Alan Ball, Towelhead

There is a thread that runs through writer-director Alan Ball's work
and that is sex. With his Academy Award for writing American
Beauty, his creation of Six Feet Under, the revered HBO
funeral home series, and now his new movie Towelhead about a
13-year-old Lebanese-American girl's sexual and emotional awakening and
his new HBO series, True Blood about vampires as a newly
"out" minority, Ball never flinches from showing the passion, the
hard bodies, the missteps that make sex so fulfilling and so messy.
Interviewed at Manhattan's Regency Hotel, Ball, who is openly gay,
considers sex, his own life, why the racist title of his movie was dropped
and then stayed, and why his two newest projects, both adaptations, were
irresistible.

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