Fashion
Luella Bartley
Hui-Hui
Peter Jensen
Katie Gallagher

Entertainment
Alan Ball
Summer Bishil
Dr. Dog
Nima Nourizadeh
Chuck Palahniuk
Anthology Recodrings
Marina Zenovich
Zimmerman/Berg

Artists
Desireé Holman
Corndawg
Matt Furie
Molly Landreth
Matthew Lock
Nikolay Saveliev
Christopher Schulz
Darren Sylvester

Fiction
24 Hours on L16
Nobody Eats Oranges...
Some Mornings

“Excuse me Mr. Ball,” I interjected in 2006, awkwardly interrupting the director as he was setting up a shot in a baking high school gymnasium. “Um… I’m a big fan, and I just wanted to give you this letter.” As a lowly extra on the set of what was then referred to as The Untitled Alan Ball Project, I was engaging in entirely taboo behavior. I broke the cardinal rule of the background artist: never talk to the Important People unless they talk to you. But in this case, I was making an exception in my professional conduct. “Six Feet Under really had an impact on me, so I just want to thank you,” I said, handing him the letter I had penned the night before. Scuttling off to rejoin the extras, I expected to either be sent home or at least reprimanded for breaking the fourth wall—but to my surprise, the director approached me later that day and thanked me for my geeky fan letter.
        I’m probably just embarrassing myself all over again by retelling this story here, but it’d be a conflict of interest to write about Alan Ball’s work without mentioning my own delirious fandom. I’d been looking forward to Towelhead since I got a brief glimpse at the production two years ago, so perhaps I’m a little biased—but the final film did not disappoint. Based on Alicia Erian’s 2005 novel of the same name, Towelhead tells the darkly comic story of Jasira, a 13-year-old Arab-American coming to terms with her own identity and sexuality. Pitted against the harsh social climate of junior high school, the Gulf War, her father’s abusive sense of morality, and the confusing sexual advances of her army reservist neighbor, Mr. Vuoso, Jasira emerges from a series of potentially scarring events with more strength and self-confidence than she’s ever known.
        The complexities of Towelhead’s look at one girl’s overlapping sexual abuse and sexual awakening will be lost on hardcore fans of Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” segments, but those with an open mind will find a film that goes beyond the uncomfortable surface of molestation to present a story of female empowerment. Case in sensationalistic point, the headline for Fox News’ Towelhead review: “Kiddie Porn Movie Rocks Toronto as 'Feel-Awful' Film of the Year.” Real classy, Fox News.
        Ball is currently deep in production on a new series for HBO called True Blood, based in a world where vampires have “come out of the coffin” and live amongst the mortals. He took time out of his schedule to talk about the MPAA, institutionalized sexism, and Dancing with the Stars.

What did you learn working on Six Feet Under that informed your writing and directing process on Towelhead?
Six Feet Under for me, in a lot of ways, was like going to film school. Prior to that, all my experience had been in theater or four-camera sitcoms, which are not mediums in which the story is written for the camera. So, five years of Six Feet Under gave me a lot of skills in understanding and learning how to tell a story visually, as opposed to relying on dialogue. I think if I hadn’t done those five years I would have never felt confident enough to direct a movie. Just technical things like how the process works, how to work with actors, post-production, editing, all of those things which I think I’ve become pretty adept at.

You started out working in the squeaky clean world of network sitcoms, before moving to HBO, where you were never forced to answer to regulations board. What was it like to present Towelhead to the MPAA in order to get an “R” rating?
Well, I was very clear even in the first draft of the script that all the sexuality in the movie would not be gratuitous, that it would be suggested rather than shown graphically. That the point of focus would be what was happening to the characters emotionally. And actually, when we first took it to the MPAA they only had one note. They only had one request that would keep an R rating for the movie and it was quite reasonable.

Was it an entire scene they wanted removed?
It was just one shot in that final montage where Jazeera is getting her picture taken at the glamour shot place, and she’s sort of remembering what happened with Mr. Vuoso. It was a shot in which she was on her hands and knees on the floor, and while it wasn’t explicitly graphic, I think there was concern that it was just too much for the movie to still maintain an R rating, and I gladly took it out. I don’t think I really lost anything. I don’t think the movie lost anything from removing that image.

There were a lot of shots I took out, myself, before we even took the movie to the MPAA because, you know, when you’re dealing with a character that is that young, even if the actress herself is eighteen, it is very disturbing—as it should be. But I didn’t want the movie to be so disturbing that it would take us out of it and in any way keep us from being on board with her emotionally. By the time it got to the MPAA it was pretty—what’s the word I am looking for—it’s not safe, but it was pretty tasteful.

