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Hoot
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 Hoot Production NotesTagline: It's time to stand up for the little guys.
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. Lastly, he quickly recognizes that, just like everywhere else he’s been, Florida has its share of bullies.
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 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 Florida. As a writer myself, I tried to emulate those guys in some ways. It all made for a good story. That's what I saw in Hoot.”
“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.”
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Brie Larson as Beatrice in Hoot.
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