Tagline: It’s time to stand up for the little guys.
Hoot movie storyline. Based on the Carl Hiaasen’s Newbery Award-honored book which has become a New York Times bestseller, “Hoot” revolves around a young boy who moves to Florida where he tries to solve an ecological mystery involving endangered owls, an assortment of other unusual creatures, and group of eccentric adults.
Three middle-schoolers take on greedy land developers, corrupt politicians, and clueless cops in the mystery adventure “Hoot”. Based on Carl Hiaasen’s Newberry Honor-winning book, “Hoot” revolves around a Montana boy who moves to Florida and unearths a disturbing threat to a local population of endangered owls.
Determined to protect his new environment, the boy and his friends fight to prevent the adults from making a big mistake. Packed with surprising plot twists, quirky characters, and offbeat humor, “Hoot” is a classic story that’s fun for all ages. Middle schooler Roy Eberhardt is the perpetual new kid on the block.
Due to his father’s job, Roy’s moved so many times he’s lost track of how many schools he’s attended (six since kindergarten) and how many towns he’s lived in (that would be ten) in his fourteen years of life. You could say he’s perpetually a stranger in a strange land. This time, he’s left the big sky country of Montana for the tropical sun belt of Florida and a sleepy Gulf Coast hamlet named Coconut Cove. The first thing he must do (if he is to avoid being called ‘cowgirl’ by his new classmates) is trade in his boots for flip flops and his western ‘dude’ shirt for a tank top. The second thing he notices is that Florida does not have 10,000 foot mountains like Montana, but is as flat as a pancake.
That’s always been part of the drill for the new kid in town. And, on his first day at Trace Middle School, Roy’s about to meet the biggest bully of them all –Dana Matherson, a hulking monster with a girl’s name who greets his new schoolmate by painfully sinking his fingers into Roy’s temples and smashing his face against the school bus window.
But, in an odd way, Roy is indebted to Dana. You see, if Dana hadn’t dug his thumbs into Roy’s neck and scrunched his face against the glass, he would never have spotted the barefoot running boy – a wiry, blonde-haired runaway without books, backpack or shoes – outpacing the bus in the stifling heat and humidity.
And, if Roy had not spotted the curious, mysterious running boy (whom he finds out is called Mullet Fingers), he would not have met Beatrice Leep, the running boy’s scrappy stepsister and fellow 8th grader who just happens to be the toughest kid at school. Someone who strikes fear in the heart of every boy at Trace, even the bully Dana.
And, if Roy had not met Beatrice Leep, he would not have heard about the new restaurant planned for Coconut Cove – Mother Paula’s All-American Pancake House, one of the country’s most popular chains. Had he not known about the new eatery about to break ground under the watchful eye of the company’s overambitious P.R. executive, Chuck Muckle, he would not have unearthed a disturbing threat to a local population of endangered owls, whose burrows happen to be right on the construction site where the malicious Muckle and his foreman, the dimwitted Curly Branitt, are racing against the clock to erect their new franchise.
And, if Roy had not tried to protect his new environment, he would never have experienced the thrill of a lifetime, one that brings him into contact with potty-trained alligators, the nest of burrowing owls, a group of poisonous cottonmouth snakes with strangely sparkling tails and a host of quirky human characters, including corrupt politicians, the beleaguered construction foreman, Mother Paula herself and Officer David Delinko, the diligent but clueless local beat cop whose investigation into some mysterious, extraordinary circumstances at the construction site may just earn him the detective stripes he so urgently wants.
An Award Winning Book’s Journey to the Big Screen
Author Carl Hiaasen’s 2002 book Hoot was his first for young readers after delighting grownup audiences over the last two decades with such satiric, salty, adult-flavored bestsellers as Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Skinny Dip and seven others novels dating back to his 1986 debut, Tourist Season. The recipient of a prestigious 2003 Newbery Honor, Hoot has more than one million copies in print and spent well over a year on the New York Times Children’s Bestseller list.
Hiaasen, the long-admired Miami Herald columnist, says he wrote Hoot “because it was something I’d never done before. I really wanted to write something that I could give to my nephew, nieces, stepson and young son without worrying about the salty language or adult situations. They all wanted to read the grownup novels, but I didn’t think they were ready yet because of those adult situations.”
