Drawing crowds that outnumber attendance at professional and college games combined, high school football is more than a mere sporting event--it is a full-blown cultural phenomenon that provides a sense of identity to small towns all over America. Blue Hill Productions takes a near-anthropological survey of the importance of high school football to small-town life in their revealing documentary FRIDAY NIGHTS IN AMERICA, travelling to five very different communities to gauge the complex emotions elicited by the sport. The film contrasts the obsessive fandom of west Texas prairie town Odessa to the more sedate approach of wealthy San Francisco suburb Concord; captures an annual rivalry between two teams in the predominantly African-American farming town of Pahokee, Florida; documents an extravagant parade for the Hawkinsville High School Red Devils in rural south Georgia; and examines the impact of closing steel mills on the psyche of football fans in the western Pennsylvania town of Braddock.
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