'We're the Guinea Pig'

Nan Bernstein wanted to set the record straight. She said she was baffled by an Austin Chronicle article from more than a year ago on the subject of $400,000 of tax breaks earmarked for Friday Night Lights by the city of Austin and the Texas Film Incentive Program. She said phone calls to the paper went unanswered, so she was understandably eager to have her say once she got a living, breathing Chronicle writer on the phone.

"I read that and thought, 'What?' At that point, we had not received any money yet," Bernstein said in a phone interview from the Austin-based Friday Night Lights production offices. "Only recently has the incentive money been paid," she said.

It might be a part of Bernstein's organizational DNA that she was able to pull this bit of unfinished business back into the present in order to set the record straight – to finally pluck that speck of lint that had been driving her crazy all this time, in order to get on with the matter at hand – which was entertain this curious reporter's questions. On the agenda: Bernstein's role in the critically acclaimed series, how she believes Texas fares among other states with film incentive programs, and what will be the future of Friday Night Lights: Is the fifth season they are currently shooting really the last one?

"I consider my job as a general contractor," Bernstein said of her role in the series. "I organize money, people, and time." As producer, she was among the first to hit Texas prior to shooting. She was the one who leased office space and did early scouting for locations, chief among them the football field, ("I knew that was going to be the heart of the show.") And while so many of her responsibilities seem wide-ranging and stressful, she is the first to say that it's all made easier by surrounding herself by good people.

"This is a major team effort," she said of the Friday Night Lights production team, which includes about 110 staff on any given day, with 50 more on football game shoots. Unlike working a feature film, where you count down to the end of the shooting schedule, the entire Friday Night Lights staff is really working three shows at once, she explained: wrapping one and prepping for the next while shooting another.

"Putting together the right group of people makes all the difference in the world," she said of her predominantly Texas-born and -bred staff. "The good thing about episodic television is that we can keep refining systems and people. It's kind of a dumb analogy, but we're all trying to make one good cup of coffee. We need lots of grounds, one cup, and one coffeemaker. As a group, this is one of the best group of crews that I've ever worked with. Everyone feels very connected to the show, very responsible to it. You feel it when you come in. It's rare when you come into a show or film and feel happy to see everyone."

And what of the incentive program?

"We're the guinea pig," she said plainly. "I think a lot of studios in L.A. are taking a wait-and-see attitude before coming here to work. Texas is still working out the kinks. There are other states with much easier systems, others with worse," she said. "The state film commission requires a lot of work to show accountability, and we are required to verify a lot of paperwork. The verification system is a little drawn out right now. It has to be because it's new," she conceded. Still, she has taken it upon herself to spread the good word about living and working in Texas to any of her colleagues who ask.

Well, perhaps by the time Friday Night Lights begins shooting the sixth season, the kinks will be worked out. Although it was announced that the fifth season would be the last, the rumor mill has been working overtime with speculation that the end maybe isn't so near after all.

"Oh, they haven't told us anything," Bernstein says. "They've told us this might not be the last season. Every year, we're told we're shutting down, not going to continue. Every year, it's a crapshoot."

[Editor's note: While Friday Night Lights has certainly figured in our ongoing coverage of the film incentives issue, the only reference to $400,000 we could find in our archives was in a March 19, 2007, blog post written by Wells Dunbar about the upcoming agenda of a City Council meeting, in which he erroneously reported that the council was considering an item that would grant the production $400,000 in incentives; the actual figure was $40,000 a season. The item was approved by council on March 22, 2007. Dunbar has no recollection of being contacted by Bernstein.]