Saturday, June 13, 2009

Dallas celebrates the return of True Blood with a Contest #10 A visit from Charlaine to Bon Temps

For contest #10 Sookie hosts a visit from Charlaine Harris. ( We are really in Shreveport attending the Author Author event , where Charlaine will speak at 2 pm) Just for fun what if Charlaine was really going to speak in Bon Temps ...what would happen?

Charlaine is part of a author visits at the Bon Temps Library and Barbara Beck is busy getting the library ready for the 2 pm visit.


Who from town might attend the talk ?

If Sookie takes her a little tour of the town where will they go?

Where will they take CH to lunch ?

Where will they take CH to dinner?


Good Luck

Email: "Dallas " at Loving True Blood in Dallas

Here is list of available prizes ! HERE

SOME of these prizes WILL be offered everyday - NOT all the prizes.(we randomly draw 4 available prizes each day so all the "good prizes" won't disappear the first few days )

Each day (June 3rd - June 14th) there will be a chance for you to win a prize.
The entrants will be randomly numbered and the winner will be chosen by the Twitter character @TaraThornton each evening.

That days contest ends 4 pm cst the following day.

You foreign folks are welcome to play but if you win you will have to pay postage I can't offer to mail stuff internationally, sorry.

Ryan Kwanten True Blood Stud: Why I Always Take My Clothes Off

Ryan Kwanten can't seem to keep his shirt on.

At least when he's playing Jason Stackhouse on HBO's True Blood.

"The moment Jason gets a little heated, whether it be the sexual realm or the competitive realm," Kwanten tells me, "the clothes start to come off."

Like during a scene in the second season (premiering Sunday) in which Jason and new frenemy Luke (Wes Brown) compete in a game of flag football at a camp run by antivampire sect Fellowship of the Sun…

"Jason was pushed," Kwanten explains "Luke tackled him a little too hard, so he thought he'd go Rambo-style and deal with the business at hand."


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Interview with a vampire -- Stephen Moyer of True Blood


Vampires, shapeshifters, and a barmaid who can read peoples' minds ... HBO's True Blood returns on June 14, 9 PM.

I've been impatiently waiting for the white-hot series to come back since the toenail-painted black foot slumped out of Andy's car door at the end of season one. Is it Lafayette's foot? I asked Stephen Moyer, who plays vampire Bill Compton, but of course, he wouldn't tell me. No matter. I'll be glued to my TV next Sunday night.

Read on and find out what Moyer has to say about the new season, what it's like playing a 173-year-old vampire, and whether the love triangle between Sookie, Bill and Sam will continue. And I managed to keep my head, even as Moyer called me "Love" and "Darling" in his delightful British accent.

First of all, I love True Blood. I'm such a huge fan, and I tell everyone to watch it. I love Alan Ball and everything he's done.

He's amazing, isn't he? I think that what Alan has done so cleverly with our show is create something that's about blood and vampires, but he's found yet another forum to talk about human relationships. The fact that there's blood and sex and violence ... they're just a sidelin

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'True Blood' Star Michelle Forbes: 'Buckle Up and Get A Helmet!'

In the history of television, no character has ever had a more attention-grabbing introduction than Maryann, who first appeared naked on a dark road accompanied by an oversize pig. Getting into a car accident is an understandable reaction, Tara.
But that was just the first of many life loops Tara was thrown for after welcoming Maryann into her life. And that craziness won't be slowing down any time soon -- in fact, Maryann turns the volume up to 11 in the first handful of new "Trues."
I've been a fan of Michelle Forbes' for quite a while -- but there is one hiccup on her resume I had to investigate during out conversation. In addition to that "24" snafu, we chatted about Maryann's master plan, why Tara is important to it and what it means for the entire town of Bon Temps!
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The Girls Guide to Comic-con

The Girls' Guide to Comic Con 2009

Comic-Con. It's not just for nerdy guys anymore.

And it's not all just about the influx of squealing "Twilight" girls, either. This summer's event, taking place July 23-26 in the San Diego Convention Center, could shape up to be a smorgasbord for female fandemonium. (We say "could" because the official rundown of panels and events won't be officially released until next month.) But we've got a pretty good idea of what … Read More Read More

Q&A: 'True Blood' cast

Interview with the vampires (and their human friends, too)

The cast of HBO's "True Blood" gathered in Los Angeles to celebrate the new season of the sexy vampire-loves-human saga.

Creator Alan Ball and stars Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer dropped clues about what the second season will bring, including a trip to Texas, new love interests, more dirty secrets and a whole lotta sex (even an orgy!). Check out what the stars had to say about the show, their characters and the new season.

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Paper in L.A.: Vampire ad 1st, then news

read last line

LOS ANGELES — Vampires have taken over the Los Angeles Times.

