On October 11, 1975, the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” was broadcast on NBC, and the opening credits featured a series of photos of Manhattan shot by model-turned-photographer (and my cousin) Edie Baskin. She was the show’s sole photographer for its first 25 years, and her now-iconic images of the cast and hosts, enhanced by hand-drawn color graphics, served as “bumpers,” shots between the commercials and the broadcast.

Those photos of luminaries, including Steve Martin, Burt Reynolds, Carrie Fisher, The Rolling Stones, Lily Tomlin, and eventually “The Not Ready for Prime Time” players John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Dan Aykroyd, have now been collected into a book called Live from My Studio: The Art of Edie Baskin, published by Simon & Schuster Books.

In an interview, she talks to us about how she got the job and her evolving technique.  

How did you become interested in augmenting photographs with color and adding graphic elements?

A few people were doing it at the time. Jean Pagliuso and Benno Friedman were doing it a little bit differently. I had a boyfriend, and we went on a cross-country trip. One of the places we went was Las Vegas. I loved the Las Vegas pictures, so I decided to put some color in them, and then in some other pictures, pictures I’d done of some cows.

What do you use? Paint? Crayons?

Yes, Marshall photo oils, pencil sets, chalk, anything that makes color. 

When you put color on a black and white photo, what does that interaction mean to you?

I’d like to see it change into something I’ve made.

How did you get involved?

I met Lorne Michaels at a poker game at the Chateau Marmont. And there was just a group of us that hung out, and we went to Las Vegas together. We were just a group of kids. And then I moved back to New York. I had lived there before, but I was taking a little break.

He did a Lily Tomlin special. And he hired me for that because we were friends. It was like, “Let’s put on a show in the barnyard.” Only Lorne got a real job. I moved back to New York, and Lorne knew I was there. So he called me and he told me he got a late-night television show. And he was coming back to New York, and said, “Let’s hang.”

I invited him to come to my loft, where I’d been doing my photography work on my own. And I asked him to come down and look at my work. I was very proud of my photos. He liked those and the pictures from my cross-country trip, and he asked me if I could do the same thing for New York City at night. I said, “Yes, I’m sure I could.” I did that, and then I was called up to NBC to show a couple of the creative people there, and they liked it. So, out I went into the streets, shooting for the title sequence, and that became the opening credits. 

The bumpers started on the second show. I was friends with Paul Simon, and I introduced Paul and Lorne, and they became fast friends. So Paul did the second show, and I took a picture of him standing by a piano and tinted it. And I used it as a bumper.

What did your experience as a model teach you about interacting with the subjects of your pictures? 

I always try to make people comfortable and welcome.

I’m going to ask you about some of the images in the book that I thought represented a range worth discussing. Let’s start with Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin, actors who were and still are married. You really captured their chemistry.

They were just really great together, very happy together, and lively together.

The Talking Heads. That was one of the most subtle in terms of your additions to the image, almost like sepia, a very light touch. 

I didn’t make a conscious decision. It was what I did at the time and how I grew, how I moved in and out of different things. And that was more of what I was doing at the time. I did a scribble on her blouse. I did put some skin color. That was when I was just beginning to work with the skin color.

Your portrait of Teri Garr is much more vivid, really expressing her vibrance.

That’s one of my all-time favorites, and she said she liked all of them. Teri was a friend of mine. We were in dance class together, and I have just known her throughout my life.

And you donated some of the originals to UCLA.

A series of my hand-painted works. Yes, I call it my wall of laughter.  

Fantastic Fest is an interesting combination of known quantities and unexpected discoveries. Everyone has an idea what something like “Black Phone 2” or even “Primate” is before they use their pass to score a ticket for it, but a lot of the schedule also consists of premieres that can feel more like throwing a dart at a schedule. Maybe this will be good? To varying degrees, all three in this dispatch are.

“Colors” meets “Sinners” in Ryan Prows’ intense “Night Patrol,” one of the most buzzed Fantastic Fest premieres of 2025, like it or not. Love it or hate it, and I heard from people in both camps, this brutal genre flick had people here talking about it, and that’s sometimes all that really matters when your audience is seeing five movies a day. You want to stand out. It’s an audacious genre film, a movie with a great pitch: What if the corrupt cops of an LAPD task force were actual vampires, sucking off the blood of the community they’ve sworn an oath to protect?

