Beauty and the box office.

I went to see American Beauty, the movie I wrote, about a month after it had opened at a theater in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. I just bought my ticket and sat in the back; it was sold-out. Just sitting in that theater and watching how the crowd responded was really gratifying. This was a mainstream, regular audience, rowdy and ready to laugh at all the humor, no matter how dark it was.

And they went along with the movie no matter how gay it was. Everybody laughed when the gay neighbors, the two Jims, come over with their welcome basket to the Fittses' house and the right-wing Colonel (Chris Cooper) gets that look on his face as he realizes exactly what kind of "partners" they are. Then, in the scene in the garage near the end of the film when the Colonel kisses Lester (Kevin Spacey), there were some gasps, but no one in that theater went "E-e-ew!"--as we have all experienced in other movies with male-to-male kisses.

A lot of producers who rejected my script said, "This is too weird. Nobody's going to go see this." Too many producers think like marketers, looking for some sort of formula that will guarantee success. But it doesn't work that way. As I saw in that theater in Los Feliz, there's something sort of capricious and intangible that happens between a movie and an audience. You can't predict it with a formula.

I have to admit I've been sort of surprised by all the acclaim and attention American Beauty has received. Almost everybody I've ever known in my entire life has gotten in touch with me one way or another. People I don't know tell me how much the movie has moved them--a lot of them, I've noticed, are parents with small children. The negative response has mostly been laughable. One posting I read online said, "This movie is blatantly promoting homosexuality because, if you'll notice, whenever anybody is walking down the street, they're walking down the middle of the street, except for the two gay characters. They use the sidewalk. So obviously this movie is trying to tell us that homosexuality is normal." I just read that and thought, Oh, my God, what a freak.

It is true that the two Jims are easily the most well-adjusted people in the movie--and therefore the most boring. And that was the whole point--to make them the least exotic, the most traditional. Their flip side is the Colonel, whose deep, deep denial of his own nature leads him to violence. The movie is in part about how homophobia is based in fear and repression and what fear and repression can do.

But neither the two Jims nor the Colonel represents all gay men. Too often people tend to read everything into a movie, to think that every character represents some sort of universal. People have said, for example, that American Beauty is a blatant indictment of suburban values. Yet there are millions of families living in suburbia, raising kids, who are well-adjusted and spiritual and dealing with life. Just because this movie has two particularly dysfunctional families living in suburbia doesn't mean it's an indictment of all suburbia.

And just because this movie's a success doesn't mean that other gay writers should drop what they're doing and write more movies about gay people in suburbia. The lesson I learned from American Beauty is to write what I feel passionate about and to not worry, Is it going to sell? Is this what the marketplace is looking for right now? How are audiences in Los Feliz going to respond? Because when I wrote it, I was just thinking that it was something that I would go see. Writers shouldn't try to second-guess themselves; they should just write from the heart.

My writing process is very organic, and the characters almost seem alive to me when I'm writing. I just write them as who they are, not as a representation of some sort of message that I'm trying to impart. Because I'm gay, usually there is some sort of gay character or theme in what I write, but I'm not doing that consciously because I'm trying to teach America about homosexuals. When writing is done that way, it always feels preachy. And if I'm in the audience, even if it's saying something I agree with, I just think to myself, Oh, stop trying to teach me. Just tell me a story.

Oscar-nominated for American Beauty, Ball is also a playwright and television writer and producer.