The Cinema Girl | Buzz Bissinger

Author Buzz Bissinger

INTERVIEW | Serena Donadoni

When Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team and A Dream hit bookstores in 1990, it looked as if H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger had scored a touchdown. A critical and commercial success, this blow-by-blow account of the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas explored the phenomenon of high school football in a community obsessed with gridiron success. Hollywood was soon on Bissinger's doorstep, scooping up the rights to what Sports Illustrated would hail as one of the top five sports books of all time. So why did it take 14 years to reach the screen? It's the kind of frustrating odyssey Harry Gerard Bissinger III, now 49, might be chronicling if he weren't in the middle of it. Bissinger watched from the sidelines as Friday Night Lights went through director after director, beginning with the late Alan J. Pakula (All The President's Men).

A journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for a six-part investigative series he co-wrote with two other reporters from The Philadelphia Inquirer about the city's court system before ever penning his first book, Buzz Bissinger went back to work, increasingly pessimistic that Friday Night Lights would ever become a film. He returned to Philadelphia to write A Prayer for the City, an in-depth look at the first term of Mayor Ed Rendell, and became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (where his profile of factually-challenged journalist Stephen Glass was rapidly transformed into the film Shattered Glass). Bissinger also went Hollywood himself, becoming a writer (and co-producer) on NYPD Blue during the 2000-01 season.

Meanwhile, Friday Night Lights had made it into the hands of yet another director, one who had been eagerly watching its status since publication: Bissinger's second cousin, Peter Berg. An actor on television (Chicago Hope) and in films (The Last Seduction), Berg had begun working behind the camera, writing and directing the black comedy Very Bad Things (1998) and creating the even bleaker — and short-lived — television show Wonderland (2000). [Peter Berg subsequently took Friday Night Lights to the small screen, transforming it into an hour-long drama. The series, filmed in and around Austin, is set in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas.]

With Berg and powerhouse producer Brian Grazer on board, Friday Night Lights finally got the go-ahead, and Bissinger is pleased with the way his cousin translated his book to film, even though a number of changes were made to the true story for dramatic effect. Since its release, the $40 million movie has become a sturdy hit, and a reprint of the book (with a new forward) has climbed up the nonfiction bestseller list. This interview with Buzz Bissinger took place on the 35-yard line of Ford Field in Detroit.

THE CINEMA GIRL: When you first went to Odessa, did you set out to write about football, or the social phenomenon that grew up around the game?

BUZZ BISSINGER: I think initially, I set out to write more about football. When I started out writing Friday Night Lights, I moved to Odessa, Texas in the summer of 1988. I think I intended it more as a kind of classic Hoosiers-type experience: a town comes together around high school football. As I got into it, certainly, the sport of high school football is very much in it, but it became a much more complex story with a lot of different sociological elements in it: race, education, the boom and bust economy of all oil town. All those kinds of things went into it.

TCG: Did you choose the Permian Panthers because of their winning record up to that point?

BISSINGER: That was part of the reason. I wanted to pick a team that I thought had a good chance of going to the state playoffs. "Going to state," as they called it when I was there. But I also picked it because of the setting. I really wanted to pick a place that was just out there in what I call the real America. Odessa is out there. It's west Texas, it's basically 300 miles from everything. It's 300 miles from El Paso, it's 300 miles from Dallas. So that had appeal to me to write a book like this, to really try and get at the heart of this phenomenon of the Friday night lights high school football and the impact it can have on a community.

TCG: So do you feel that that team lived up to the expectations that the town had for them that year?

BISSINGER: I thought you were going to say, "Did they live up to my expectations?" It was the most unbelievably dramatic story that any nonfiction — I mean, some people call this a novel because they assume I made it up. I didn't make up a single word of it. I think the answer is no. I mean, this was a team that was ranked number one in the state before the season, had a tremendous amount of talent, they'd gone to the semi-finals the year before. And I think there was a sense of let-down. Granted, the team they faced at the end, Dallas Carter, was a great team. The problem in Odessa is that unless you get into the state finals, it's sort of a down year. That's how intense it was, and that's how much it was about winning. I mean, they were addicted to winning, almost at all costs.

TCG: At what point did it strike you that a lot of what was happening was the relationships between the fathers and sons?

BISSINGER: Alan Pakula, who was one of the many filmmakers involved, was a brilliant filmmaker who made some of the greatest American movies ever made. He said, "You know, this book really is about fathers and sons." It sort of struck me. I hadn't really thought about it, but he's right. There are these great relationships that are depicted in the film. There's the relationship between Boobie Miles and basically his father, his uncle L.V. There's the relationship between Don Billingsley and his father Charlie, who's a former high school football star. There's almost the relationship of Mike Winchell and the absence of his father, and a mother who he's very protective of. That was one of the underlying themes of the book: how fathers, how mothers, how we all live vicariously through our kids in ways that are both good and bad, and I think a wonderful underlying current of the film.

