Death changes us all

SISTER'S DEATH TURNED BALL ONTO THE MACABRE
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TRUE BLOOD creator ALAN BALL blames his fascination with death on a horrifying childhood experience - when he watched as his sister was killed in a car crash.

The writer has tackled the macabre in all of his film and TV projects, including American Beauty, funeral parlour drama Six Feet Under and vampire series True Blood.

He insists death has stayed with him since the adolescent tragedy.

Ball, 52, explains to Entertainment Weekly, "When I was 13 years old I was in a car accident with my sister who was driving the car. It was her 22nd birthday and she died. She died in front of me. She died all over me. (Death) stuck its big old ugly face in my face and my life changed. That's why death seems to be a theme that appears in all my stuff."

Vampire-Con sinks its fangs into Los Angeles

FRIDAY, AUGUST 14th TO SUNDAY, AUGUST 16th

The Vam-Pop Culture Weekend Celebrates Our Favorite Creatures of the Night with a Two-Night Film Festival, Celebrity Guests, 40th Anniversary Celebration of Vampirella ® And A Moonlit Danse Macabre

June 4, 2009, Hollywood, CA – Vampire-Con 2009, the world’s first convention devoted to Vam-Pop culture swoops into Hollywood, CA for a weekend-long event, August 14 – 16. In association with Harris Comics, Vampire-Con will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the sexy comic-book icon Vampirella ®.

The weekend kicks off with a Vampire Film Festival at The New Beverly Cinema on Friday, August 14th and Saturday, August 15th. The fest will feature celebrity guests, contests and a program of your favorite vampire flicks both classic and new.

On Sunday, August 16th, Vampire-Con takes wing to the famed Music Box Theatre @ Fonda in Hollywood. Find your inner vampire at the day-long event on two floors of vendors, SFX make-up demonstrations and celebrity panel discussions. Topics will include Inked in Blood: 40 Years of Vampirella ®, Why We Love Vampires: A Brief History of the Undead and Hot Blooded: Vampires & Sexuality.

On Sunday evening, The Music Box @ Fonda transforms into VAMPIRELLA’S ® BALL, a heart-pounding 21 & over danse macabre. Vampires and humans alike will experience the dark side of Los Angeles’ acclaimed underground vaudeville cirque “Lucent Dossier” and revel the night away to the blood-churning beats provided by DJ Gary Calamar, music supervisor of HBO’s TRUE BLOOD and host of KCRW’s The Open Road.

From Dracula to Twilight, Vampires have provided an ageless mythology that taps into our cultural pulse. As new generations become fans, Vampire-Con celebrates these scary and sexy creatures that capture our collective imagination.

Tickets are $15 for the Sunday day-walkers and $30 for Vampirella’s ® Ball. Film festival admission is $7 per night. Stay tuned for updates about celebrity guests, prizes, contests and more! For more info, visit: HYPERLINK "http://www.vampire-con.com" www.vampire-con.com.

The Vamps that make Dead "sexy" again

Bite Me! Why We Love Vampires

Is it the bad economy, or your secret desire for domination? Psychologists weigh in on our obsession with the bloodsuckers.

By Joan Raymond | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Jul 16, 2009

There are three things that Kendra Porter of Cleveland looks for in a man. She likes them smart, funny, and tall. Warm, conscious, and breathing are givens. That's why Porter, 27, says she's more than a little bewildered about her latest crush: a 1,000-year-old hunk of vampire Viking eye candy named Eric, just one of the incredibly beautiful creatures populating the HBO series True Blood, based on the bestselling "Southern Vampire Mysteries" of Charlaine Harris. "This is so embarrassing," says Porter, an interior designer, who plans her Sunday nights around the show. "I was never into that whole vampire thing. Now I'm like vampire central. I want to say, 'Bite me.' But, you know, in that really good way."

Poor Ms. Porter. She's missed out on years of the undead's appeal. But vampires have never been as hot as they are now—in a steamy, let's-step-in-the-shower-together way. Women are now so sexually attracted to vampires, advertisers are even getting in on the action. (And who wouldn't want a little vampire action on the side, especially if it involved Alexander Skarsgård?) In a new Gillette billboard, a vampire hunk caresses his cleanly shaven face next to the phrase "Dead Sexy." In another ad, for Marc Ecko cologne, a male vampire nibbles at a naked woman's neck with the line "Attract a Human." As if they needed any help.

