“The book Friday Night Lights was something I had read very early on,” remembers Oscar®-winning producer Brian Grazer. “The late, great director, Alan Pakula, introduced me to the book. Alan was going to direct the movie—since his death, I’ve stuck with the project for 14 years, waiting for the right timing and combination of talent to bring it to the screen, being respectful and mindful of what Alan would have brought to the film. I’ve been in love with the story since the beginning and committed to turning it into the kind of film it deserves to be.”
Originally published in 1990, H.G. ‘Buzz’ Bissinger’s book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream, his chronicle of the 1988 Permian High School football season in Odessa, Texas, remained on The New York Times Best-seller List for 15 weeks, has since gone through several re-printings (currently in its 40th printing) and was named by Sports Illustrated as one of greatest sports stories of all time and the best ever to be centered in the world of football.
Today, 14 years after publication, the book still sells at the rate of nearly 50,000 copies a year. Friday Night Lights has proven popular not only in high school football locker rooms, but also in hundreds of college classrooms, particularly studies in sociology.
“There are a handful of really great sports stories in this century, and I think this is one of them,” comments Grazer. “But what’s even more compelling than the sports element, I feel, is the revelation of the presence of this localized cultural phenomenon, this subculture, all across America, in small towns and in some pretty big ones as well. Attendance around these Friday night high school games takes on a religious aspect, a spiritual side—basically people going every Friday to church. And these young athletes are like rock stars in these towns and they have to carry all of the burdens that come with being famous role models who are looked to for that all-important win.”
“In the mid-‘80s, I remember driving out west, going through little towns in Alabama, Louisiana and Texas and seeing their high school football stadiums,” author Bissinger recounts. “They were always beautiful, always painted, and the fields were always being watered even if there was a drought. These places really are shrines, like temples, and my dream was to write this book. It wouldn’t leave my head until I found this town called Odessa. So, I quit my job and decided to go there.”
In depicting the 1988 season, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, then an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, uprooted his young family and spent a full year in Odessa after hearing about the locals’ allegiance to the Permian Panthers, long considered one of the greatest high school football programs in Texas.
“I wanted to recount the highs and lows of what it meant to be a high school football player in a town such as this,” Bissinger writes. “The idea of high school sports keeping a town together, keeping it alive, and the inevitable danger of adults living vicariously through their young, fascinated me. These kids held the town on their shoulders in a place where high school football went to the very core of life.”
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