Never dreaming he would write for such a young audience, Hiaasen adds, “I talked with my agent about such an idea. I never dreamed that anyone would publish a book that I would write for a younger crowd. But, I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have a book that (might) have the same attitude, the same spin, the same view and the same affection of Florida that my other books had but would actually be for kids? To tell a story that kids could dig.’”
While environmental themes of his beloved homestate prevail in every book he pens (“the trigger or the fuse, if you will, to everything I’ve written about and tried to do in journalism,” says Hiaasen), the issue of the owls for Hiaasen “was a real story, a page from my own childhood. Where I grew up in West Broward, we had nests of burrowing owls right in our own neighborhood.”
“After the novel was finished, my mom found an old album, a photo album,” the author recalls. “I had taken this little Kodak Instamatic and gone out for a school project to photograph one of the last places where these burrowing owls nested near where I grew up.
In the album, you see these tiny, little dots, these little owls standing at their burrows. I could drive you to that site now and it would be under about 25 tons of concrete. These developers came in and put up strip malls, just bulldozed all these little birds and their nests. Even at a very young age, I had a certain amount of anger, frustration and sadness in seeing this place that I loved so much disappear.”
“It was something I only intended to do one time,” admits Hiaasen, who has since written a second novel for youngsters called Flush, published just as filming on Hoot wrapped. “After Hoot came out, it achieved a totally unforeseen popularity. It was a real eye-opener. I’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of letters from children who read this book. They tune right away into the message and the characters, get right to the heart of what the book is about. They understood where I was coming from. There must be hope for the world.”
Hollywood didn’t, according to the author, who has had only one other novel adapted onto the big screen (director Andrew Bergman’s 1996 film Striptease, based on Hiaasen’s 1994 bestseller, which starred Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds) and says about Hoot, “they shopped it around Hollywood and nobody seemed to be that interested.”
Surprisingly, most of Hiaasen’s other books have been optioned (but remain unproduced) for the motion picture screen, including his most recent tome, Skinny Dip, and the 1986 title, Tourist Season, “which is the first novel I did, this very seditious and naughty little novel.
The first time Jimmy Buffett ever called me was about optioning those movie rights. He loved the book, but the rights had already been taken. We still became friends and have stayed in touch all these years. He knew about Hoot and thought it would make a great movie.”
In addition to his legacy as one of the country’s most popular, prolific and successful singer / songwriters, the Grammy-nominated Buffett is also a best-selling author and novelist in his own right. His three #1 best sellers (Tales From Margaritaville, Where Is Joe Merchant? and A Pirate Looks At Fifty) make him one of only six authors in the history of the New York Times bestseller list to have reached #1 on both their fiction and nonfiction lists.
“Carl is an old friend of mine,” echoes Buffett, another longtime Floridian. “When I heard that he had a new children’s book, I bought it for my daughter. She was the catalyst in this whole thing. She’s an incessant reader and said this was a really good book and that it’d make a great movie. After she finished it, I read it. I agreed that it would make a wonderful family movie, because it tells a story about kids outsmarting grownups while teaching them a valuable lesson about the environment.”
“The message of this movie is not only that are kids smarter than adults, but it’s our world that they’re going to inherit, and it’s great to see activism at that early age,” Buffett continues. “Roy comes to Florida as a stranger from Montana and gets involved. And that’s one of the things that I loved about the story. So, in addition to its entertainment value, you hope that kids come away with a little bit more thought of how we affect animals, their environments, and their very existence. To do that in a kid’s book I thought was pretty unique.”
Keen to produce his very first motion picture, Buffett remarks that “I’m always looking for something that can be entertaining for adults who like to take their children to movies. As a father myself, I’m always learning something new from my kids every day. I’m a grownup who still possesses the heart of a child or a schoolboy. When I read this, I thought this was something unique because Carl’s writing can be enjoyed by adults as well as kids. I was an old Rocky and Bullwinkle fan. Also Beanie And Cecil. Cartoons that had a little bit of satire that were written by adults for adults, but were also funny for kids. I’m also an old Travis McGee and Elmore Leonard fan, guys like Carl who write about the unusual culture of South Floridat.”