That but have been relieving, that you didn’t have to face their wrath.
They were actually very complimentary of the movie. And they really understood what it was trying to do.

Were you surprised at the appalled-to-the-point-of-self-parody reaction from Fox News when Towelhead screened at Toronto?
No. From Fox News, are you surprised? I would be surprised if Fox News had anything positive to say about a movie dealing with this particular subject matter. It wasn’t treated in the traditional way—I mean, there’s a certain mythology that we’re comfortable with when addressing the issue of sexual molestation of minors. We’re used to seeing it as a pretty black and white issue, where the victim is very much a victim, does not have any curiosity of sexual feelings him or herself, and the perpetrator is a sub-human monster. That’s the only way a lot of people can wrap their brains around this particular phenomenon.

Why do you think people have such a hard time accepting the idea of teenage girls having legitimate sexual feelings. It’s not just Towelhead, and it’s not just Fox News. Miley Cyrus shows a little bit of back in an Annie Lebowitz photo, and it’s exploitation. Why do you think there’s this angelic idealization of teenage girls?
Well, I wouldn’t even say it’s so much about teenage girls— I think the way we view women in general in this culture still owes a lot to our Puritan roots. We still view women through the binary of Madonna/whore. Women are not supposed to be sexually assertive or sexually aggressive, and if they are, they’re sluts. I look at that great Judi Dench and Cate Blanchet movie from a couple of years ago, Notes on a Scandal, and there was never any concern about the 15-year-old boy being a victim. There was only concern about her having done something improper. No one was saying, “He’s destroyed for life. Oh, that’s the most horrible thing that could possibly happen to a boy.”

For all of the enlightened aspects in our culture, I think institutionalized sexism is still pretty firm. Last night I watched Dancing With The Stars, for sheer camp entertainment value, and it’s just-- we still live in a culture where women are encouraged and conditioned from a very early age to view their main source of self worth and self-esteem as how sexually desirable they are to men. There’s a general hysterical fear of sex in general in our society. Unless it’s really fetishized and overly-romanticized or stylized to the point of selling whatever product is being sold by it.

On the flip side of that you have this phenomenon of abuse which is incredibly common—some statistics say as many as one in three women have had some sort of inappropriate sexual interaction with an adult in their lives. As many as one in six men. Going back to that comfortable paradigm that we’ve assigned to this particular narrative, it’s, “Oh well, that’s the worst thing that can happen, she’s destroyed.” Knowing many people myself who did have these kinds of experiences growing up— no, they’re not. They’re not destroyed. Everybody gets traumatized in some way or another. I’m not in any way advocating or excusing the responsibility of adults in those situations, and I do think it is a crime. It is both a crime legally in terms of our laws and our culture, and I think it’s a crime morally.

What I loved about the book when I read Alicia’s book Towelhead, however, was that I’d never really been told this story where the girl comes out of it somehow not branded as a victim for life. And one of the interesting things about this story is had she not gone through this situation with Mr. Vuoso, she would never had found the strength within her to extricate herself from an equally abusive, though in a different way, relationship with her father. I mean, this event in her life allowed her to step up and take control over her own destiny and her own body. And I thought that was an amazing story to tell.

Racism against Arab-Americans is a subject that’s rarely been explored in pop culture. It’s usually relegated to news blurbs about airport security and Patriot Act power abuses. Was it challenging to broach that subject on film while juggling the delicate task of exploring a teenage girl’s sexual awakening?
Any time somebody who is already a member of a marginalized group that is the target of racism or defamation takes it upon themselves to hate another group, it’s fascinating to me. Because logically it doesn’t make any sense, but of course emotionally it does. It’s human nature—perhaps not the most evolved aspect of human nature, but it is.

I think women, especially young girls, who don’t have any positive role models in their lives to teach them what it means to have this sexual power over are very susceptible to being objectified in ways that are different, but no less destructive than the objectification that is behind racism. One of the reasons I decided to keep the title of the movie was because any sort of ugly racial, gender, sexual preference epitaph that somebody hurls at you, etymologically is designed to take away your identity and turn you into a label. So the notion of having one’s identity sort of blurred and then becoming a concept, a political idea, the face of someone’s fear— in a way that’s exactly what happens to Jasira in the movie. Nobody actually sees the person that is there.