Eye Candy And Lady Porn

This weekend here in Melbourne Alan Ball was speaking at an ‘In Conversation’ event put on by the Wheeler Centre, a great venue and organization that is part of the State Library and showcases everything to do with writing and storytelling. The creator of True Blood was relaxed, entertaining and informative throughout the hour that he was onstage with enthusiastic and well-researched interviewer Alan Brough. Ball discussed things like adapting a television series from a book series, what they changed from the books and what they will continue to change, sex, nudity and ‘male eye candy’, the show’s passionate fans and their opinions, and also some very small details of what we may see in season five.


Ball was asked if all the ‘male eye candy’ and the fact that they are naked a lot is simply for his own enjoyment or if he’s now objectifying men after so long of it being done to women. Ball replied "Both", but it was unclear how serious he was being. He referred to the books as "lady porn", and told how surprised he was when he first found out there was an entire genre (paranormal romance) where a human heroine is being pursued by vamps, werewolves, fairies, angels, demons, and all kinds of stuff. He says that even though they try to have something for all demographics, women would probably be the target audience.

On the amount of sex, Ball stated: "The heart of True Blood is the primal muck that souls grow out of, and sex is a big part of that." He talked a bit about Jason’s first sex scene with Maudette. Jason is "a wounded little boy at heart who uses sex to try to heal those wounds", so it made sense for his first ever scene to be a sex scene. Ball admitted he did feel very awkward being on set that first time when Ryan and the actress took their robes off.

He revealed the actors’ comfort dictates the level of nudity, and many of the girls on the show are not comfortable taking their clothes off. Ball says if they were, we would be seeing just as many naked girls as we do naked guys. He gave a specific example about Joe Mangianello being especially keen to get naked. The scene where Alcide gets into bed with Debbie in 409 was just in the script as something like ‘He strips down to his boxers and gets into bed’, but Joe was adamant that ‘No, he sleeps naked!’

Interestingly, Ball insisted they don’t write detailed descriptions of sex scenes in the script, just something like ‘they make love.’ There are days when he is not on set when they film a sex scene, and when he sees the footage he’s surprised at just how "intense or risqué or crazy they’ve taken it."