Friday, October 8, 2004

PG

For thematic issues, sexual content, language, some teen drinking and rough sports action

Drama

Billy Bob Thornton, Tim McGraw, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, Lucas Black, Lee Thompson Young, Garrett Hedlund, Lee Jackson

David Aaron Cohen, Peter Berg

Peter Berg

Friday Night Lights (2004)

From Oscar®-winning producer Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment and based on the best-selling book about high school football by H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights chronicles the entire 1988 season of the Permian High Panthers of Odessa, Texas, with football players, coaches, mothers, fathers, pastors, boosters, fans and families struggling with ongoing personal conflicts while the team fights for a state championship.

A town for sale, Odessa, Texas has seen better days--the financial bust evident in its boarded-up shops and broken lives. Yet one hope sustains the community where, once a week during the fall, the town and its dreams come alive beneath the dazzling and disorienting Friday night lights...when the Permian High Panthers take to the field. In a city where economic uncertainty has eroded the spirit of its inhabitants, nearly everyone seeks comfort in the religion of the Friday night ritual, where the unfulfilled dreams of an entire community are shifted onto the shoulder pads of a team of high-school athletes.

Friday Night Lights captures the frenzy of a small town that reveres its school team and their weekly games. With Odessa standing in for places just like it all across America, the film provides an illuminating look at the hoped-for successes and the built-in failures of trying to live the American Dream through the efforts of a group of talented young men. The film is produced by Academy Award® winner Brian Grazer, directed by Peter Berg (The Rundown, Very Bad Things) and adapted from Bissinger's book by Berg and David Aaron Cohen (The Devil's Own).