Beneath the masthead of Friday print editions is a full front-page ad for the HBO's series "True Blood." A black-and-white close-up of star Stephen Moyer with blood dripping from the corner of his mouth dominates the page.

In news boxes around town, all that's visible is the close-up of actor's menacing gaze and the paper's banner splayed across the top. No other stories or photos appear on the cover, which is actually a separate four-page broadsheet touting Sunday's premiere of the show's second season.

Readers remove the wrap to find the regular front page, anchored by the Lakers' NBA Finals win over the Magic on Thursday night in Orlando. Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan says it's the first time the newspaper put its masthead above an advertisement wrapping the paper.

"One of the things for us is that innovation is pretty crucial in both a challenged and cluttered marketplace," Sullivan said. "HBO came to the Times to break through that clutter, and the result is what you see today."

Zach Enterlin, HBO's vice president of advertising and promotions, said HBO had placed front-page ads with Hollywood trade publications in the past, but jumped at the chance to do the same with the Times.

"We saw it as a fantastic opportunity to speak to a consumer audience in an innovative way," he said.

The Times announced in 2007 that it would begin considering front-page advertisements. Ads at the bottom of the cover have appeared in the paper for more than a year, including in April, when the paper ran an ad for the NBC show "Southland" that resembled a news column and occupied traditional news space.

Sullivan said future front-page wraps were a "distinct possibility."

The Times worked with HBO to ensure "the right fit" for the front-page wrapper, Sullivan said, adding that the paper "certainly weighs decisions about innovative advertising with all constituencies in mind," including readers and advertisers.

The "Southland" advertisement in April brought criticism from those who thought it could confuse readers about what really was news. Robert Niles, a former journalism instructor at the University of Southern California who still edits the school's journalism review, said the full front-page ad Friday is "a sign of just utter surrender by the Times that they wouldn't think people would be freaked out by this."

"It's a pretty dangerous road to go down for any news organization to actually sell advertising that covers up your news reporting," he said. "It really shows a lack of respect for the audience and a lack of confidence in your editorial product."

Like all U.S. newspapers, the Times is struggling as advertising revenues crater, readers cancel their subscriptions and a growing number of people get their news free on the Internet.

Sullivan declined to discuss how much the paper charged for the ad.

LA Times True Blood Season 2 Review


HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Creator Alan Ball ("Six Feet Under") continues his more or less faithful, though highly elaborated and extended, adaptations of Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novelsCharlaine Harris’, which tell the story of a telepathic waitress, her undead beau and various other libidinous friends and monsters in the Louisiana swamp town of Bon Temps. (Cajun French for "Sunnydale," in a way.) The special conceit here, which is a good one, is that the recent invention of synthetic blood -- marketed as a kind of nonalcoholic beer for the blood-addicted, in one of the many metaphors that flit around this tale -- has allowed vampires to "come out of the coffin" and join mainstream society.

Just as the first season covered the territory of the first Sookie book, "Dead by Dark," the second follows the lines of its sequel, "Living Dead in Dallas," though with even more additions and alterations. Whereas Harris' novels are all written from Sookie's point of view, the series spreads its attention among several characters, and the material has been twisted and inflated to feature them. There are a lot of characters, and they need things to do.

These changes are controversial among Harris fans -- as is Anna Paquin's wide-eyed performance as Sookie -- but they are, as television, generally for the better. Indeed, the fleshed-out secondary characters have better material than do Sookie and her vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer), who labor under the burden of replaying for the umpteenth time the forbidden love between the living and the dead, the light and the dark. Beneath it all, he is just another one of those good-bad-but-not-evil boys whom good girls have been bringing home since even before the leather jacket was invented, or the Shangri-Las formed, or Buffy met Angel.

I was not particularly a fan of the first season, which seemed to me unfocused and ponderous, and not so much frightening as graphically unpleasant. And though there was textual authority for the copious nudity and the heavy breathing, there is something tiresomely inevitable about the way HBO sells sex.

But the first four episodes of Season 2 strike me as an improvement. Some of it is just a matter of tone. Ball had dressed Harris' talky genre novels -- a mix of horror, mystery and Harlequin romance -- in some worn old threads, the country folk being a shade too gooberish and the vampires subscribing to a whole goth-metal-S&M-biker thing that made it seem as if they were taking their style cues from humans who take their style cues from vampire movies.

Still, many series take themselves too seriously out of the box. I took it as a good sign that scary senior vampire Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) first appears this season in the middle of having his hair cellophaned. And I accept as a welcome bit of irony that Bill himself says at one point (I paraphrase possibly), "I'm a vampire, I'm supposed to be tortured."

Ball's most notable addition to Harris' cast is Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), the teenage girl Bill turned into a vampire under duress at the end of last season, and who, having come to live with him, has brought out his inner Brian Keith, much to the good. (At the same time, she's the only vampire whose pain you feel.)

