THE WHOLE 100 YARDS `FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS' FINDS CONSIDERABLE DRAMA IN SMALL-TOWN, BIG-TIME FOOTBALL.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

``Friday Night Lights,'' H.G. ``Buzz'' Bissinger's nonfiction best seller about a Texas town's obsession with high-school football, could have been made into several different movies.

After more than a dozen years of false starts and failed attempts, however, the movie that Bissinger's cousin, Peter Berg, has directed comes down, according to the author, to family relationships played out in a very imposing gridiron context.

``For all the controversy the book caused, whether it was about race or education, that was not the underlying theme of the book,'' investigative reporter Bissinger says of his 1990 tome. ``It was about these 17-year-old kids carrying the hopes and dreams of an entire town on their shoulders and how they deal with it. The first director that tried to do it, the late Alan Pakula, always said, 'This is a book about fathers and sons.' This was gratifying to me, and it resonates in the film.''

It resonated with the film's two mature male leads, Billy Bob Thornton and country music sensation Tim McGraw, as well.

Thornton, whose father coached basketball in Arkansas, plays Gary Gaines, coach of the Odessa, Texas, multiple state champion Permian High Panthers during the 1988 season, when Bissinger lived in and studied the town. McGraw, who learned at the age of 11 that he was the son of Major League pitching legend Tug McGraw, makes his major acting debut as Charlie Billingsley, an ornery former Panther star who takes out his disappointments in life on his butterfingered tailback son Don (Garrett Hedlund).

Other Permian players are portrayed by Lucas Black (the kid in Thornton's ``Sling Blade''), Jay Hernandez, Lee Thompson Young and Texas college football legend Lee Jackson. Most poignant is Derek Luke (``Antwone Fisher'') as Boobie Miles, the Panthers' hotshot running back whose early-season injury alters his life forever - and, much more important to the competition-crazed town, sacks Coach Gaines' game plan for a winning season.

Coach Billy Bob

Although he purposely avoided meeting his real-life counterpart, Thornton learned from the book and audiotapes of Gary Gaines that the man was, for the most part, a stabilizing father figure in his highly pressured players' lives. Except, of course, when something went wrong on the field.

``I didn't want to imitate him,'' says Thornton. ``I knew his voice and accent were very similar to mine, and I knew what he was as a person. He was supposed to be a pretty regular guy and a nice guy.

``On the field, he could be hard and could get excited. But one of the reasons why I wanted to play the part was that he wasn't just a one-note coach. A lot of coaches in movies are just intense every minute of the day, and you don't see the other side of them. The trick here was to play a guy who had a dual nature; he's a coach, but he's a husband and a father with a home life. So it was, how do you play a guy who's really decent and loves his players but also has that strong desire to win?''

Using stuff he'd seen at home, right? Well, not exactly.

``My dad was a pretty hard guy - we didn't have a great relationship,'' admits Thornton, whose own sports career - he dreamed of pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals - was cut short when a freak fastball broke his collarbone the day he arrived at the Kansas City Royals' training camp.

``That was really the only place we connected. If I didn't talk about sports with him, there was nothing else to talk about.

``He died in 1974. But it's so funny, doing this movie was a little bit of a healing thing for me. Taking a few things from my dad, I realized that he taught me some pretty good stuff. It's the first time I've actually been able to think that sometimes he was right.''

McGraw's experience of sports and family was even more complicated. Despite excelling at baseball, football and basketball in his small Louisiana town, Tim could not get his famous father to pay much attention to him until he reached adulthood. The pair did become friends, however, and Tim confirms that his latest hit single, ``Live Like You Were Dying,'' is a tribute to Tug, who passed away in January.

Happily married to fellow Nashville superstar Faith Hill, with whom he has three daughters, McGraw is quite pleased to acknowledge that, once he got to college, ``guitars and beer'' derailed his own chances of a pro sports career. Though understandably pleased with how his life has turned out, McGraw had memories to draw on for his portrayal of ornery life-loser Charlie.

