Alan Ball's Woman Vigilante Dark Comedy And 1930's Screwball Sex Comedy
Academy Award winning screenwriter turned director Alan Ball (American Beauty) recently revealed details about two possible upcoming film projects:
He hopes to direct a screwball comedy/romantic farce he wrote right before coming across Towelhead, about two incredibly wealthy egomaniacal people "negotiating their sexual relationship within standards of that time, with that language, and with all the trappings of 1936." Ball has said in other interviews that it is inspired by that era's Hollywood comedies, calling it "very stylized but fun".
But I'm far more interested in a film he hopes to produce, which he describes as "a dark, dark comedy" about "a woman who just gets fed up with being a doormat". "She snaps and she decides to become a vigilante" and "it's got a body count!". Ball admits that the film is a harder sell.
Ball doesn't do high concept, and I don't expect any project by the writer to be "an easy sell". Ball's directorial debut Towelhead went virtually unseen by audiences, but is probably one of the top 20 films of the year.