Unless you've been sleeping in a coffin for the last few months—and if you have, lucky you!—you'll know that the hottest genre around is the bloodletter, with vampire-based movies, fan clubs, and, of course, the ever-popular vampire-based paranormal romance literature all competing for our attention. In the fall, the CW debuts Vampire Diaries, a teen soap opera that will make the Gossip Girl crowd want someone other than Chace Crawford to bite them. Next week's Comic-Con International, a celebration of all things pop culture held in San Diego, offers up a heavy dose of vampire-themed events, including a panel discussion with members of the True Blood cast and executive producer Alan Ball. And Southern California will see yet another vampire frenzy next month, with Vampire-Con. Billed as the first vampire-centric convention, the two-day Hollywood event includes a vampire-film festival, panel discussions, and a danse macabre featuring "vampirerotica" go-go girls and boys. "People are really excited about this," says Heidi Johnson, Vampire-Con's PR director. "Even my grandmother is into vampires now."

Vampires and sex have been inexorably intertwined since Bram Stoker's iconic sexual predator Count Dracula took a little nip of Mina and Lucy back in 1897. And well before Robert Pattinson (Twilight's Edward Cullen) or Stephen Moyer and Skarsgård (True Blood's vampire duo of Bill Compton and Eric Northman) set the female heart aflutter, a young, virile Frank Langella did the same thing with his sly portrayal of the count in John Badham's 1979 big-screen adaptation of the story. So did an oddly sexy, bespectacled Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 Dracula, and Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt when they bared their fangs in the movie version of Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire in 1994. But there's something about the modern-day vampire that's even more alluring than any of these. It's not just that they're sexy. It's that every girl wants to have sex with them.

In some ways, these new vamps have been defanged—a few wear condoms and others sparkle in the sun like Abercrombie & Fitch models (OK, that's just the Twilight vampires). But these changes in the vampire myth also have helped to humanize the characters, turning them into modern-day Romeos for all the angsty Juliets in the tweenage world. True Blood's Ball says that his vampires are part of a "story of people trying to assimilate, trying to find a way in the world. The notion that a group like the vampire is feared and misunderstood, that they're outsiders, it's really very interesting." The hypersexuality, coupled with the potential for danger, makes some of the most unlikely women yearn for the vampire embrace.

But the current vampire obsession isn't all about the fangs. It may be an excellent balm for bigger issues, says Donovan Gwinner, assistant professor of English at Aurora University. In Gwinner's class "Got Blood? Vampires in Literature, Film and Popular Culture," students were required to read several vampire-related books, including Stoker's Dracula and popular literature by Rice, Harris, and Stephenie Meyer. "We talked a lot about how things suck," jokes Gwinner. "But in times of economic contraction, fear of job loss, and war, the vampire myth really speaks to people. What's so bad about being powerful, almost immortal, always in control, and incredibly desirable?"

Very little, as contemporary writers of vampire fiction can attest. The imagery has always been sledgehammer-subtle, says Laurell K. Hamilton, bestselling author of the "Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter" series. "It's fang, penetration, ecstasy," she says. "Our readers know that vampire sex is somehow going to be the very best sex a woman has ever had."

And why shouldn't it be? After all, "they've generally had centuries to practice," says author Charlaine Harris. Plus, her bloodsuckers are out, proud, and mainstreaming with humans due to a blood substitute they can buy at the corner store. But their appeal, she believes, is eternal youth. "We're obsessed with staying young," she says. "And vampires never worry about Social Security or knee replacements. That's almost irresistible to us."

While she has creative license to take her vampires any place she wants, she admits that there is a little pressure to keep at least some of them sexy, rather than portraying them solely as killing machines. She had to cut a scene from a book in which Sookie Stackhouse, the intrepid telepathic waitress, used a calculator to try to determine the number of people her vamp lover, Bill, had killed before he "mainstreamed" with humans. "It was a funny scene, and an awful scene, and I could see Sookie doing that," says Harris with a laugh. "But I understood that it was really going to be hard to see Bill as an attractive character after Sookie tallied six figures or something."

