Let's be serious here: Alan Ball doesn't have much to prove where HBO is concerned. He brought "Six Feet Under" to the cable network in 2001, a year after winning an Oscar for writing "American Beauty." The funeral home-set drama series ran for five season before coming to an end with a finale that many number among the best show-closers of all time. More recently, Ball's efforts have focused on the modern-day Louisiana-set vampire series, "True Blood," a bona fide hit in the vampire-friendly pop culture world we currently live in.
With "True Blood" having just kicked off its third season, Ball is now working out what he'll tackle next. The word today from Variety is that he's preparing to produce and direct the pilot for a potential new HBO series, "All Signs of Death." Focusing on a man with a knack for cleaning up crime scenes, the story comes from the book "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death" by Charlie Huston, who also scripted the pilot. No cast has been set yet, but production is expected to start in August. Head over to Variety to check out the full story.
It's taken Alan Ball nine years after his Oscar win for “American Beauty” to make his way back to the big-screen. Hopefully, it’ll be a much shorter trip the third time around, the 
Walking down the street a couple weeks ago I passed a poster promoting something called the “Vampire Rights Amendment.” Maybe you did, too. It didn’t register at first -- living in New York, one grows accustomed to all sorts of civic grievance. The next time I encountered one of these posters, though, I went home and looked up the VRA online, and was, first of all, surprised to find it online, and then to discover that it was part of an elaborate, under-the-radar ad campaign for an upcoming cable series called “True Blood.” Okay, I was roped in.
** FOLLOW MTV MOVIES BLOG ON TWITTER! **