Friday Night Lights
by H.G. Bissinger
List Price: $15.95
Pages: 371
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0306809907
Publisher: Da Capo Press
H.G. Bissinger has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the National Headliner Award, and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel for his reporting. The author of the highly acclaimed A Prayer for the City, the has written for the television series NYPD Blue and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He lives in Philadelphia.
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Q: Because of the compelling nature of the book and the characters involved, there has been movie talk surrounding Friday Night Lights since it was first published in 1990. What took Hollywood so long to take it to the big screen?
HGB: The process took 14 years and quite frankly I gave up after a decade. It wasn't for lack of trying by Brian Grazer, the uber-producer at Imagine who controlled the rights to the book. Eight or nine different directors were attached at one point or another-Alan Pakula, Brian Levant, Jon Avnet, Richard Linklater-among others. There were at least half a dozen scripts, but nobody could get it right. One of the problems was trying to figure out what movie to extract from the book, since the book, according to one Imagine producer, contained enough material for three or four different movies.
Interest in the film re-ignited after two key events. One was the success of Remember the Titans. The other was Sports Illustrated naming Friday Night Lights one of the five best books ever written about sports fiction or non-fiction and the best in the last 30 years. It became more apparent than ever that this was a story that had to be made.
Last year, Pete Berg was attached as the director (The Rundown and Very Bad Things). The first thing he did was rewrite an existing script. In doing so, he crafted the script to the narrative of the book. Ironically, none of the other screenwriters attached had done that. They kept fighting the story, until Pete realized what a great dramatic story it was.
Q: To what level were you involved in the process to get it there-creatively or otherwise?
HGB: I had no official role other than being the writer of the book, but Pete and I had dozens of conversations about his creative vision for the film. We talked a lot about what characters should be portrayed and what they dramatically represented. We also talked about ways to highlight certain themes that had been essential to the book, in particular racism and misplaced educational priorities, without hitting the viewer over the head with them. Which is not to say that he did everything I suggested. But he listened, and he kept the ending of the book in tact since changing it would have rendered the film useless in terms of any faithful rendering to the book.
Having worked as a producer/writer on NYPD Blue you are probably better equipped than most authors to see your words become action and image. But did you have any apprehensions with the idea of handing over what amounts to a few years of your life-and the lives of the players and coaches and people of Odessa-and have it boiled down to a few hours?
There was enormous apprehension. I was terrified that the movie, following the formula of other movies about high school sports that have been successful, might be slicked up a little but still a rah-rah feel good experience in which everyone lives happily ever after. In other words, the entire thrust of the book would be lost, the sense of these high school kids being sacrificed to their town in the name of winning a state championship. I was also terrified that the kids I had written about, kids with enormous complexity and variation, would simply be depicted as clichéd Texas wahoos.
Q: Were you on set during the filming? If so, what was that experience like? Did it bring you back to 1988?
HGB: I was on the set twice, once in Austin and once in Houston at the Astrodome. The experience was incredible in taking me straight back to 1988. The uniforms were the same. The weird clothing that everyone wore back then was the same. Even the damn hair was the same. The newspapers clippings were actual clippings. Watching the filming was almost surreal.
Q: Is Friday Night Lights a story that can only be told in West Texas, in 1988-with all the social and economical implications that implies?
HGB: Absolutely not. The Friday night lights burn with particular intensity in Odessa. But it's not unique. The role of sports in American culture is both remarkable and still undervalued. Once you get beyond the fringes of the big cities, there are tens of thousands of Odessas across the country all struggling to hold onto something and finding that something in high school sports.
Q: Fourteen years after publication, the book still has a remarkable shelf life. It has sold nearly 700,000 copies and still sells at the rate of nearly 50,000 copies a year. Why has it endured for so long?
