Screenwriter Alan Ball

Web posted on:
Friday, October 08, 1999 4:42:07 PM EST

By Jamie Allen
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) -- A pot-smoking, bench-pressing dad dealing with a whopper of a midlife crisis that includes Humbert Humbert thoughts about his daughter's best friend. His plastic, bread-winning wife who worships the god of monetary success. A Peeping Tom with a video camera, who turns out to be a cool dude. A middle-class, likeable gay couple.

These are just some of the characters populating a suburban world scripted by Alan Ball. There are also plenty of computer-generated rose petals, a closet Nazi with an even deeper secret, a 1970 Camaro that represents recaptured youth and a plastic bag that becomes the symbol of everything beautiful.

This world is known to moviegoers as "American Beauty," the critically acclaimed DreamWorks film starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening. It's leading the early march to Oscar-land.

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American Beauty

"American Beauty" follows Spacey's character, Lester Burnham, and his rebellion against a mundane life. It's one of those stories that escapes the action-adventure or comic mindlessness of so much that comes out of Hollywood, and attempts to make a statement deeper than, "Oh, behave" or "Make my day." Critics have called the film tragic and uplifting, in the same sentence.

Ball is the screenwriter on the film, and since its release he's been having -- well, he's been having a ball.

"I'm pretty happy these days," he says from his Los Angeles office. "There's not a lot to not be happy about."

"American Beauty" isn't the only reason Ball is content. He has also worked his way to a writer's dream gig as executive producer of his own sitcom. "Oh Grow Up" is in its first season and airs Wednesday nights on ABC.

"I'm busier than I've ever been in my life," he says, and his voice sounds like he might be in the mood to whistle while he works.

It's inspiring to see a guy like Ball finally reaching this pinnacle. He's one of those writers who struggled for years, but never lost sight of the dream.

"Oh Grow Up," the new ensemble comedy series starring David Alan Basche, Rena Sofer, Stephen Dunham, Niesha Tout and John Ducey, airs on the ABC Television Network.

Meaningful work

Ball, 42, was raised in Marietta, Georgia, a small town on the outskirts of Atlanta that's home to Newt Gingrich. But life in the conservative environment sent Ball packing after high school.

He studied acting and playwriting at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, before eventually making his way to New York in the late 1980s. While there, he worked day jobs at PR magazines and wrote plays that were produced off-off Broadway, but slammed by critics.

By the mid-'90s he'd won a job writing for the sitcoms "Grace Under Fire" and "Cybil" and moved to Los Angeles. Still, he wasn't doing what he wanted.

"I was working on 'Cybil' and it wasn't the most creative place," he says. "It was a show in which the star had creative control and you basically sort of became her stenographer. Although I don't want to say anything bad about her, because she is what she is and there's nothing wrong with that. It just wasn't the right place for me to be.

"I need to feel like the work I'm doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get really frustrated."

Ball also wrote the script for "American Beauty," now in theaters with Kevin Spacey in the lead role.

'Generic America'

So Ball took out his frustrations by going home each night and writing about something true to his heart. The script for "American Beauty" has roots in his upbringing in a repressed suburbia, he says.

"My parents were both fairly unhappy people, for a variety of reasons," he says. "I'm a huge freak, and always have been. I spent the first part of my life trying really desperately not to be one, and it was just a waste of time."

One theme of the script is that it's important to live an original life, no matter what your surroundings might be.

"I like how it sort of takes place in this generic America," he says. "You never know what the state is where it's set, because the America we live in now is virtually indistinguishable, any region from the other. You're going to drive down the highway and there's going to be a Bed, Bath and Beyond, a McDonald's, a Staples, a Starbucks, a Gap. It's so weirdly cookie-cutter and conformist, more so than it ever has been.

"We live in a time where there's an alienation factor," Ball continues. "There's a certain disconnection. We don't have any real sense of community anymore. We've become so distanced from Nature and living in Nature. Most of us live in artificial environments and then we go to work in artificial environments and the world becomes something that you see through a window."

'One of the smartest men'

It was these ideas that fueled the screenplay to completion, and Ball made no Hollywood compromises along the way.

Ball says, "I was thinking, 'I'm not going second guess what's going to sell on the marketplace, I'm not going to try to write what I think will get produced. I'm going write something that I like and that I care about and that I can be passionate about.' I knew that the script would be audacious enough that it would get me some meetings, but I never, ever expected it to get produced, much less by DreamWorks, and much less done right."

But it did, Ball says. He soon found himself working with first-time film director Sam Mendes, a Royal Shakespeare Company member in his native England.

"He's one of the smartest men I've ever known," says Ball. "I think because we both came out of the theater, we spoke the same language.

"I felt safe because the way he talked about the script I could tell he totally understood it," Ball says. "He wanted to make the movie of the script. He didn't want to use the script as a starting-off place about his concept of what the script is about, which is what happens in 90 percent of cases like that."

Oscar?

When Spacey and Bening signed on, the cast started rehearsals, with Ball reading opposite the acclaimed actors -- something that Ball, a former actor, feared at first.

"I was really nervous when I met Kevin," he says, "because I'm like a huge fan of his. I was like, 'Hi, Mr. Spacey.' And I couldn't make direct eye contact and I felt like the biggest dweeb in the world."

Ball worked through it though, and the changes they brought to the script.

"There's some rumor floating around that not a word was changed in the script, and that's not true," Ball admits.

He lauds the work done by the cast, which also includes Thora Birch, Mena Suvari, Wes Bentley, Peter Gallagher, Chris Cooper and Allison Janney. Ball says he's very happy with the finished product, and trying to ignore the Oscar buzz that keeps getting louder.

"I can't think about that. It's flattering, but I've tried to keep that stuff at a distance," he says.

'I'm the luckiest guy on Earth'

It helps that most of his spare time is spent with his new baby, "Oh Grow Up." The sitcom is spawned from another period of Ball's life -- his time living in New York.

"I lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn with three other guys and this very psychologically complicated dog named 'Mom,'" he says. "It was a situation where gay men and straight men were living together and it was not ever a problem. And that was my jumping-off point for the sitcom.

"If anything, the show is about a weird surrogate family, the kind of weird surrogate families that happen between people living in urban situations who haven't found themselves in more traditional family structures," Ball says.

"I'm proud of the show," he says. "It's the first time in TV where I've really loved driving on the lot each day. I'm the luckiest guy on Earth because I get to come into work and sit in a room with these really smart, funny people and laugh all day."