TV

Into the 'Lights'

NBC's new series about high-school football goes for genuine likability with Central Texas as its playing field

By Diane Holloway
AMERICAN-STATESMAN TELEVISION WRITER
Sunday, October 01, 2006

It's 100 degrees in the shade — if you can find any shade — and probably 105-plus in the sun on a windy, dusty August day in a gravel pit south of Kyle.

The conditions are brutal, but dozens of overly cheerful folks are hauling heavy equipment around, testing camera angles and adjusting big fuzzy boom mikes. An elite few in this group look like actual people. They've been dusted off and touched up by makeup and hair experts. Everyone else has taken on a ghostly pallor from the chalky particles that are thick in the air.

Welcome to the made-up but decidedly realistic-looking world of "Friday Night Lights," NBC's eagerly anticipated new series, inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning author H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger's book about small-town Texas life and the heady obsession with high-school football.

As the next-to-the-last scene of the day is readied and the sun begins to set, red and purple highlights swoop onto the horizon over the rolling hills of Hays County.

"Look at that sky . . . I love it here," says co-executive producer Jeffrey Reiner, whose exploding curly hair has gone from dark brown to dusty beige during the day. "I've filmed all around the world, but this place has real soul and great character."

The young actors who play students are mostly unknowns but not likely to stay unknown for long. Kyle Chandler plays the new football coach, Eric Taylor, and Connie Britton reprises her role from the movie as the coach's wife, Tami. (Fictional Dillon, by the way, replaces Odessa as the setting, and the action takes place today rather than in the '80s.)

Cameras roll, and an emotional breakup scene is shot between Taylor Kitsch, who plays hot-headed running back Tim, and Adrianne Palicki, who plays his royally ticked-off girlfriend, Tyra. She barrels down the dirt road in a pickup, stomps over to where the beer-swilling Tim is launching golf balls over a cliff and into a massive pit. She chews him out for not visiting an injured teammate in the hospital and then turns to leave.

Suddenly Tim falls backward, seemingly over the edge and to his death. But when Tyra tearfully races over to help, she sees that Tim has faked his fall and is laughing at her. After multiple takes, Palicki begins to lose her voice from screaming. Cut and print.

Later that night, a tortuous scene is filmed with the fictional Dillon Panthers running wind sprints up a mud hill. The mud is a product of giant cranes spewing water down a steep slope at the Yarrington Road Materials quarry. The real heat, plus the exhausting workout, plus the mud generate genuine pain.

"There's going to be vomiting involved," a crew member whispers excitedly. This is not in the script, mind you, but simply a prediction based on existing conditions and the intensity of the called-for sprints.

The production has been spreading its cranes and cash around Central Texas for months.

Thanks to the NBC series, the Austin economy will be boosted by an estimated $20 million during production of the first half of the season, according to the Austin Film Commission. A dozen episodes have been ordered, and if all the rave reviews turn into big ratings, the cash will continue to flow.

"The decision to film in Texas was a no-brainer," says executive producer Peter Berg, who fell in love with the area when he was directing the 2004 movie version of "Friday Night Lights." "This is about Texas football. It would have been so bogus to have a bunch of Canadians running around with Southern accents."

Settling in

"Friday Night Lights" isn't the first series to film here. The CBS Western "Ned Blessing," from local screenwriter Bill Wittliff, filmed out at Willie Nelson's ranch and aired in 1993. But it was canceled in less than a month.

And MTV's "Real World" was shot in Austin in 2005. Unlike that rowdy reality show, which stirred up many a drunken ruckus on Sixth Street, "Friday Night Lights" has settled into Austin quietly and comfortably. Most of the young cast members live in condos off South Congress Avenue, and many of the crew members are permanent residents. They work long days and long nights and are rarely noticed in public — so far.

Reiner's wife and 16-year-old son are with him, and he insists he likes it here so much he doesn't mind the heat. And he cherishes Austin's legendary weirdness. On a scorching day he was walking his dog Sniffles around Town Lake when he saw a man brushing his teeth.

"I felt at home right then," Reiner said.

When the pilot was filmed in February and March, Pflugerville High School served as the show's home field. But the Pflugerville Panthers' real football season was gearing up in August when episode filming began, so the production found a new home in Del Valle. The company has refurbished an old stadium and field house near Austin-Bergstrom International Airport for filming and will donate the facility to Del Valle Independent School District as a permanent upgrade.