The director of “Lowlife” launches his film out of a cannon in the opening scenes as we meet Wazi (RJ Cyler) and his girlfriend sharing a moment in the middle of the L.A. night. Police officers approach the vehicle, demand that she gets out of the car, and then one whose clearly in charge (played by wrestler C.M. Punk) instructs the new guy named Hawkins (Justin Long) to shoot her in the head. He complies, setting a dark tone for a film that is willing to go there in terms of violence, language, and racial commentary.

The next day we learn that Hawkins is partners with one of the LAPD that may be a rare good apple named Carr (Jermaine Fowler), who, of course, is the now-on-the-run Wazi’s brother. Their mother (Nicki Micheaux) still lives in a place called the Courts, preaching the values of her ancestors as protection, using Zulu imagery and practices to help her people. She hands out pamphlets to gang members, and places African totems on the fences around her house. It turns out they will come in handy.

After his initiation into “Night Patrol,” Hawkins discovers the truth about the elite squad, and a secret about his family relation to the group. He also undergoes a pretty gnarly, bloody transformation. Prows digs right into some fun practical effects and gallons of the fake red stuff, and Long is truly up for the challenge. You know those sequences in movies when the ordinary guy becomes a bloodsucker for the first time? The shaking, the terror, the transforming, etc.? Long is basically forced into one of those for half the run time here, and he gives a physically daring performance that’s unlike what is usually asked of him. He’s great. Almost everyone is good in “Night Patrol”—the “Master” of the group who I won’t spoil feels a bit miscast to me—but it belongs to Long.

Prows has a lot of ideas that he’s willing to fearlessly deploy, but the movie gets a little messy in the final act, as chaos descends on the Courts, and we lose a sense of geography and continuity. It becomes hard to tell who’s going where, who’s still alive, and who’s found safety. At one point, some key characters seem to be running out only to end up on a couch again. And then the final scenes are even clunkier. And while “Sinners” is a tough bar to reach, it does feel like “Night Patrol” raises some ideas about race and law enforcement without as much to say about white culture literally sucking the blood of minorities and their cultures as Coogler’s masterpiece.

Still, this is an original, ambitious piece of work that IFC should be able to turn into a buzz generator to start 2026.

A film that started to make that buzzy noise in Austin in the days before its premiere is Rod Blackhurst’s demented “Dolly,” which is basically an homage to Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” complete with a Leatherface-esque monster, twisted family, and grainy film stock. Co-writer/director Blackhurst is clever enough to literally place a signpost early in the film to make it clear that he knows you’re starting to suspect the Hooper connections, and you’re not wrong.

Chase (Seann William Scott) and Rachel (an excellent Kate Cobb) are taking a hike to a scenic overlook, where Chase is going to propose to his longtime girlfriend (although we know she’s not sure she’s going to say yes). On the trail to the view, they find some creepy dolls, most broken, some nailed to trees. That they don’t immediately run back to their car is a bit of a movie contrivance, but that’s the contract viewers sign with a movie called “Dolly.”

It’s not long before Chase and Rachel meet the title character, a hulking beast played by a wrestler named Max the Impaler with a bloody dress and a doll mask on its face. Only making breathing and squeaky, sorta-baby noises, Dolly is nightmare fuel, especially after she captures Rachel, and tries to make the poor woman her new “daughter.” This means a crib, diaper change, and, yes, feeding. “Dolly” flirts with what was once called torture porn as Rachel’s plight gets more and more disturbing, but Blackhurst knows just how long to carry out his grossest ideas before giving viewers a break.

His vision is twisted but also sometimes funny in its ridiculousness, making for a film that’s well-balanced tonally, even if it feels a little slight on plotting. I get the sense that Blackhurst and his team would like to turn this character into a franchise and if this relatively self-contained, small-cast version is just the introduction for the bigger and better adventures of Dolly, it’s a memorable one.

Finally, there’s Diana Mills Smith’s “Dinner to Die For,” which played as a part of the low-budget Burnt Ends program at Fantastic Fest. It’s a single-setting, cheaply-made piece of thriller filmmaking that feels a bit like a short that’s been barely stretched out to feature (and it’s only 75 minutes), but Smith has ability that’s worth keeping an eye on. She knows how to keep a three-character piece moving, even if I wanted another unexpected course or two on this fixed menu.

Shamilla Miller is solid as the intriguing Hannah, a chef who has been forced into the relatively unsatisfying work of food photography. You know the fancy shots that accompany overpriced cookbooks, which she wishes she could write herself. Her friend Evan (Steven John Ward) keeps coming over to try her cuisine and watch true crime episodes with her, clearly putting in the time because he hopes to escape the friend zone. When a new neighbor named Blaire (Nina Erasmus) catches Hannah’s eye, Hannah starts an unexpected role play with Evan, suggesting that she could invite Blaire over for a bit of dinner and a bit of murder. Is she just playfully incorporating their true crime obsession into flirtatious banter? That’s what Evan presumes at first, and he plays along, until he starts to worry.