But it's that potential for death that gives vampires a lot of their sexual edge. "It's kind of like autoerotic asphyxia, except that's real," says Katherine Ramsland, professor of psychology at DeSales University. "In terms of fantasy, the vampire mystique is 90 percent sexual. It's a metaphor for dangerous sex. Because if it goes wrong, you're gone." For her book, Piercing the Darkness, Ramsland spent several years researching the rabid vampire fan, those folks who actually act out the Dracula fantasy. Many are professionals (lawyers, stockbrokers, politicians); some are simply lost. What struck Ramsland as rather odd was that most women wanted to be the victim rather than the hunter. "I think it's kind of weird to be the impaled one, the seduced one," she says. "There were so many women who wanted to lose control. And I thought women had come a little further than that."

If message boards, chat rooms, and fan clubs are any indication, the whole seduction, lose-control routine is a huge part of the fantasy. "I think a lot of women wouldn't mind someone else taking control of things for a while," says Melissa Lowery, 34, editor and co-owner of popular fan site true-blood.net. In the last 30 days, the site has had more than 140,000 unique visitors. And after wading through 3,700 comments, Lowery has noted at least one theme that keeps popping up: "Even if a vampire is your lover and gentle and kind, he still has the power to rip someone's leg off," she says. "Sometimes I think women just want to be protected, and that's not so bad."

That may have something to do with all the adolescent angst we still have bottled up. "I'm a short Jewish guy and I love vampires. It's all about the classic, tormented relationship, the otherness," says Dr. Steven Schlozman, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In his paper "Vampires and Those Who Slay Them," published in the journal Academic Psychiatry, Schlozman argues that the Buffy-verse, for example, speaks to key developmental challenges of adolescents, some of which even many adults have never quite mastered. In the episode "Gone," Buffy teases bad-boy vamp Spike while she's invisible, which Schlozman sees as the "perfect" metaphor for the adolescent longing adults can feel for the vampire lover. "It's like you want to do it, but you sure don't want anyone to know that you are into vampires," he says. "But it sure can be a good time."

Marliese Engel Traver, a 25-year-old publicist from New York City, knows exactly what Schlozman means. She's been a fan of all things vampire since she was a teenage Buffy fan. She's since graduated to Twilight (she's read all the books and seen the movie three times), and on Sunday nights, she and her husband, Tom, watch True Blood. For her, it's the bad-boy connection, what she calls the "forbidden fruit" of the vampire that kind of turns her on. "I like Twilight vampires for romance, and True Blood for everything else," says Traver, with a giggle. "Let's just say that what you see on the screen can often translate to real life. My husband is happy I like this show."

Who knows? Maybe next we'll be seeing vampire marriage counselors.

'True Blood' Emmy Snub: Five Reasons The Series Deserved A Nomination

From MTV Hollywood Crush
Posted July 16th, 2009 by Amy Wilkinson in TV News

It's as predictable as a vampire's thirst for human blood. Each year a more-than-deserving series is left out in the cold come Emmy nominations time. The glaring omission that had me seeing red this year is HBO's much-talked-about vampire series, "True Blood." Sure, they picked up a few Creative Arts (or "Schmemmys" as Kathy Griffin calls them) nominations in art direction, title design and casting, but no "Big Show" nods to speak of. Oh, the bloody horror! We at Hollywood Crush are obviously fans of the show and in protest of the series' snub we've compiled a list of the five reasons the show deserved to be nominated (the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences — we hope you're paying attention!).

1. It's the highest rated show on HBO
The second season premiere of "True Blood" garnered 3.7 million viewers, the network's highest rating since the "Sopranos" finale two years ago. The show even bested itself this week soaring to 3.9 million blood-thirsty watchers. Yet, its HBO brother "Entourage," a show which rambles through the same predictable plot arc each season, gets a nomination for "Outstanding Comedy Series."

2. It has a deeper message
Sure, it's a show about vampires. Sexy ones at that. But when you dig a little deeper in the dirt you find an allegory that examines gay rights, racism, and religion.