The production is headquartered in South Austin on Burleson Road, in an office once occupied by Kinky Friedman's gubernatorial campaign. Frequent filming sites around town have included an Applebee's restaurant and Capital Chevrolet on South Interstate 35 and EZ's restaurant on North Lamar Boulevard. Scenes also have been shot in Kyle, Manor, Pflugerville, West Lake Hills and other nearby communities.

The pilot boasts a slew of local coaches, including Longhorns leader Mack Brown, Westlake coach Derek Long and Pflugerville coaches George Herrmann and Gary Zerno.

"Friday Night Lights" comes with its own home-grown co-executive producer, too. Sarah Aubrey was born in Austin and graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School. After receiving a degree from Princeton University, she returned to Austin for law school at UT. There she met her husband, Eric Harmon (who now works for the district attorney's office in Los Angeles).

A promising career in entertainment law took a sharp turn into movie producing when Aubrey hooked up with the Coen brothers for their film "Bad Santa." Next she partnered with Berg on the "Friday Night Lights" movie.

"It's interesting and twisted, isn't it?" Aubrey said recently of her leap from law to "Bad Santa" to TV. "This one is near and dear to my heart because of Austin. It's really a dream come true to be able to come home and shoot here, under that sky and with all these wonderful people. Austin has been a warm, wonderful host city for us. We're trying and I think succeeding in getting a strong sense of place."

Authentic feel

Peter Berg fell in love with the nonfiction saga of Odessa's famed Permian Panthers when Bissinger's book came out. It took more than a dozen years for Berg to bring the book to the big screen, including a year in Texas writing the script.

The series, in Berg's mind, is a logical extension — and a chance to do more with the original material.

"We loved the film, but Buzz was able to take a really deep look at the culture of athletics," Berg said. "That was limited in the movie, and now we have the opportunity to go deeper. We use football as a baseline from which to explore this Shakespearean type of environment."

The series will delve into weighty issues such as racism, religion, grade inflation for athletes and the sometimes suffocating pressure on players and coaches to succeed.

"Brian (Grazer, another producer partner on the show) said to me, 'Don't clown up this world,' " Berg said. "I don't think we did. I think it will ring authentic to anybody caught up in that world."

The goal is for "Friday Night Lights" to appeal to young and old, sports fans and nonsports fans. At its heart, the series is about friendships and families as much as football.

"Buzz's book has succeeded all over this country in capturing people's emotions about football and living in a community," Aubrey says. "There was an audience for the movie that was wildly larger than just the middle of the country that likes football. This is a high-stakes environment with kids trying to grow up in a spotlight, where successes and failures are huge. But everyone who's been a teenager remembers those years, if not fondly then certainly with a lot of emotions."

Nevertheless, the football scenes have to be realistic and true.

"Our goal is to not embarrass ourselves," said Berg, who believes that mission was accomplished and points to Mack Brown's cameo in the pilot as "a ringing endorsement from the community and the state."

In a half-time scene for the pilot that was filmed at Pflugerville, real coaches deliver the "firing up" speech to the players.

"That was very 'of the moment,' " Aubrey says. "You can't write things like that."

Besides advice and cameos from local coaches, the series has put together a fake football team that looks real. The players, ranging in age from 18 to 27, are young men who are not in high school or college but who have played football.

For the bone-shattering hits, the principals, have stunt doubles, but mostly the actors do their own plays.

"We're running every play until we get smashed, from snap to tackle," says Zach Gilford, who plays backup quarterback Matt Saracen.

Kyle Chandler, who played briefly on the University of Georgia's freshman-sophomore football team, based his character on local coaches he spent time with — not on Billy Bob Thornton's character from the movie.

"Every coach is different as a leader, but they all have to find a way to reprimand and to encourage," Chandler says. "There's no doubt they love the kids. The players are their kids. When the team wins, it's great, but if they lose, you don't want to be around town. Coaches are under high pressure from families, the team and the whole town."

To succeed, "Friday Night Lights" will have to buck a long-standing jinx against family shows, shows based on movies and shows about sports. And the show's Tuesday time slot seems to confuse some people — even though a show about high-school football would never air on Friday nights when games are played.

Berg, who got rave reviews for "Wonderland," a drama set in a psychiatric hospital that was axed after only two episodes, says he's "cautiously pessimistic. . . . I hope it's a big hit, and I'm enormously proud of the show. But TV is very complex and competitive right now."

Brian Grazer, on the other hand, says he's "cautiously optimistic. If people tune into our show, I think the interest will accelerate and they'll come back. My heart believes it'll work."

dholloway@statesman.com; 445-3608