Alan Ball

Alan E Ball is an American writer director actor and producer for film theatre and television He is particularly notable for writing American Beauty and True Blood and for creating Six Feet Under work which earned him an Academy Award an Emmy and awards from the Writers Directors and Producers Guilds Ball was born in Marietta Georgia to Frank and Mary Ball an aircraft inspector and a homemaker His older sister Mary Ann was killed in a car accident when Ball was 13 he was in the passenger seat at the time He attended high school in Marietta and went on to attend the University of Georgia and Florida State University from which he graduated in 1980 with a degree in theater arts After college he began work as a playwright at the General Nonsense Theater Company in Sarasota Florida Ball broke into television as a writer and story editor on the situation comedies Grace Under Fire and Cybill Ball has written two films American Beauty 1999 and Towelhead 2007 the latter of which he also produced and directed He is also the creator writer and executive producer of the HBO drama series Six Feet Under and True Blood He was showrunner for True Blood for its first five seasons In 2010 Ball began work on a television adaptation of the crime noir novel The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston to be titled All Signs of Death In December 2010 after several months of preproduction HBO cancelled production on All Signs of Death He is also one of the executive producers of the Cinemax series Banshee In January 2015 it was announced that Balls period musical drama Virtuoso had had a pilot ordered by HBO The pilot will be executively produced by Elton John Confirmed actors to be starring in the show include Peter Macdissi Iva Babic Francois Civil Lindsay Farris Nico Mirallegro and Alex Lawther For his work in television and film Ball has received critical acclaim and numerous awards and nominations including an Academy Award an Emmy a Golden Globe and awards from the Writers Directors and Producers Guilds