Jessica also gives Paquin a new playmate and new attitudes to play, her best friend (the excellent Rutina Wesley) and her lovelorn, shape-shifting boss (Sam Trammell) being occupied elsewhere with mysterious strangers played by Michelle Forbes and Ashley Jones.

Meanwhile, Sookie's lunkheaded hunk-of-beefcake brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten), who last year was getting high on vampire blood, is off in another sector altogether, having been seduced into the anti-vampire Fellowship of the Sun, a rather too obvious riff on the Christian right. (Survivors of the '60s know, however, that it is indeed a short step from acidhead to Jesus freak.) Kwanten seems to be playing his reformed character as a young George W. Bush.

And drug-dealing, sex-selling gay cook Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) is chained up in Eric's basement, but at least he isn't dead, as he is from Page 5 of "Living Dead in Dallas" -- a smart move too, as Ellis is one of the best things about this often frustrating but not unlikable show.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

'True Blood' sinks its teeth into a second season


Chicago Times

One word—a name, actually—makes it hard to take “True Blood” (8 p.m. Central Sunday, HBO; three stars) seriously.

That name is pronounced “Suhkhee.” Or “Soohkee.” The actual moniker belongs to Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), the true love of Bill Compton, a courtly vampire who, when human, fought in the Civil War.

Compton is played by an Englishman, Stephen Moyer, and the way Moyer tries to say the name with a Southern accent is faintly—OK, more than faintly—ridiculous. Yet that verbal mangling also provides a certain amount of enjoyment in the Watcher household—the competition to say "Sookie" in a Bill-like way that makes other laugh is by now a summer ritual.

That’s not to say Moyer is a bad actor—far from it. He gives Bill an air of quiet pathos and steely intelligence. Two seasons in, however, I’m still not sure what he sees in “Suhkhee”—sorry, Sookie—a psychic waitress whose main activity in Season 1 seemed to be flouncing angrily out of rooms, houses and bars. Give this woman a location, and she will find a way to stomp away from it in a foul mood

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ALAN BALL Talks About Season 2 of TRUE BLOOD Interview


From Daemonstv

ALAN BALL, creator of the HBO series, TRUE BLOOD, based on Charlaine Harris series of books, took some time to answer some of the burning questions we have about Season 2 (which premieres this Sunday Jun 14 at 9pm).

The question that most of us have on our mind is probably, how can True Blood be even sexier and gorier than it was last season?

Well, Alan Ball tells us it will be.

It will be sexier, gorier, funnier and deeper. This season the show is finding its identity and things get more organic.

Even though there is going to be another mystery this season, Alan Ball explained that the show is about more than just that, it's also about love story. And as opposed to last season when the audience was as clueless as Sookie and the town of Bon Temps about who the killer was, this season, we as the audience will be aware of a character that is up to no good before the characters on the show are.

Writing process for 'True Blood'

Alan Ball explained that 50% of it comes from the books and the other 50% conceived by him and his team of 4 writers including Brian Bruckner, Raelle Tucker, Alexander Woo, and Nancy Oliver. The books are narrated by Sookie and as so, other characters only exist when she interacts with them, which creates the need for writing about other characters when Sookie is not around. However, they stick pretty close to Sookie's story, only changing things here and there to make them more cinematically appealing.

In order to plan out the season, they take the book and find their favorite scenes. They then break it down over 12 episodes for the season. However, the writing of the show evolves and it always ends up becoming what it wants to and they end up rewriting things. They try to make the whole process very organic.

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TV vampires take over Friday's Los Angeles Times 16 hours ago LOS ANGELES (AP) — Vampires have taken over the Los Angeles Times.


TV vampires take over Friday's Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Vampires have taken over the Los Angeles Times.

Beneath the masthead of Friday print editions is a full front-page ad for HBO's "True Blood."

A black-and-white close-up of star Stephen Moyer with blood dripping from his mouth dominates the page, which is all that's visible in newsboxes around town.

No other stories or photos appear on the cover, which is actually a separate four-page broadsheet touting Sunday's season premiere. Readers remove the wrap to find the regular front page, anchored by the Lakers's Thursday win over Orlando.

Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan says it's the first time newspaper has put its masthead above an advertisement wrapping the paper. She declined to discuss how much the paper charged for the ad.

TrueBlood Cherry V Juice Pie

Thanks Sara for sending this

OCCASION: Having caught the TrueBlood fever just recently after watching Season One in one sitting, I was inspired to create this pie just in time for anyone throwing a TrueBlood viewing party for Season Two, starting June 14. This pie debuted at a Peden Place Summer BBQ! This sinfully delicious dessert is sure to beat anything you’d find at Merlotte’s and it is guaranteed to have humans dying for seconds!