“I’ve written scores for movies, even been in some myself, but I have never produced one before,” Buffett says about his interest in optioning Hiaasen’s book for his first motion picture production. “I’d never produced a movie before, but, hell, I run a rock-and-roll band, I thought producing can’t be that hard! The only other thing I’ve produced was a musical down in Florida of a Herman Wouk story. I loved the process, it was intriguing to me. All of a sudden, I met Wil Shriner up in San Francisco and we started talking. I knew he was a standup comic, and a friend of mine said he also directed episodes of ‘Frasier’ and ‘Becker’. So, I sent Wil a copy of the book asking him how to go about adapting it into a movie. Wil was so unique to this project because you had somebody that understood Florida, where he’s from.”
“If you know anything about Jimmy, you know that when he decides to do something, it gets done!,” Carl Hiaasen exclaims. “I called my agent and said Jimmy was interested. He’s never done a movie, but he knows everybody all over the place. There are Parrotheads everywhere. And a lot of them happen to run Hollywood studios, so why not see what he can do. The next thing I knew, there’s a jet landing in Marathon, Florida, and there’s Wil Shriner, whom I’d never met. But I knew his work from talk shows and standup. Then Wil and I flew seven minutes to Key West. Jimmy’s out fishing, he comes in, meets us for lunch and we start talking. Will and Jimmy both understood the book and they were very concerned about the heart and the spirit of this little story.”
“Jimmy is the whole reason this movie got made,” director Wil Shriner concurs. “Jimmy bought the rights to the book from Carl – they’re fishing buddies. Jimmy and I are also friends…I’ve known Jimmy for a few years. We were talking one day, and he asked me to read this book Hoot. I’d read some of Carl’s other work, and thought this was a cute book. I told Jimmy this would make a great little movie. And he goes, ‘funny, that’s what I was thinking. How do we do that?’. I told him in order to make the movie, he needed a great script that he could shop around. This was a sweet little coming-of-age story about a boy who gets caught up in the intrigue of these endangered owls. It’s a wonderful little film about kids becoming friends. It’s also a caper film, a mystery film and a buddy comedy all in one.”
“So, we went to the Keys, Jimmy and I, to sit down with Carl,” the director continues about their budding partnership with author Hiaasen. “But, Carl was busy writing books and Jimmy was touring. I, however, was at the end of my sitcom season. So, of the three, I had some time off. I told them I’d write it if I could direct it. In adapting a book, there’s the book and the reader’s interpretation of the book. So, as I adapted the screenplay, I tried to stay true to the book.” Adds Buffett, “Wil is a great comedic writer, so he initially wrote it. Without tooting our own horns, you got two pretty successful novelists here that can also write. So, we collectively put the script together.”
With draft in hand, the Florida trifecta of Hiaasen (a Sunshine State native), Buffett (an adopted Floridian) and Shriner (who spent his adolescent years in Ft. Lauderdale) approached four-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Frank Marshall, a longtime acquaintance of the singer (who had a small role in his Oscar-nominated Seabiscuit) to help get the film made.
“Frank and I have been friends for a long time,” Buffett offers. “Let’s face it – if you’re going to produce for the first time, it’s not bad having Frank Marshall as your producing partner. I initially bought the rights to the book just as an investment and basically financed its development from the beginning just to see what would eventually happen. And my first thought when I got the rights was to call Frank and let him know I bought the rights to this Carl Hiaasen book. Ask him what he thinks. What better sounding board would you go to?”
“We approached Frank when we had a script and he said it was really good,” Buffett recalls. “He gave me some notes on it. We went back and redid the script based on the notes. Frank called me from Berlin, where he was producing The Bourne Supremacy, and said, ‘man, you guys nailed this thing’. Frank then found people that were interested in doing the movie.”
Marshall, who had earlier investigated optioning another of Hiaasen’s novels, Stormy Weather, liked the idea behind Hoot because “in addition to the social issues that Carl brought to his story, I liked the idea that kids are empowered to protect the environment and battle the establishment in a positive way.”
“I think it’s very important that kids are aware of the environment and what’s going on and what people call development or progress and how it can be so harmful to the things around us,” Marshall continues. “There are a lot of great messages in this book and film and certainly the storyline is interesting enough to carry them along in a really fun way. What I also love about Carl’s writing is its edge and the satire to it while bringing up issues that I think young people should be aware of today. It’s a story of growing up, taking charge of yourself and learning about the environment.”