``I thought (truck driver Horace Smith) was my real dad until I found the birth certificate,'' recalls McGraw, referring to the man his mother, Betty, married a year after Tim was born. ``My stepdad was one of those guys who had a big heart, but he could also be meaner than a bull. I grew up with a lot of abuse in the family, so it was pretty traumatic all the way growing up. I think this was just the capper for me.''

Like Thornton, McGraw avoided meeting the real Billingsley before playing him. Might have avoided a bad fight, too.

``I saw one picture of Charlie that was on the wall in the house we were shooting at, but that was just a picture of him in a high-school uniform,'' McGraw recalls. ``And I talked to the principal of the high school for about 20 minutes about Charlie. He said he was a pretty rough guy during that time, but he was talking about when they were in high school.''

Recalling his own childhood sports experiences, McGraw reckons that Charlie represents a universal archetype.

``Anybody that's been around Little League baseball long enough, every game you go to, that guy's there,'' he says. ``There are probably about 15 to 20 parents I remember, growing up, that are incorporated in Charlie a little bit.''

Crazy about football

And that was just in McGraw's teensy little Start, La. High-school football in Texas, where Permian's Ratliff Stadium, the nation's largest, seats 20,000, is a whole other ballgame. Indeed, many of the working-class oil city's residents felt so betrayed by Bissinger's warts-and-all report that he had to cancel local book-signing appearances due to threats of bodily harm.

This did not make getting the movie made any easier for producer Brian Grazer, who wanted to make at least some of it in Odessa (scenes were ultimately shot at Ratliff Stadium, though much filming was also done in Houston and Austin, Texas).

There was also the tough matter of figuring out which aspects of the sociologically rich book the movie needed to focus on. After original director Pakula was killed in a freak auto accident, super-producer Grazer, whose films run the gamut from ``A Beautiful Mind'' to ``8 Mile,'' went through numerous filmmakers who just didn't seem to have the right combination.

That Bissinger's younger cousin Berg, who shares a screenplay credit with David Aaron Cohen, ultimately wound up in the directing chair was something of a coincidence. But the actor (``The Last Seduction,'' TV's ``Chicago Hope'') turned filmmaker (``Very Bad Things,'' ``The Rundown'') shares one family trait with his Pulitzer Prize-winning relative: a drive to get the story right.

Don't drop the ball

``To know that I had somebody who was going to be sitting in quiet judgment of me was something that definitely kept me on my toes,'' Berg admits. ``What became important for me was to try to get some of the visceral experience that Buzz got by going down there with his family for over a year. So last football season, I went down there and spent the season with two different teams (one each in Odessa and Austin). In a sense, that enabled me to tell my own story, where I could look Buzz in the eye and say, `OK, I get it.' ''

And in the process, ingratiate himself with Odessans whose goodwill he'd need when filming time came. The more controversial cultural aspects of the story are downplayed in the movie, and Berg reports that the Odessa school board, at least, has deemed the film's portrayal of its world a fair one. Bissinger stayed out of the town during production; not to avoid attention to the family connection, he says, but out of recognition that Berg had to tell his story his own way in a different medium.

Still, Bissinger has gone on record saying that if little Petey screwed up ``Friday Night Lights,'' he'd kill him. Now that he's sat through the film - twice - family court judgment has been passed on this remarkably family-resonant movie project.

``Pete is my cousin and I love Pete to death, but I love my book more,'' Bissinger proclaims. ``I mean that. But Pete does get to live. Is the film different from the book? It is different from the book. But I feel that the film really captures the essential spirit of the book.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) FIRST AND FOREVER

`Friday Night Lights' digs into the religion of Texas high-school football

(2) Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) leads the Permian High Panthers of Odessa, Texas, to the state playoffs in ``Friday Night Lights.''

(3) Coach Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), left, Chris Comer (Lee Thompson Young) and Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) huddle on the sidelines.

(4) Boobie Miles (Derek Luke, left) and teammates in the Panthers' locker room.

(5) director Peter Berg