IMG_0759

To Make Crust:

1 Unfrozen Chocolate Cookie Pie Crust

To Make Topping:

2 c heavy whipping cream

1/2 c Splenda

V Juice Drizzle (to be created later on)

To Make Filling:

4 c fresh Bing Cherries

1/2 c Old New Orleans Rum Factory Brand Rum (served nightly at Fangtasia)

1 3/4 c Splenda

1 cup chocolate pudding cake (store bought)

1/4 tsp almond extract

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

4 tbsp corn starch

1 1/2 tbsp unsalted butter

Directions:

DAY BEFORE PIE FILLING PREP: I chose to do this step the day before because I found cherries on sale and wanted to begin the pie while they were at their freshest. I also wanted to pit them ahead of time because my manicure was on its last leg and I didn’t mind ruining it! I found the following website helpful on how to pit cherries: http://startcooking.com/blog/218/How-to-Pit-Cherries. I found the pitting process to be quite relaxing and it only took half of “Ellen” to complete 3 pints.

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True Blood's 'Sam' and 'Tara' KTLA morning chat

Vampire trend bites into big, small screens

These days vampires seem to be all love and no bite.

Or they bite mainly when they’re making love, as in the case of “True Blood,” the original HBO series that premieres its second season on Sunday, and is the focus of aggressive marketing with an advertisement that took over the front page of the ailing Los Angeles Times on Friday.

annapaquinThe series, based on Charlaine Harris’ book series called the “Southern Vampire Mysteries,” tells the story of telepathic Sookie Stackhouse, who falls in love with vampire Bill Compton in a small Louisiana town where vampires have come out of the coffin, so to speak.

The show stars Anna Paquin and is one of HBO’s brightest hopes after the cable channel suffered the one-two punch of losing The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under.”

The series also is part of the latest phenomenon of vampires biting into movies and television.

http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/2009/06/12/vampire-trend-bites-into-big-small-screens/

Top 10: Reasons Women Love Vampires


From Ask Men.com

Vampires are everywhere -- in books like Twilight and in the recently released New Moon trailer, in magazines and newspapers and now on television in the second season of True Blood on HBO. Vampires are stealing our women, but not by the usual force and trickery. Woman love the stupid bloodsuckers!

There is something about these Gothic symbols of manhood that make every woman weak in the neck. Is it their style, their power or just their flair for the romantic? It might be a combination of all of the above that makes these thousand-year-old walking corpses so damn appealing to the opposite sex.

Here are 10 reasons why women love vampires, and how a single guy can use this knowledge to his advantage.

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True Blood TV review: Vampire soap opera bloody good

Shows entering their second seasons on pay cable tend to see a rise in ratings - a lot of people are late jumping on the bandwagon and often discover shows on DVD first. So it would be no surprise to find "True Blood," which kept increasing its audience through Season 1, as HBO's glittering star entering Season 2 on Sunday.

But the genre series about vampires is, if less the work in progress it was last season, still an acquired taste. Created by Alan Ball ("Six Feet Under," "American Beauty"), the dark, brooding, high-gore and high-sex drama has an interesting premise: Vampires, who have always lived among us, are able to "come out" now that a synthetic blood has been invented that allegedly negates their need to feed on humans.

Based in the present day in the fictional town of Bon Temps, La., "True Blood" finds vampires being just like any other minority group - having to fight for their rights. They want to be accepted into society but have met opposition, mostly from religious groups. These arguments are played out CNN-style on 24-hour news programs that residents routinely watch. It's a creative way backdrop, giving some fans the idea that "True Blood" is a metaphor series (particularly for gays) about coming out and being accepted. While this sociopolitical element is a nice add-on, Ball has already said that he created a vampire series to have a little fun, not send messages. The existential funk of "Six Feet Under" left him drained and he wanted a completely different experience

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/06/11/DDBE184FVI.DTL

The lighter (and darker) side of Evan Rachel Wood


Vampire or girl next door? The actress keeps us guessing in two new roles.

By Gayle Jo Carter

Suddenly, she's everywhere. This week, Evan Rachel Wood shows off her lighter side in the new Woody Allen comedy "Whatever Works." (Says "Variety": "Wood handles ... her improbably Daisy Mae-ish character with surprising finesse.") And on the small screen, the actress is set to appear as a vampire on HBO's dark drama "True Blood."
Evan Rachel Wood and Henry Cavill star in Woody Allen's "Whatever Works," opening in some cities this week.

Despite her newfound ubiquity and repeated critical acclaim in small, piercing dramas such as last year's "The Wrestler," Wood, 21, is best known for her notably strange relationships with much older oddballs Marilyn Manson and Wrestler co-star Mickey Rourke. We asked her about those, and more. Excerpts:

You've been labeled as dark and rebellious.
I'm just being me. People think I'm edgy, but I'm not.

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True Blood Music Video of the Day: Ride