Jonathan Storm: 'Trueblood' keeps the vampires alive

The Inquirer's Jonathan Storm is reporting this week from the television critics press tour in Beverly Hills. These items originally appeared in his blog, "From the Source," at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/from_the_source.

There's Life for Vampires After.

How can you have a TV season without vampires? What will all those obsessive fans do?

Well, now they can order HBO, where Alan Ball, who put dead people into the ground for years with

Six Feet Under

, keeps them alive forever in

Trueblood

, based on Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, which I'm sure anybody reading this, besides my friends and relatives, knows all about.

Sookie's a Loooze-ee-anna waitress who reads minds and, apparently, falls in love with a 173-year-old vampire. In Ball's world, the vamps, fortified by synthetic blood you can buy at the Wawa, have come out of the coffin and hang out in bars. Unlike the undead in CBS's dearly departed

Moonlight

(please give up, folks, it's not coming back), these undead can't stand the daylight.

"I think it's pretty lame when you let your vampire go out in the day just because you don't want to shoot at night," Ball said.

Little Anna Paquin, who won a supporting-actress Oscar for

The Piano

when she was 11, plays Sookie. (She'll be 26 on July 24.)

Trueblood

's creator is not a contemporary vampire expert. He has "never seen

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

or

Angel

," he told the critics. "I've never read the Ann Rice books."

Trueblood

premieres Sept. 7.

Tony Curtis: A Legend Speaks.

In town at the Beverly Hilton from his home in Las Vegas, movie great Tony Curtis holed up in a suite and doled out one-on-one interview nuggets on Friday.

He was publicizing Turner Classic Movies' August "Summer Under the Stars" festival, when different days are devoted to individual actors' work - Garbo, Brando, and, on Aug. 27, 13 movies featuring Curtis, 83.

The actor, recovering from a hospital battle with pneumonia, is trying to get his sea legs back, but spends most of his time in a wheelchair. That has not dimmed his Lust for Life, which is

not

one of the 125 or so movies and TV shows he's been in.

His favorite:

The Great Race

. "I was all in white, the good guy. Jack Lemmon was all in black, the evil one, and we had a ball."

He cited two films as the most challenging:

The Defiant Ones

, in which he was chained to Sidney Poitier (they played escaped cons), and his bitter, racist character had to learn how to deal. That was his sole Oscar nomination. And

Sweet Smell of Success

, in which he plays a press agent trying to cozy up to the most powerful gossip columnist, played by Burt Lancaster, whom Curtis called, "the best movie actor."

Curtis grew up as Bernie Schwartz, living behind his father's Bronx tailor shop, went to acting school on the G.I. Bill after World War II, and had little trouble finding a movie contract. "I had a lot of black hair," he said (now, his head is shaved), "and these blue eyes of mine used to put 'em away."

He says he's still a womanizer, "but I'm happily married," and he moved to Vegas eight years ago to get away from the incessant nostalgia trips that plague Hollywood legends. He's found considerable success as a painter, and he enjoys the casinos.

"Come on out, and we'll play blackjack," he invited me. "I'll show you what I do. I lose like everybody else."