12 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE May 17, 2002

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Dead man's party

Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball has the time of his life writing about death

ky Audly Semkill

Just how do you follow up a multi-awardwinning project like American Beauty?

Alan Ball, screenwriter for the film, was honored with the Best Original Screenplay award by the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and the Writers Guild of America in 1999.

Ball returned in 2001 with a new project, a weekly drama titled Six Feet Under on the cable network HBO. The series takes a darkly comical look at the members of a dysfunctional family that run an independent funeral home. Featured prominently are two gay characters, the wound-tight and closeted son David (Michael C. Hall) and his boyfriend Keith, a Los Angeles cop (Mathew St. Patrick).

Ball doesn't hide his frustrations about working on network shows such as Grace Under Fire, Cybill, and the ill-fated Oh. Grow Up. Some would say that his return to television was a surprising move given his success in the cinematic arena.

But as Ball explained, this show isn't in the world of network television. That part of his career, it seems, is dead and buried.

Andy Scahill: How exactly did Six Feet Under come into being?

Alan Ball: Well, I signed into a three-year TV deal the week before I sold the American Beauty script. I thought, I'll write a bunch of pilots and they'll never get made and I'll get this nice paycheck, and life will be good.

Well, the first pilot I wrote got made into the show Oh, Grow Up. It was premièring at the same time that American Beauty was premièring, and it was struggling, and getting bad ratings, and critics hated it, and the network hated it.

American Beauty came out and suddenly everyone wanted to meet me. So I had lunch with Carolyn Strauss from HBO and she said that she'd always wanted to do a show about a family that runs a funeral home.

And I thought, that is so brilliant. I wish I could work on that, but I'm doing this show for ABC. Well, shortly thereafter, ABC cancelled my show. And I went home for Christmas and wrote the pilot.

I take it that writing for HBO is a different experience?

Night and day. Everybody says that they want distinctive programming, but HBO really means it. The networks are running so scared now, they are afraid to do anything truly different. They're bloated; there are too many executives, too many people giving notes, most of them are really uncreative . . . and they can only think in terms of things that have been successful before, which is why you always get the note, "Can't you make it like such and such?"

But HBO, on the other hand, really respects the people they hire to create programming. That's not to say I don't get notes. But network notes tend to all convey, “Make everyone nicer and articulate the subtext." And HBO?

The notes I get from HBO are more, "Can it be more complicated? This moment feels a little too resolved." So I spent a good deal of time at the beginning just hearing these notes and realizing, oh yeah, I don't have to actively be a bad writer . . .

I assume you took to the idea of setting this in a funeral home pretty readily. What speaks to you about this setting?

Well, what interested me right off the bat is that these people are surrounded by death, in a culture that ything it can to ignore the reality of death. And I was very interested in how this affects their life It

seemed to me like one thing that would happen is that life itself would be thrown into stark relief.

There's a great quote by Thomas Lynch, he's a poet and undertaker, that says something to the effect of, "There is nothing like the sight of a dead human body to help the living separate the good days from the bad days." That could be a thematic statement for Six Feet Under.

Living in that environment, it's fairly philosophical and existential on a daily basis, and how often do you get to write philosophical and existential stuff?

What kind of research did you do for the show, if any?

I had a certain jumping-off place as far as my emotional response to the whole funeral thing. But mostly I left the real specifics of the industry up to our technical advisors, who are licensed morticians. I've gotten to the point now where I'll be writing a conversation between David and Federico, and I'll just write "mortician dialogue to come." And I'll call the mortician and go, "They're working on a woman who has a head injury, what's some technical stuff they can say to each other?"

I also found it very interesting, if disturbing, to hear things referred to as the "death care industry".

That's what they call it. That's why I put the commercials in the pilot; because it is a business; there are services that are marketed.

As far as the characters go, I noticed that they are initially presented so that the audience assumes things about them, and gradually those assumptions are broken down. Is that something that you intended?

That's something that I like to do, because I think that as audiences we are so savvy to formulaic stuff. So much of what gets produced is formulaic. Audiences very clearly pick up on "Okay, he's the handsome guy, so he's the star; she's the pretty one, so she'll be with him, and he's too nice to be true, so he'll get killed instantly."

So what I love to do is set up those expectations and then not fulfill them, or go someplace completely different. I know as an audience member, I love to be surprised because it happens so rarely.

One that sticks out in my mind is the character of Keith, who doesn't want to be known as the “big black sex cop," and he turns out to be one of the most tender characters in the show.

Yeah, I see him as the kind of moral barometer of the show. Because he is what he is, and he has a very clear conception of what is right and what is wrong.

The character of David, however, is deeply secretive about his sexuality. From the writer's perspective, why do you feel he is so closeted?

As the series goes on, you start to learn a lot more about David; he really suffers from the Best Little Boy in the World syndrome.

ART STREIBER

David (Michael C. Hall, left) and his boyfriend Keith (Mathew St. Patrick).

I didn't set out to write a different kind of gay character, it just turned out to be who David was. In terms of gay men and lesbians that stay in the closet, their biggest obst is themselves, not society. So it's that in nal conflict that I find really interesting that I wanted to explore in David. This is a guy

who stayed behind, he learned the business because he wanted to be the good son, feels eternally betrayed by his brother...it's just more interesting. It's another part of the HBO "more conflict" idea.

Also, when you start a character off with something like that, you give them somewhere to go. So that when David does have whatever small victory he has, it will be that much more rewarding.

Every episode starts with a death, and it seems as though the dead continue to talk even after they're dead. Is this a continuing theme?

Yeah. My father died almost 20 years ago and I still have conversations with him in my head. But David is a guy who spends a lot of time with dead people and also a guy who's in a lot of emotional conflict, so they basically become a manifestation of his own inner dialogue.

You have a pretty extensive background in theater. Does that influence the way that you write Six Feet Under?

Coming from the theater, I tend to be more interested in character than plot. A lot of the television that you see is just cut-and-dry plot-driven. A lot of them use their characters as chess pieces that they can just move around and put in different plots.

I also think I bring the willingness to play around with particular devices. The dead speaking is not particularly new, but I feel it serves a purpose and tells us what we need to know about the characters' inner lives. I think that coming from theater, I tend to be willing to play with that fourth wall a little bit.

The embalming commercials in the first episode, any chance that they're coming back?

No... You know, you'd run out of things to advertise real fast. The reason they were there was number one, just to alert the viewer that stylistically we're going to do some weird stuff. Second, to establish that it is a business and there are products being marketed. It's also a little to network because we are conheing dasteful prod-

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