3. It has a superb cast
No weak links here. Virtually the entire cast of "True Blood" is Emmy worthy (Anna Paquin's even got an Oscar to her name), but we give special props to Ryan Kwanten for his portrayal of earnest yet dim-witted Jason Stackhouse and Alexander Skarsgård who plays vampire Eric with a chilling likability.

4. It's an adaptation with legs
Instead of copying Charlaine Harris' The Southern Vampire Mysteries series scene for scene, creator and director Alan Ball used the author's world as a reference point for his own vision of Bon Temps, LA. He's noticeably deviated from the books (SPOILER ALERT! Lafayette should be dead by now), but many of Charlaine's fans don't seem to mind, which speaks to the likability of Ball's series.

5. It's just darn good television
'Nuff said.

True Blood earns it's spot on HBO's elite wall of fame

With a Little ‘True Blood,’ HBO Is Reviving Its Fortunes

New York Times
By BILL CARTER

Published: July 12, 2009

The slump at HBO is apparently over.

“True Blood,” HBO’s vampire series in its second season, is pulling the channel out of a slump that began after a number of hit shows ended.

Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin in “True Blood,” a departure from the more ethically complex series HBO has run in the past.

In “True Blood,” the pay cable giant has its first hit since “Rome,” and the numbers indicate it may be the biggest thing on the channel since “The Sopranos.” If that sounds surprising, it may be because few saw it coming — inside HBO or out.

In the three episodes measured so far this, its second, season, “True Blood” has amassed viewer totals that any network, including broadcast networks, would be excited to own: 12.1 million, 10 million and 10.3 million. And HBO has attracted those viewers from an audience base about a third the size of fully distributed networks.

“This is hopefully a long-running franchise for us,” said Michael Lombardo, the president of programming for HBO.

In just about every way “True Blood” is a buoyant story for a network that needed one. Two years ago, the channel removed Chris Albrecht, the company chief executive, who had been widely credited as the creative mastermind behind the string of commercial or critical series successes at the network, including “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under” and “The Wire.” (Mr. Albrecht was fired after being charged with domestic abuse in Las Vegas.) Since then, the network has been fending off charges that its once vaunted programming lineup was a thing of the past.

The new creative team, headed by Richard Plepler and Mr. Lombardo, began with a cupboard mostly barren, as shows like “John From Cincinnati” failed to catch fire and one long-running quality drama, “Big Love,” had to overcome tepid support from the previous regime.

Rivals like Showtime, which had their own string of critical successes with “Weeds” and “Nurse Jackie,” began using a new term for the network: “HB-Over.”

By most evaluations, from critics and many of HBO’s own executives, “True Blood” is a different kind of series. Whereas “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” were dramatically and ethically complex, the artistic aspirations of “True Blood” seem on the surface less ambitious, as the show’s creator, Alan Ball, conceded.

“When I first pitched it, I said it’s popcorn television,” Mr. Ball said. “It has a lot going on beneath the surface, and I love the layers because I love to write layered stories. But I love the popcorn part of ‘True Blood.’ It’s just really great fun.”

He also acknowledged the elemental reason the show works: “Women love the storytelling and the romance, and men love the sex and violence.”

There is no direct relationship between successful shows on HBO and the network’s subscription base; that has remained relatively stable (about 29 million to 30 million) through the feast years of “The Sopranos” and the famine that followed.

But hit series are what keeps up HBO’s reputation as being talked-about around the water cooler, which is one crucial part of its business model. HBO’s profit is estimated at $1.3 billion a year.

The first signs that “True Blood” was working were evident in DVD sales of the first season, which, according to HBO executives, reached about one million, again HBO’s highest for a series since “The Sopranos.”

Then there is the book series, featuring the central character Sookie Stackhouse, on which the show is based. The novels by Charlaine Harris, undoubtedly fueled by interest from the television version, occupied seven spots of the top 20 on the most recent New York Times mass market paperback list.

And already the series seems to be a ratings rainmaker for HBO. A new comedy, “Hung,” which followed “True Blood” on Sunday nights, amassed more than seven million viewers in its first week.