“Dinner to Die For” probably should have been a short or given a bit more meat to fill out to a feature. It’s a film that takes too long to find another gear and then feels kind of like it rushes to its ending just as the stakes are raised, although Smith does get a few fantastic shots in her climax that had the audience at the Fantastic Fest premiere cheering. It matters, especially for films like these, when the last bites are the best ones.

“It was in Odessa that I found those Friday night lights, and they burned with more intensity than I ever imagined… As someone later described it, those lights become an addiction if you live in a place like Odessa…As I stood in that beautiful stadium on the plains week after week, it became obvious that these kids held the town on their shoulders.” — H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream (1990)

If the conversation is about the most significant and enduring book ever published about high school football, the universally acknowledged GOAT is H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights.

When we’re debating the best movies about high school football, my vote goes to Peter Berg’s adaptation of “FNL” (2004), just ahead of “All the Right Moves” (1983) and “Remember the Titans” (2000) and light-years ahead of the admittedly entertaining but borderline cartoonish “Varsity Blues” (1999).

As for TV series in this category, let’s broaden the discussion to include series covering all sports, at any level. I have a fond place in my memory bank for “The White Shadow” (1978-1981), and I loved “Ted Lasso” so much that I’m cautiously optimistic about the somewhat surprising news of a Season 4, even though I thought Season 3 wrapped things up in note-perfect fashion. Still, it’s the television adaptation of “Friday Night Lights” (2006-2011) that has remained atop my rankings of the best TV sports shows ever made.

High school football season is here. Hawaii and Alaska have already begun their 2025 seasons, with the vast majority of states kicking off their campaigns in the third or fourth weeks of August. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the legacy of “Friday Night Lights”—the book, the movie, and the TV show.

The Book

By the fall of 1988, the brilliant, then 34-year-old H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger was already a star journalist. Bissinger had won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting while writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he made another big splash with a Vanity Fair article titled “Shattered Glass,” an exposé of the fabulist catalog of work by Stephen Glass. (Writer/director Billy Ray’s adaptation of that piece was one of the best films of 2003.)

Bissinger spent a year in Odessa, TX, and immersed himself in the football-crazed community—and the result was the sensational bestseller Friday Night Lights, told in the “New Journalism” style pioneered by the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gay Talese. The book was about so much more than high school sports; Bissinger took us inside a West Texas community where solid, small-town values were stressed—but racism was prevalent, and football was given priority over academics, with the locals placing an inordinate amount of importance on the Friday night gridiron performances of a bunch of 17-year-olds.

The most tragic figure is the star running back Boobie Miles, who seems bound for Division I and perhaps even NFL greatness, until he suffers a brutal injury in a preseason scrimmage. At a time when Boobie most needed the support of the community, the easy grades teachers were handing him disappeared (at a time when education required to be stressed), and some members of the coaching staff reportedly made cruel and racist jokes about Boobie being useless. Even in the most tragic of passages, there is a poetry to Bissinger’s narrative, and this is a work of complexity and subtlety. He includes positive portrayals of head coach Gary Gaines and several players, including Brian Chavez, Ivory Christian, and Brian Winchell, but he never shies away from showing us the darkest side of those Friday night lights.

(Sidebar: Over the years, Bissinger provided financial and emotional support for the struggling Miles and published a 34-page afterword titled “After Friday Night Lights” in 2012 that detailed their relationship–but to no avail. Miles has made a mess of his own life and has seriously harmed others; he has been convicted of multiple crimes and is currently serving a 13-year prison sentence.)

The Movie

Rewatching director Peter Berg’s 2004 adaptation of Bissinger’s book (Berg co-wrote the screenplay with David Aaron Cohen), I was struck by the gritty authenticity of the football sequences, whether it was preseason practices, weight room sessions, or the climactic championship game at the Astrodome. (Berg wisely kept the story planted in the past, capturing the atmosphere of the Odessa of the late 1980s.) In subsequent films like “Battleship” and “Lone Survivor,” Berg and the talented cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler would sometimes overdo it with the whip-around, herky-jerky camera moves. Still, on their first collaboration with “FNL,” the style is just slick yet raw enough to create a docudrama effect without being too showy.

