Friday Night Lights (2004)

Friday Night Lights (2004)

Tagline: Hope comes alive on Friday nights.

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.

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 Movie Poster (2004)

Friday Night Lights (2004)

Directed by: Peter Berg
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke, Jay Hernandez, Lucas Black, Connie Cooper, Garrett Hedlund, Lee Thompson Young, Tim McGraw, Amber Heard, Katherine Willis
Screenplay by: David Aaron Cohen
Production Design by: Sharon Seymour
Cinematography by: Tobias A. Schliessler
Film Editing by: Gabrielle Fasulo, Colby Parker Jr., Susan Rash, David Rosenbloom
Costume Design by: Susan Matheson
Set Decoration by: Carla Curry
Art Direction by: Peter Borck
Music by: Explosions in the Sky, Brian Reitzell, David Torn
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic issues, sexual content, language, teen drinking, rough sports action.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: October 8, 2004

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