This season, “True Blood” has a first-run Sunday night audience of about 3.6 million, up from two million for last season.

HBO counts audiences across all the platforms that wind up offering the episodes: a repeat on HBO itself, repeats on HBO2 and its video-on-demand channel, replays on digital video recorders and downloads from iTunes.

That is how the numbers grow to more than 10 million. (For perspective, “The Sopranos” finished its first run with a Sunday night audience of 11.9 million, which grew to 14.2 million with the extra viewers added in.

Showtime, HBO’s chief pay-cable competitor, draws much smaller audiences for its hits: about 3.3 million viewers this year (including all platforms) for the long-running comedy “Weeds,” and about 3.1 million for the critically lauded new half-hour series “Nurse Jackie” which features Edie Falco, a former “Sopranos” star.

Mr. Plepler and Mr. Lombardo began their tenures knowing that they had a series coming from Mr. Ball, the creator of “Six Feet Under.” There were only two problems: because Mr. Ball had other commitments, they would have to wait more than a year between the time the pilot was commissioned and when the series would be seen; and the new series was about vampires.

Mr. Lombardo conceded that the first reaction at the network was: “A vampire show? Really?” But, he said, HBO had a record of backing creators it believed in, so Mr. Ball was given the go-ahead.

The show — which owes a lot to what some people do with their teeth — might not have existed at all if not for a dental appointment. Mr. Ball turned up early for one, noticed a Barnes and Noble bookstore across the street and, to kill a bit of time, wandered in and started perusing the mystery and horror shelves.

He spotted a slim volume called “Dead Until Dark,” and found himself enthralled. “I’d try to get to bed knowing I had to be up at 6 a.m., to work on ‘Six Feet Under,’ and decide I’d just read one chapter,” Mr. Ball said. “I’d end up reading seven.”

The reason, Mr. Ball said, was “the stories, which were exciting and sexy and violent and romantic.” As a Georgia native, he said he also liked that they were “authentically Southern, not cartoon Southern.”

Mr. Ball picked up the rest of the books Ms. Harris had already written. “I decided this was a television series,” Mr. Ball said. “It had elements of the Saturday matinee serial. It had elements of ‘Tobacco Road.’ It had elements of big gothic romance, and even social satire.”

To demonstrate to HBO what he wanted to do with the series, Mr. Ball wrote the first three episodes before he went off to direct his film “Nothing Is Private.”

“Alan Ball really knows how to write really interesting characters,” said David Baldwin, the executive vice president for program planning for HBO. “He can take a milieu and make it his own.”

Of course, as Mr. Baldwin pointed out, it did not hurt that “True Blood” came along exactly as another vampire series, the “Twilight” books and film, was exploding.

“I’d never even heard of the ‘Twilight’ books when we got started,” Mr. Ball said. But he added he is perfectly willing to run with the trend.

“It is sort of vampire time,” he said.

Small-town Southern life a muse for author Harris

MAGNOLIA, ARK.

By JON GAMBRELL
Associated Press

Vampires typically roam the fogged streets of London or the humid nights of New Orleans, opulent worlds filled with beautiful monsters and formal balls.

Trailer parks and honky-tonks didn't fit -- until author Charlaine Harris took a chance with a telepathic barmaid named Sookie Stackhouse.

Now, Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries series has hit The New York Times' list of best sellers, gained fans far beyond her south Arkansas town and inspired a television series on HBO. Though fueled by sex, violence and hints of humor, Harris' novels hold a mirror up to a South where race and societal change permeates through her prose.

Still, the mother of three said her only concern at first was finding something that would sell.

"I'm no crusader," Harris says. "I just like to make a point. If people get it, good. If they don't, OK."

Stackhouse's fictional hometown of Bon Temps, La., resembles the South in which Harris grew up, filled with waitresses who wear Keds sneakers and shop at Wal-Mart. Trailer homes dot the rural pastures of the north Louisiana town and pickup trucks fill the parking lot of the bar where Harris' heroine works.

For Kevin Durand, an associate philosophy professor at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, life in Bon Temps evokes where his family once lived in Louisiana.

