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Tavis: If making it in Hollywood were only this easy. The first movie script Alan Ball had produced in this town was a little film called "American Beauty," which of course earned a slew of Academy Awards, including ones for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. He followed that up by creating one of the most talked-about and creative shows on television, the hit HBO drama "Six Feet Under." The show is currently in season number 4. Here's a scene now from "Six Feet Under."

David: Are you OK?

Nate: Ever since Lisa died, every death that comes through here feels like her dying all over again.

David: It's only been a few months, Nate.

Nate: Yeah. I keep thinking it's gonna get easier.

David: No one ever said it gets easy.

Nate: Not easy, easier.

Tavis: Alan, nice to meet you.

Alan Ball: Nice to meet you.

Tavis: Glad to have you on. That was a bit of host prerogative. I took a little bit of liberty when I suggested, uh, that your making it in this business was all too easy. The rest of us would be lucky-- would be lucky to have the road paved so easily for us to success. I might well be wrong about that 'cause I do recognize, having said that, that there's no such thing as an overnight success, no overnight sensation. Am I being a little--am I getting under your skin by saying you made it overnight?

Ball: Well, I had worked--I had spent 5 years in TV, uh, prior to "American Beauty" being produced, and I had spent many years as a struggling playwright in New York. And I was 42 when "American Beauty--"

Tavis: An overnight sensation at 42?

Ball: Exactly, exactly.

Tavis: Well, I started with that because I figured that might have been a bit unfair to say that, and I don't want to give folk the wrong impression that it is easy to make it in this business and you literally just came out of the ether and, bam, you writing stuff that's Academy Award nominated.

Ball: Right. Um, no, "American Beauty" was my first produced screenplay. I had written a couple of other screenplays prior to that, but mostly I had--I think I honed my craft as a playwright in New York. I had a theater company that I worked with, um, and we, basically, we were a bunch of writers and actors. We were out of college; we did shows in basements, you know, at midnight on Thursday. We did shows several times when there were more people on stage than there were in the audience, you know. And I think it wasn't--I've been writing--actually, the first play I ever wrote, I was 6 years old. I wrote a play about the Easter Bunny that we performed for the P.T.A. So, uh, I think it's not something that happened overnight.

Tavis: Yeah. So there is a backstory?

Ball: There is a backstory.

Tavis: Glad to hear that. Makes me feel better, 'cause I thought I was slackin'.

Ball: Ha ha ha ha!

Tavis: If you did it just like that, I gotta work a little harder. Um, "Six Feet Under." Anybody's seen it knows that there's clearly a fascination with death. This whole series is centered around that, this funeral home. Why do you think the American public is fascinated with death, and I can only assume they are, uh, because "Six Feet Under" is such a huge hit.

Ball: Well, I think just humankind in general has always been fascinated with death because it's--it's so universal, it's so mysterious. We know it's gonna happen to us, and I think we live in a culture in America today where we basically just want to sweep it under the carpet, you know, because everybody's young and beautiful, and if you buy this product or, you know, this thing, you're gonna be happy.

Tavis: Botox and collagen--

Ball: Exactly. Let's pretend like aging doesn't exist. Let's pretend, like, uh, death isn't really something that's gonna happen to us, but everybody comes to a point in their life where you realize, yes, it is gonna happen and it's gonna happen to you. And, um, and I think--one of the things that I liked about the idea of doing a show set in a funeral home, which was an idea that was originally pitched to me by Carolyn Strauss from HBO, was "I haven't seen that." That's an interesting thing, and, uh, who are these people whose job it is to face death for the rest of us? Because even in the last hundred years, the way that--you know, I've done a lot of research, of course, when I started working on the show--the way that we as a culture approach death, even a hundred years ago when someone died they stayed at home. They were laid out in the home, you know. The notion of having a funeral home or something like that to take care of the deceased for us, it's gone from being a familial thing, a tribal thing, a spiritual thing, to being part of the service economy. And I think there's something intrinsically absurd about that, because no matter what you do to a dead body--how you dress it up, whatever--you still have to deal with the fact this person who was part of your life is no longer there and they never will be. And, um, I think that...I just--having had experiences of my own with death growing up, I feel like "Who are these people who live with that, who actually roll their sleeves up and put their hands in it, and how does it affect their lives?"

Tavis: What have you learned--and I want to juxtapose what you learned working on this series with the point you just made now about your experience with death--you were just 13, as I recall. I want to juxtapose these 2 things in just a second, but before I go back to your being 13, what have you learned over the last 4 seasons personally about death? What have you been empowered by, what have you been enlightened by with regard to the very notion of what death is and how we deal with it?

Ball: Well, I think I have...I think doing the show has enabled me to really sort of confront it on a daily basis. Hypothetical, yes. I mean, I'm not really confronting real death. But it's just allowed me to make that much more of a-- of a realization, "Yeah, I'm gonna die. It's gonna happen to me." I probably have more of my life behind me than I do ahead of me. And there's a certain...oddly enough, there's a certain liberation that comes with that realization.

Tavis: I was about to ask you, are you comfortable with knowing that, that you have more days behind you than in front of you? 'Cause I'm getting to be that same age as well.

Ball: Yeah, well, I mean that's an issue--that's a point that everyone hits in their life, and a lot of people have midlife crises. I think there is some sort of psychological and spiritual and emotional transformation that you have to make. Some people make that by, you know, divorcing their wives and buying sports cars and getting hair transplants and, you know, getting with much younger women or whatever. Uh, some people make it by becoming more spiritual, by deciding, "Am I really doing what I want to do with my life?" But it is something that you have to hit, and I think you have to make your peace with it. You have to be comfortable with it. Otherwise you're gonna be living in a constant state of anxiety. And if you have less time left, you want that time to be quality time.