TCG: Were you ever interested in doing the screen adaptation yourself?

BISSINGER: In the last four, five years, I've done some screenwriting, and the answer is no. I may have been too close to it. I think I just got too frustrated with it. This thing churned forever. I mean, the rights were sold to the book Friday Night Lights when it came out in 1990 almost immediately. Alan Pakula, that didn't work. Richard Linklater, that didn't work. Jon Avnet, that didn't work. Brian Levant, that didn't work. Ted Demme, that didn't work. I said, "I give up, I give up." And then Pete Berg came in and his script was really the first out of eight to, I think, really get it right, in terms of capturing the tone and spirit of the book.

TCG: When I've talked to authors who've had their books adapted, they say, "The book is the book, it's always going to be what it is, and maybe the movie will bring people to the book, but that won't change what I did."

BISSINGER: I think that's right. I don't think the film is going to change the book. I hear a lot of writers who take the money to have their books adapted, and then bitch and moan all the way to the bank. No one put a gun to my head to sell the rights. I think when you sell the rights, you have to honor another creative vision. On the other hand, I'm proud of my book, it's important to me. I was worried that it would be clowned up and sillied up, and made into a more slicked up, goopy version of Varsity Blues (1999). I have to say, Pete Berg is my cousin, so you probably say, "Oh, cousin...what do you expect?" Frankly, when you're family, there's a tendency to hate someone even more, and be much more jealous. And I'm very jealous of Pete, he's become this big Hollywood director. He really got it right. I think it's a terrific film that captures the tone of the book, it captures the authenticity, it feels true, it feels real. No bones about it, I'm very proud of Pete, and I'm proud of the role I played in terms of writing Friday Night Lights.

TCG: Looking up some information on the Internet, especially coverage in the Odessa American newspaper, I think it's safe to say the response in Odessa wasn't altogether positive.

BISSINGER: That's true.

TCG: What was it like for you when you finally did go back?

BISSINGER: I actually went back in June. There's a piece that's coming out in Sports Illustrated in October about my trip. They asked me to go back. I had not been back. The book was very controversial. I had threats against me. I couldn't go back, I was supposed to do a book signing. You know what? It was great going back. The town has changed, I've changed. I will never take a word back of what I wrote. I don't know if people will ever quite forgive me, but I think they were very excited about the film and the bright lights of Hollywood, and they were pouring millions of dollars into the town. But what was really meaningful was seeing people I hadn't seen in a long time. A lot of people did say, "You know what? We didn't like your book, but it's forced us to change and come to grips with some things about us. We just took high school sports too far." You know, that's music to a writer's ear, to have something that really did have an impact. And so it was a very, very moving trip for me personally.

TCG: Where did the term Mojo come from?

BISSINGER: I think there were a bunch of drunken fans at Permian High School. It was either Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding, it was a song that involved the word mojo. They started chanting it, and it just sort of picked up. It's not an official term necessarily, it wasn't the official slogan of the school. Now it's 15,000 to 20,000 people on a Friday night — "Mojo! Mojo!" — runs across like the desert wind and it's become synonymous with the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas.

TCG: What is it about football that makes it so inherently dramatic?

BISSINGER: I think it's inherently dramatic because — and Pete tried to do this in the film, and I tried to do this when I wrote Friday Night Lights — there's something very warlike about it, and that's not to diminish war, because war is obviously horrible. It's chaotic, it's violent, it's beautiful, it has sounds, it has sights. It just has all these different influences going on at once that I find very dramatic, and then you overlay it with the fans. Because the bond between team and town in high school football towns is really intense. There's that aspect of these fans going crazy and really, really loving these kids. It's not like you're watching a pro game. You don't really know the pro players. You really know these kids. You bleed for these kids, and you're living through them, which is both magnificent, and can also be very, very dangerous.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS | 2004

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton (Coach Gaines), Lucas Black (Mike Winchell), Garrett Hedlund (Don Billingsley), Derek Luke (Boobie Miles), Jay Hernandez (Brian Chavez), Lee Jackson (Ivory Christian), Lee Thompson Young (Chris Comer), Grover Coulson (L.V. Miles), Connie Britton (Sharon Gaines), Connie Cooper (Mrs. Winchell), Kasey Stevens (Flippy), Ryanne Duzich (Melissa), Amber Head (Maria), Morgan Farris (Jennifer Gaines), Gavin Grazer (Trapper), Turk Pipkin (Skip Baldwin), Dr. Carey Windler (Dr. Rogers), Brad Leland (John Aubrey), Lillian Langford (Nancy Aubrey), Christian Kane (Brian), and B.T. Stone (Slammin' Sammy).

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