that was a little more fun.”
Mr. Ball persuaded HBO to let him adapt the novels into “True Blood,” a much-anticipated series that will begin on Sept. 7, starring Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse, the telepathic waitress, and the British actor Stephen Moyer as Bill Compton, her vampire lover.
Since the end of “Six Feet Under” in 2005 and “The Sopranos” last year, HBO has been struggling to find a series that will match the cachet and ratings those shows generated. “John From Cincinnati,” which began after “The Sopranos” finale, was positioned to fill the void but fizzled. And the recent avalanche of Emmy nominations for AMC’s “Mad Men,” which HBO passed on, has only underscored its the relatively buzzless lineup. HBO is clearly hoping that “True Blood” will fill that void and has devoted months to an aggressive marketing campaign featuring fake vampire Web sites (like trubeverage.com and bloodcopy.com), billboards and television commercials for the Tru Blood beverage. (“This blood’s for you.”)
HBO executives point to “True Blood” when insisting that their network is about to return to the spotlight. “It delivers on all the reasons why people love a television show,” said Sue Naegle, who took over as president of HBO’s entertainment division in April and has been charged with helping the network regain some of the attention that has recently shifted to its rival Showtime for shows like “Weeds” and “Dexter.” “It’s a world that people will understand and is filled with characters people want to return to week after week.”
The advertising, she said, serves to familiarize viewers with the new show’s premise ahead of time. “True Blood,” like the books, is heavy on sex, violence and supernatural beings, all the bright-red forbidden-love metaphors that served Bram Stoker and Anne Rice so well. And the garishness of it all — the fangs penetrating flesh, the surprisingly graphic sex scenes, the sometimes-gory bloodletting — will surely cause a stir among some critics.
Which Mr. Ball doesn’t mind.
“We did a focus group,” he said, during a recent interview on the Hollywood soundstage where the show’s interior scenes are filmed (location shooting also takes place in Shreveport, La.), “and it was great because the women loved the romance and the relationships, and the men loved the sex and violence. And I thought, well, that’s kind of a cliché, but I’m glad. There’s something in there for everybody.”
But as much as he wants viewers to enjoy the visceral thrill of the show, it’s also clear that Mr. Ball sees “True Blood” as a way to engage larger cultural issues, the notion of how we respond to the presence and aspirations of those whose very existence is regarded by many as a threat.
“I love the fact that these creatures are struggling for assimilation. I can relate to that in certain ways,” said Mr. Ball, who is gay and grew up in Marietta, Ga. His work, including “Six Feet Under” and the screenplay for “American Beauty,” has often dealt with the notion that people are not always what they seem. He said he was intrigued by Ms. Harris’s premise that the humans in “True Blood” are at times more threatening than the vampires.
“Certainly it’s very easy to look at the vampires as metaphors for gays and lesbians” he said, referring to a series subplot that involves a Vampire Rights Amendment and a Christian group that considers the vampires to be agents of Satan and wants them all destroyed. “But it’s very easy to see them as metaphors for all kinds of things. If this story had been done 50 years ago, it would be a metaphor for racial equality. “But I can also look at the vampires and see them as a kind of terrifying shadow organization that is going to do what they want to do, whether they have to break the law or not. And if you get in the way, they’ll just get rid of you. So, it’s a very fluid metaphor.”
Ms. Harris, who lives in a small town in Arkansas and refers to herself as “a middle-class middle-age housewife,” signed on with Mr. Ball after rejecting two offers from other producers to turn her books into feature films. “I understood after I talked to Alan that he knew what I was doing with the books,” she said. “My original conception was about exclusionism and how we’re often most afraid of the things that make us look at ourselves too closely.”
Mr. Ball said: “When I pitched the show to HBO, they asked me what it was about, and I said, it’s about what it really means to be disenfranchised, to be feared, to be misunderstood. It’s a metaphor for the terrors of intimacy. I sort of made that up on the spot, but now that I think about it, it does sort of work. That’s one of the reasons vampires have been such a potent metaphor and mythological motif for centuries. They show up in pretty much all cultures. It’s the notion of separating that part which keeps us safe and separate from another person, both emotionally and physically. And how there is a certain loss of self that takes place when there is true intimacy. And I think that’s really healthy. But it doesn’t mean it’s not scary.”
Not quite as scary perhaps as the prospect of facing the loyal, obsessive fans of Ms. Harris’s books. They are already online, questioning casting choices, wondering how much Mr. Ball’s version will deviate from the original writing.
The choice of Ms. Paquin, 26, best known for her role as Rogue in the “X-Men” films and her Academy Award-winning role in “The Piano” when she was 11, to play Sookie raised some eyebrows among the “Southern Vampire” fans. In the books the character is blond, blue-eyed, buxom and sometimes naive. “I was the only brunette in the waiting room,” Ms. Paquin said of her first auditions for the part. “But it turns out that a little spray tan and a little peroxide goes a long way.”
Mr. Ball said: “A lot of women that read for Sookie tried to play her very skittish or overly Southern. It doesn’t work. I knew early on that in order for the series to be as enjoyable and entertaining as the books were, I had to hire actors who could play it straight, not try to make it funny and not try to make it scary. Because that’s when things become unintentionally campy. And Anna really pursued this role. I felt she saw it as a chance to reinvent herself.”
The first season of “True Blood” will essentially follow “Dead Until Dark,” the first book of the series. “We’re trying to remain as true to her books as possible, “Mr. Ball said. “Charlaine’s world is very detailed. It feels very real. So we’re not going to change the structure very much. And the identity of the main killer is so well done, I didn’t want to change it. So I just hope that people who know how the story turns out will keep it themselves.”
Thanks to Kate for sending this article to us.