Although Berg had to jettison background historical passages, streamline storylines and nudge facts around to winnow a 357-page tome down to a 118-minute movie, the fictionalized portrayals of Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) and Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), among others, feel true to the spirit of the book. Derek Luke is electric as Boobie, who talks about himself in the third person and is more concerned with personal glory than team success, until he suffers that horrific injury. When Boobie insists to his coach that he’s ready to return for an October game against Midland, he immediately goes down again, this time for good. (Gaines takes one look at the hurting Boobie on the sidelines, walks away, and bluntly states, “He’s done.”)

Another compelling storyline involves the fumble-prone running back Donny Billingsley (Garret Hedlund, terrific) and his alcoholic and abusive father, Charlie (a menacingly good Tim McGraw), who wears and displays his state championship ring as if it represents the most important accomplishment in his life—which, sadly, is true. 

At halftime of the climactic game against the heavily favored, physically dominant Dallas Carter team, Thornton’s Coach, Gaines, sums up a reality about high-stakes high school football that rings true to this day: “You got two more quarters, and that’s it… Most of you have been playing this game for 10 years. You’ve got two more quarters, and after that, most of you will never play this game again for as long as you live.” (I remember hearing my coach at Thornridge High School giving a version of that same speech before the final game of my senior season.) Little wonder that even though these kids are playing a game they truly love, they often seem to forget to inhale the joy of it all.

The TV Show

As we all know, Ben Affleck starred in the NBC drama series that was inspired by Bissinger’s book. Wait, what? 

“Against the Grain” (1993), featuring John Terry as high school coach Ed Clemons, and Affleck as his son, the hunky young football player Joe Willie Clemons, was loosely based on Friday Night Lights. It lasted just eight weeks before it was permanently sacked, and quickly forgotten.

Onto the main event. When Peter Berg and showrunner Jason Katims brought “Friday Night Lights” to NBC in 2006, it marked the relatively rare occurrence of a book becoming a movie and then a TV show, with “M*A*S*H” arguably the most famous example. (Other notable titles: “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan stories, “The Dead Zone,” and “Snowpiercer.”)

With W.G. Snuffy Walden creating the iconic, slow-build,  chills-inducing opening anthem—it’s a Top 10 TV theme for me—that sets the tone for the blending of sports and family drama, “Friday Night Lights” was almost entirely fictionalized, and it softened some of the harsher themes explored in the book and the film. We spent at least as much time following the domestic arcs of the various nuclear families as we did on the football scenes–but that’s why it appealed to some non-sports fans as well as us football nerds. Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton created one of the most believable and empathetic couples television has ever seen in Eric and Tami Taylor, with an underappreciated Aimee Teagarden doing emotionally charged work as their teenage daughter Julie. (Britton had little to do as Coach Gaines’ wife Sharon in “Friday Night Lights” the movie, but she was a formidable co-lead on the TV show.)

The football scenes were well-choreographed, even if there were far too many games decided on the final play, and we were emotionally invested from the get-go, due to the stellar performances by Scott Porter as the star quarterback Jason Street, who suffers a paralyzing injury in the pilot episode; Zach Gilford as the aw-shucks backup QB Matt Saracen, Gaius Charles as Brian “Smash” Williams; Taylor Kitsch as the troubled anti-hero Tim Riggins, and, later on,  Michael B. Jordan as Vince Howard. (The insanely talented cast also included Jesse Plemons and Adrienne Palicki, and would expand to include blazing talents such as Aldis Hodge and Jurnee Smollett. Even though most of the actors playing high schoolers were too old for the part, at least the storylines would have some students graduating while others rotated in.)

The TV version of “FNL” would sometimes venture into lurid territory (e.g. Plemons’ Landry killing the stalker of Palicki’s Tyra, and the two of them conspiring to cover up the crime). But on balance, the series did a stellar job of tackling issues of race, economic class, crime, domestic strife, healthcare, school board politics, and, yes, the overemphasis on high school football in small-town America. Over five seasons, first on NBC and then on DirecTV’s 101 Network, “Friday Night Lights” struggled to find a large audience, but it was critically acclaimed—and dearly embraced by those of us who loved it. In the film version of “FNL,” Coach Gaines says to his team, “Can you live in [the] moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart… Boys, my heart is full. My heart’s full.”

On TV, Coach Taylor’s mantra was, “Clear Eyes, Full Heart, Can’t Lose.” Sentimental as it might sound, the story of “Friday Night Lights,” warts and all, has cleared many an eye and filled many a heart. It is a football story, an American story, a story that holds up a mirror to society, and it rings as true and insightful in 2025 as it did in 1998 and again in the 2000s.