RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 2 sourcesThere are a fairly wide number of interesting stories you could tell about the running of breastaurant chain Hooters over the years, many of them covered in the extensive “Legal history” section of the company’s own Wikipedia page. There’s the way the company split in half back in the 1990s, only to reunite amid clouds of bankruptcies in the 2020s. There’s its huge history of lawsuits from both employees and those targeting its “attractive women only” hiring practices. There’s that time it tried to run a casino, or an airline , or a series of wings restaurants called “Hoots,” where employees were allowed to wear pants, and everything! (That last one is actually technically still going, although with only two locations in the Chicago area.) Or you could just do what one of the actual founders of the company is doing, and engage in a bit of self-mythologizing by making a movie turning the Hooters origin story into a fun buddy comedy with just a hint of “Why’s the government picking on me?” underdog flavor.
This is per Deadline , which reports that Hooters: The Movie will soon be going into independent production, directed by Jon Rosenbaum, a Disney Channel alum who recently worked on the Fraggle Rock revival show. The screenplay for the film, about two buddies who come up with the shocking idea that dudes will buy a few extra beers or chicken wings if a scantily clad woman pretends to like them while doing so, is being written Phil Olson, Chuck Melcher, and Ed Droste. The latter, as all well-versed Hootersologists will know, is one of the original Hooters founders, presumably represented in the movie’s logline by a guy named Ted, one of “two lifelong friends from a small town in Iowa who accidentally launch a national restaurant empire, only to find everything they built threatened by the federal government.” (Hooters was actually founded by six guys, enshrined in the company’s lore as the Hooters 6; we know so much more about the history of Hooters this afternoon than we did when we started researching this piece.)
The upshot is that the film will apparently recount “Ted”‘s infatuation with and search for the woman who would become the first Hooters Girl, known in the film as Diane. (In real life, Lynne Austin would be the first woman to rise to national prominence in the role, appearing in advertisements and in a Playboy photoshoot that helped Hooters grow rapidly in the 1980s.) Droste himself described the film as “a taste of our big-hearted culture and famous humor,” while also emphasizing that “our world-famous Hooters Girls are the real stars,” which feels like a tasteful way to say the movie probably won’t be scoring a PG rating. Meanwhile, the film enters a growing pantheon of what we can only think of as corporate biopics: Movies that recount, not the lives of inventors and innovators in the shoe/snack food/boob restaurant sciences, but the history of well-known brands themselves.
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