"As she describes the place, it's a place I've been," said Durand, who specializes in pop culture ghouls and vampires. "I've seen all of those things before."

That sense of place allows the fantastic to seem commonplace, especially as wereanimals, fairies and witches crowd into the story around Stackhouse and her vampire associates. Even the vampires, though satiated with artificial blood produced in Japan, struggle with scheduling nocturnal home repairs.

In a way, Harris, 57, says she wanted to serve as an "anti-Anne Rice," allowing humor and reality to drive her novels.

"I just drew on my knowledge of what it's like to live in a small town from the viewpoint of a person who has very little disposable income, ... a person who's really having to count their pennies, plan ahead to pay their property tax," she says. "That's most people, I believe."

That pretty much is a picture of Magnolia, a city of 11,000 only 20 miles away from Louisiana. There, the small county courthouse sits in a square near a gazebo. Murals of magnolia flowers and oil derricks, once the town's lifeblood, cover building walls. A diner across the street hosts a workday crowd, but don't look for a bottle of beer -- it's a dry county.

It's here where residents stop the roughly 5-foot-tall redhead in the grocery store, even if they've never read one of her books. She volunteers at her church, where members don't raise eyebrows at her violent and racy tales.

The county library, a converted Assembly of God church that has a steeple in the parking lot for sale, stocks a whole shelf of Harris' novels, including her early mysteries.

"Everything Charlaine writes goes over like a helium balloon in Magnolia," said assistant library director Dana Thornton.

Harris' Stackhouse novels read quickly, ramping up at chapters' ends in the pattern of her many trade paperback mysteries. While pulpy love entanglements and murders snare Stackhouse, the novels also provide a glimpse of social criticism. Vampires, once in self-imposed exile, "come out of the coffin," an intended parallel to the acceptance of gays in the world.

"It just seemed like a very similar situation to me," Harris says. "It's just admitting publicly the existence of something that we've always known existed privately."

Those vampires attract Stackhouse, a mind reader, as she can't hear their thoughts like normal people. They brood like other vampires flooding bookstores and movie theaters, but Harris endows them with a dark power harkening back to Bram Stoker, Durand said.

"They're still not the cuddly little teddy bears with teeth kind of deal; they're still a threat," he said. "The only reason that they don't wipe out everything is because they restrain themselves."

Race also plays a part in the novels. Few black characters exist on the pages, a problem Harris acknowledges. The first Stackhouse novel also hints to the need for a black and a white funeral home in Bon Temps, something Harris writes is tradition rather than racism.

Harris herself grew up in Tunica, Miss., during the 1960s. Now home to casinos lining the bank of the Mississippi River, the Tunica of her childhood was 80 percent black and surrounded by rice fields. The town's high school finally integrated in 1969 when Harris was a senior.

"It was very painful and frightening. Honestly, I congratulate the two young black women who graduated from my class," she says. "I don't know how they did it."

Those angry with sweeping societal change make their way into Stackhouse's town after supernatural creatures reveal themselves. Stackhouse finds herself targeted by them, her "disability" of being able to read minds often placing her in harm's way. A terrorist bombing against vampires finds her helping firefighters recover victims as the smell of "hate" hangs in the air, an allusion to 9/11.

"I saw so many people (like that) when integration came in, people who hated change without really understanding what it was going to mean or really looking at it from any other perspective than their own comfort," Harris says.

Another disaster, Hurricane Katrina, hits close to home for the book's characters. Vampires struggle to cover damaged roofs with blue plastic tarps. Stackhouse takes storm victims into her home -- though they are witches, of course.

Some readers got angry about using hurricane in her novels and accused Harris of exploiting the tragedy. However, she believes it would have been impossible not to mention it.

"I thought, 'How can I write a book about Louisiana and not mention Katrina?' That would have been crazy," Harris says. "The last thing I want to feel like is I'm profiting on someone else's misery."

Stackhouse's own travails -- romantic and otherwise -- will continue for at least four more books, the author says. The next adventure is due out in October, with Harris exploring some loose "threads" in Stackhouse's life.

But that sense of small town and the details of Harris' own life will continue to fill the pages of her novels.

"You've got to use everything you have," she says.