Casting the Kids
“I set out to create characters that resonated in some way with their own experience but also who were smart…smarter than the grownups in the book,” Carl Hiaasen adds. “Often in real life, your kids end up smarter than you. This was going to be a story where the kids figure it out before the grownups and the grownups don’t rush in and save the day at the end. It’s the kids who figure it out and save the day.”
“These are kids who came out of my own childhood,” Hiaasen explains about the impetus for the story’s characters. “As a kid, I sort of put myself in Roy’s position because this story is a chapter from my childhood. We had burrowing owls all over the place. Then developers came in and bulldozed all these little birds. My friends and I tried in our feeble way to discourage them with minor acts of sabotage that didn’t work. I think that experience set in motion everything I’ve written including the grown-up novels, the newspaper columns and Hoot.
“Roy is the new kid in town,” the author elaborates about the character through whose eyes his story unfolds. “He is a character so many kids can identify with, especially in this day and age, where there’s so much movement. People move around. I’d known kids like this who came from somewhere else. I wanted him, as well as the reader, to have an awakening when he comes to Florida, which he does skeptically and against his will. Coming from a very beautiful place, Montana, to discover this new world called Florida. Seeing the Everglades or the 10,000 Islands or the Keys for the very first time. The color of the water and all the different kinds of birds. I thought it would be a nice journey to take the reader on.”
“Roy’s life before moving to Florida is kind of sad, because he’s always moving around from place to place,” actor Logan Lerman notes about his character of Roy. “He can’t stay in one place long enough to get to know the town, or get to know the people. He’s gone to like eight different schools in a couple of years. He finally moves to Florida, and finds a place that he likes. He meets this runaway, Mullet Fingers, who is involved in this fight to save these owls. He tells Roy about it, and Roy wants to get involved. And there is this guy named Curly who runs the construction site, and Mullet Fingers and Roy sabotage it, trying to get Curly to stop doing whatever’s he doing. It’s pretty cool.”
“Mullet Fingers is a kid who doesn’t fit in anywhere,” Hiaasen jumps in about the teenage runaway who initiates the fight to save the owls. “I get so much mail about that character because sometimes kids feel they also don’t belong. It’s vital for any kind of writing that the readers identify and plug into the characters. I always knew that they would like Mullet Fingers because he is an outsider but also a survivor. He lives alone out in the woods and he gets along just fine. It wasn’t a surprise that, like me, they were going to be fond of that character.”
Seasoned sixteen-year-old actor Cody Linley was also fond of his character, saying “I saw Mullet Fingers as a wild child who’s also a caring person. He’s hard to explain because he’s a different character than anybody else. He’s not like a regular kid. His best friends are the owls and the animals that he lives with. He doesn’t talk to anybody else except for Beatrice, his step-sister, because he’s afraid of getting hurt because his mom hates him, she even sent him away to several military schools. So he has trouble trusting people. Then Roy comes along and once he gets to know him, he starts to trust him. And it’s cool that he gets to have that friendship with Roy because Roy cares about him. He’s a wild, cool kid who loves nature and runs around barefoot. I thought that was one of the coolest things about him.”
“His stepsister helps him out, but he’s out there by himself,” Hiaasen augments about Beatrice, the only other character Mullet Fingers trusts. “Beatrice at first is sort of the class bully, but then you understand she’s just trying to find her own way. She’s got a good heart but she’s a little on the tough side. And I remember riding a school bus as a kid with a couple of girls who were scary, they were so tough. I lived in daily fear of being beaten up by this one girl in particular. For a boy, you know, that’s not too cool.”
“Beatrice Leep, whose nickname is Beatrice the Bear, is basically supposed to be the big tough girl that everyone’s afraid of,” 16-year-old actress-singer Brie Larson states about her character. “You’re supposed to think that she’s this big tough girl who’s thrown kids in monkey pits and beats guys up. I think that deep down she hasn’t really done any of those things, it’s just hype. And Beatrice and Mullet Fingers are stepbrother and stepsister. She is definitely the motherly figure to Mullet Fingers because he doesn’t have anybody. She’s the only one he speaks to. She doesn’t want anybody to find out about him because then he might get shipped off to juvie or another boarding school. She’s just trying to be a good sister.”