Tavis: Would I be right in assuming then, given what you've just said, that this professional experience of working with "Six Feet Under" has allowed you to grow personally?

Ball: Yeah.

Tavis: That's gotta be good work. That's really good work.

Ball: I mean, one of the things that I'm facing now is I don't have as much personal angst as I did 4 years ago. I don't think that's just because of this show. I think I've also made some changes in my own life, personally, but I'm not as dark as I was 4 or 5 years ago. The writing that I'm doing on my own now tends to be much lighter in tone, and I think the show has been a part of that.

Tavis: You had a traumatic experience when you were 13 with death. Care to share?

Ball: I was 13 years old. I was in a car accident with my sister. She was driving me to my piano lesson, and she was blind-sided by another car, and it hit the left side of the car, and she was killed instantly and I made it through without a scratch.

Tavis: How old was your sister?

Ball: She was 22. It was her 22nd birthday.

Tavis: Same day? Wow.

Ball: Yeah, and up until that point, nothing really traumatic had ever happened to my family, at least not in the time that I had been alive, and I didn't really have--we weren't really prepared for that kind of loss, but I knew at the time, in the instant that--from the moment that I knew she was dead that my life changed. There was the life before and the life after, and I knew there was no turning back, and we didn't know how to grieve. My parents retreated into themselves, I retreated into school and achievement and blah, blah, blah, and actually, I didn't grieve for about 20 years. It wasn't until the mid-nineties when I was living in New York, and I guess at that point, my psyche was ready to deal with it and I thought I was going crazy, I thought I was having a big depression, and it was really just 20 years of impacted grief. Thank God it was taking place in New York where you can walk down the street crying and no one cares.

Tavis: Nobody bothers you.

Ball: Nobody even looks at you.

Tavis: One could argue--I don't know you that well, I just met you, but one could argue when you watch "Six Feet Under," because we see parts of your own story that you have periodically put into the script about your own life that this process has been, for lack of a better word, therapeutic for you as well.

Ball: I think so. There are 7 other writers I work with, and I don't write every word of the show. I don't want to write every word of the show. Frankly, I don't want to work that hard and work with 7 really, really talented and gifted people, and I'd actually like to name them. Bruce Eric Kaplan, Rick Cleveland, Scott Buck, Jill Soloway, Craig Wright, Nancy Oliver, oh, my God, I'm missing--Kate Robin.

Tavis: A shout-out to the writin' team.

Ball: Because they deserve it. They deserve so much credit, and a lot of times, I get specifically credited for the show as if I write everything, and that's just not the case.

Tavis: Where do they get these ideas? 'Cause you guys--I can only imagine it's a challenge every week or throughout the season to find different story lines for how this particular person in this episode is going to die, and you guys have come up with some pretty creative stuff. I guess it can't all be heart attacks and H.I.V., but--

Ball: Exactly. We take some things from headlines, you know? We're always on the lookout for creative ways to kill people. We try to find a death that is somehow organically connected to what the theme of that particular episode might be, but we have a bank, actually, we have a death bank where we have deaths that we've thought about using, but they don't really work for this episode, they go in the bank and then sometimes-- sometimes we'll come in and we'll be working on an episode and we'll realize, "You know, this death doesn't work. Let's just brainstorm and come up with another way for this to happen."

Tavis: You guys push the envelope, and again, on HBO, I guess you can do that. Some people argue that you push the envelope a little too far. How do you deal with those critics who say, "You know what? There's some things you guys do, certain scenes you write, certain visuals that we see that really, we don't need to see to really appreciate the good work that you do."

Ball: I don't really pay attention to that. I just feel like, "Well, then, don't watch," you know? If you feel like the envelope is being pushed to watch. We don't ever do anything gratuitously. I feel like in a show that is about people's lives, their lives are thrown into such stark relief by the omnipresence of death that, of course, you're gonna have, uh...dealing with someone's sex life is very interesting, I think.

Tavis: I guess it depends on the person's sex life.

Ball: Well, yeah, exactly, and people are gonna, you know, people are gonna use profanity. I mean, I think especially people who work in an industry like that, they're gonna use profanity, but you know, to be honest, I look at what's going on in Iraq, and I find that 100 times more obscene than anything we could ever do on our show, plus one of the great things about being on HBO is anything we do, they've done something 20 times worse on "Oz." Something has happened on "Oz" that is way worse than anything that could ever happen on our show.

Tavis: In the 15 seconds I have left, let me just give you a shout-out. One of the things I love about "Six Feet Under" is that you guys get the whole diversity notion. I mean, the cast and the crew, the episodes really do embrace diversity, so right quick, what do you know, what have you come to understand, appreciate, embrace about diversity that so many other producers and writers don't seem to get yet in this business?

Ball: Well, I think diversity gives you so many more opportunities, you know? There are so many different experiences to go to for story lines than just your basic, homogenized, American TV thing, plus we live in Los Angeles, so you gotta be diverse.

Tavis: Thanks for being diverse, and thanks for coming on.

Ball: Absolutely.

Tavis: Nice to see you, Alan. That's our show for tonight. As always, you can catch us on the radio on NPR. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, thanks for watching. Good night from Los Angeles, and keep the faith.