HGB: I was simply lucky to seize upon the theme of sports in our society and figure out a way to tell it in a way that became accessible for so many readers. Over the years, I have literally had thousands of people tell me that the experience of Odessa and the Permian High Panthers was something that they had gone through in their own lives. But I also did not shy away from the darker themes that were also part of the Friday night lights, such as racism and gender inferiority and misplaced educational priorities. It's why the book has become such a staple in hundreds of high schools and colleges all over the country, a narrative with a powerful and telling message.
Q: You still have close relationships with some of the players for Permian who will now be characters in the movie. Have they given you any indication how they feel about that prospect?
HGB: I think they are both very excited and very nervous. Boobie Miles was on the set in Odessa and watched the scene in which his knee gets wrecked, and I know he cried when he saw it. Another player I wrote about, Don Billingsley, was on the set in Austin but walked off after a couple of minutes because the scene was so raw to the bone in terms of depicting his difficult relationship with his father. I felt terrible for Don. We talked about it afterwards, and he said you just have no idea how difficult it is to see your life put on the screen like that.
Q: In 1990, when the book was first published, the atmosphere among some folks in Odessa was more than just hostile. In fact, a planned promotional trip to the city had to be cancelled because of threats of bodily harm made to several local bookstores where you were scheduled to do signings. Did you ever go back?
HGB: I recently returned to Odessa after more than a decade to write a piece for Sports Illustrated on whether or not it was in a sense safe to go home again. People loved me when I was there. But when it came out many were livid because I had delved into issues that no responsible journalist could ignore, in particular the issues of race and totally screwed-up educational priorities. Football dominated everything, to the degree that more money was spent on athletic tape than on books for the English department. This was also a community in which it was felt justified to fly the team to away games by chartered jet at a cost of $70,000.
Odessa has changed, because the exposure from the book forced it to change. Football no longer has the stranglehold that it once did. I was nervous about returning, because one thing West Texans don't do very well is let go of grudges. But the reaction I received was quite stirring. Dozens told me how much they admired the book and how it had forced the community to make changes.
Q: One person who has consistently accused you of betrayal over the years has been the head coach at Permian at the time, Gary Gaines, who is being portrayed in the film by Billy Bob Thornton. Have you ever spoken to Gaines about his feelings?
HGB: I used the trip as an opportunity to see Gaines, who is now the head football coach at Abilene Christian University. Gaines was deeply upset with the book when it was published. His feelings bothered me because we had become quite close during the year I was there. We had not spoken in 15 years and that bothered me as well. So I went to see him unannounced, not to apologize for what I had written, but to see if we at least could declare truce. The meeting was quite wonderful and he was quite gracious.
Q: With the filming taking place in and around Odessa, did you get a sense of their reaction to the movie?
HGB: They were crazy with excitement over it. The film was shot on location in Odessa for three weeks and apparently it was a circus every day. Plus it did not hurt that the film crew dropped well over a million dollars into the town.
Q: Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg is your cousin. Did this help you-mentally, emotionally, whatever-with trusting "Hollywood" to adapt your work properly?
HGB: It helped in that Pete, probably out of some sense of familial guilt, returned my phone calls in a fairly prompt manner. As I said earlier, he did listen to what I had to say. He sought out my opinions, but I also knew that Pete's mandate was to write and direct a film that would be commercially palatable to a major studio. So there was a lot of nervousness that he would ultimately cave in.
Q: Have you seen the film?
HGB: I have.
Q: So?
HGB: It is a terrific film. I am proud as the writer of the book and also proud of Pete for making a film that stands on its own. Not everything that was in the book is in the film because the result would have been a ten-hour movie given the book's complexity. Choices had to be made and Pete essentially made a film that is character-driven. But the structure of the film follows quite closely the narrative of the book. And it is not your typical rah-rah feel good film. It has moments of tremendous poignancy. It is evocative like the book was evocative, but it is also gritty and raw and authentic.
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Excerpted from Friday Night Lights © Copyright 2008 by H.G. Bissinger. Reprinted with permission by Da Capo Press. All rights reserved.
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