“I wanted to portray Beatrice a little differently than in the book,” says Larson, an avid reader who admits to reading a book a week, and first perused Hoot at age twelve when her sister received a copy from their book club. “I think the book makes her seem outwardly tough and almost catty. I didn’t really want her to be like that. Everything she says is forceful, but it has meaning and that’s why you listen to her. I’m also not an athletic person, but I wanted to make sure that I was in shape. I think it’s important that I looked athletic because she’s supposed to be a soccer jock.”
In choosing these three teen talents, director Wil Shriner “held casting calls throughout the country. Los Angeles. Chicago. Atlanta. Texas. We looked for kids with previous acting experience, like Logan, who nailed his audition, and was head-and-shoulders above all the other candidates for Roy. Logan was working on ‘Jack and Bobby’ at the time. I also knew his work from The Butterfly Effect. He knew the part, knew the character and we just went ‘wow that’s the kid’!”
“I had read the book before I got the part of Roy,” Lerman offers. “I thought it was a really good book, really entertaining. When I read it, I thought this would make a really cool movie. I thought of Roy as just this good kid, a resilient kid, who just fights for what’s right. He was a really great character to play.”
“I knew Brie from working with her on the WB sitcom, ‘Raising Dad’, and thought of her when I was writing the script,” Shriner continues about actress Larson, who embodied the role of Beatrice. “She was Bob Saget’s 12-year-old daughter on that sitcom. She’s just terrific, a great actress. So when this movie came about, I thought Brie was about the right age for Beatrice. She’s also a singer and was touring with Jesse McCartney and was so busy. We could never get her in, so we tested two other girls that we liked, but I always thought it’d be great if we could get Brie on this.”
“I was so excited when I found out they were making it into a movie,” Larson states about winning the role and reteaming with Shriner. “I was actually on tour with Jesse McCartney when I found out about it. I was really excited because I’ve known Wil for a really long time. He’s one of my favorite directors, so of course I auditioned for him, although I really didn’t think I was going to get the job. It still astounds me. I love Wil and I’d do anything for him. He is like my surrogate father. I loved what he did with this movie.”
“We saw Cody, who plays Mullet Fingers, early on and liked him a lot,” the director goes on about Texas native Linley. “He had the perfect look with a solid resume. Before we cast him, we were looking for more of a nature boy type character, a kid who sort of lived in the wild.”
“We also felt that the character of Mullet Fingers might be the role where we could cast an unknown,” Shriner adds. “Maybe we’d discover somebody, and we had the luxury to keep looking until shooting started. In the end, we chose Cody, a Texan with a resume of movie experience, as Mullet Fingers, and cast an unknown for the bully Dana.”
“We liked Eric the minute we saw him on tape,” Shriner enthuses about the 6’2”, 275 lb. Chicagoan Eric Phillips, who embodies the role of the hulking school bully. “Eric was from Chicago and had done some work with Second City, but had never acted professionally before. He was terrific from the moment I saw him on tape. He did a great job. He plays the bully without being hateful. He’s a funny bully. Even though he’s not a very likable character in the movie, he makes him likable. And that’s what I liked about Eric.”
“I think what makes Dana so special is that name,” says 17-year-old Phillips, one of the most popular cast members on the set. “It’s a girl’s name. Whereas other bullies might be a bully because that’s the way they are, I think Dana’s a bully because he’s defending himself. If he picks on people, nobody’s gonna talk about Dana or make fun of him for having a girl’s name. You know, who wants to talk about the school bully? He’s definitely not really a tough guy.”
Hoot (2006)
Directed by: Wil Shriner
Starring: Luke Wilson, Logan Lerman, Brie Larson, Cody Linley, Kiersten Warren, Jessica Cauffiel, Damaris Justamante, Robert Wagner, Cody Linley, Tim Blake Nelson
Screenplay by: Wil Shriner
Production Design by: Stephen J. Lineweaver
Cinematography by: Michael Chapman
Film Editing by: Alan Edward Bell
Costume Design by: Christopher Lawrence
Set Decoration by: Scott Jacobson
Art Direction by: Richard Fojo
Music by: Phil Marshall, Mac McAnally, Mike Utley
MPAA Rating: PG for mild bullying and brief language.
Distributed by: New Line Cinema
Release Date: April 21, 2006
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