412 festival comes to Pitt — Football novelist dealt with criticism

When H.G. Bissinger’s novel “Friday Night Lights” was first released, its reception in… When H.G. Bissinger’s novel “Friday Night Lights” was first released, its reception in Odessa, Texas, was “in a word, horrendous,” its author said.

“I couldn’t go back immediately because there were death threats against me,” Bissinger said. “So I think it’s safe to say they didn’t like it.”

Bissinger spoke Friday night in Alumni Hall as part of the third annual 412: Creative Nonfiction Festival in Pittsburgh in conjunction with Pitt’s film studies department and the ongoing Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series.

Pitt professor and editor of Creative Nonfiction literary journal, Lee Gutkind, introduced Bissinger and a screening of the film version of “Friday Night Lights.”

After the film was a question-and-answer session with Bissinger, led by Pitt in Hollywood’s adviser, Carl Kurlander, and Arts and Entertainment Director of City Paper Bill O’Driscoll.

“I think it’s a really exquisite film,” Bissinger said. “I think I’m different than a lot of writers, because a lot of writers bitch and moan and complain that Hollywood is gonna screw up their book, and they probably will, but nobody held a gun to my head to pay me what they paid me, and they paid nicely.”

Bissinger also considers himself lucky because the film’s director, Peter Berg, is his cousin.

“I didn’t pay him off,” Bissinger assured the crowd. “Universal asked Pete, and because he wanted to do it, I was very lucky because the last person Hollywood thinks about is the writer, and Pete wanted to honor the book and wanted to honor me.”

Because of Berg’s involvement, Bissinger said he had some input on the final product, but that he didn’t exploit his family ties and yielded most of the creative control to his cousin.

“I did tell him ‘Don’t change the ending,'” Bissinger said. “If you have them win at the end, don’t do ‘Friday Night Lights,’ because you will have stripped the book of what made it so poignant.”

To write the book, Bissinger left his job at the Philadelphia Inquirer and moved his fiancee and children down to Odessa, Texas, for a year to follow the Permian Panthers’ high school football season in 1988.

Bissinger responded to a question about how honest a portrait he believed the film to be, saying, “Ninety-five percent of what I wrote about in the book I actually did witness, but the film is somewhat dramatized.”

“The most important thing to me was to make sure these kids weren’t made to look like idiots,” Bissinger said of the film. He also made it a priority while in Odessa to preserve the players’ privacy with regard to their personal lives outside of the football field and classroom.

“I made the deliberate decision to stay out of their love lives, because I felt there had to be some barriers,” Bissinger said. “I didn’t go to their parties, because there’s nothing more pathetic than a 30-year-old Jewish guy playing with himself in the corner while everybody’s having fun.”

Despite Bissinger’s approval of the film version, “Friday Night Lights” the novel is decidedly not just a book about football.

“My expectations were that this would be a Hoosiers-type book, but once Booby [Permian’s star player] got hurt, the town turned against him racially and all bets were off,” Bissinger said.

Formerly a high school football player himself, Bissinger felt he knew a little about the game and the culture coming in, but he found himself a bit out of his league.

“I take offense to the suggestion that we Jews don’t play football,” Bissinger said. “I was a 130-pound point guard. Of course, all I could do was aim at people’s ankles. I was like a stealth guard — they never saw me coming.”

Odessa, though, introduced him to a different side of the game.

“I knew high school football was important, but I had no idea how important,” Bissinger said.

“After the book came out, the people in Odessa were telling me I had misunderstood what football meant, that I had exaggerated. Yet at the same time, the game between the town’s two high school teams had needed a hundred extra police officers, and there were public service announcements from the mayor asking for peace and harmony, so don’t f—ing tell me high school football isn’t important.”

Having had the benefit of 16 years since the book was released to reconsider, Bissinger said that many people from Odessa have since told him they believe his novel to be accurate and fair.

Bissinger said that Odessa is not an isolated example of skewed priorities in high school with regard to sports. “It’s not just football, and it’s not just Odessa. It’s lacrosse, it’s basketball and it’s all over the country,” Bissinger said.

“The book was supposed to be a cautionary tale about the dark side of high school sports, but in the last 16 years, things have gotten worse and worse.”

Following the screening and questions, Bissinger stayed to sign copies of his book and chat with audience members about it, as well as for the film and his lecture slated for the following day on ethics in writing for the 412: Creative Nonfiction Festival.