FORT LAUDERDALE -- Since childhood, Wil Shriner has wanted to direct a movie. Now at age 53, he's finally doing it.

"Admittedly, I've changed careers a few times," says the comedian-turned-actor-turned-talk-show-host-turned-TV-director. But that's a good thing. "I have friends now, my age, who've been actors all their lives and say, 'I can't get work. Everybody wants 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds.'"

Shriner makes his feature directorial debut this week with the children's movie Hoot, a film that's a first for a few other people too. Based on Carl Hiaasen's book about three kids in small-town Florida who use guerrilla tactics to save an endangered burrowing owl from a developer's bulldozers, it's the first of the acclaimed Florida author's works to make it to the screen.

It's also a first-time producing effort for Jimmy Buffett, the friend-in-common between Hiassen and Shriner.

"Jimmy and I had done shows together and hit it off. He's a seaplane guy. I'm a seaplane guy. When I was a kid, my dad (humourist Herb Shriner) had an old World War II PDY and we'd fly all over the islands, land in these pristine places and sleep on the plane."

So with three professional Floridians involved, it's not surprising that Shriner's movie doubles as a love letter to the Sunshine State. "One of my intentions was to really capture Florida and as much of its beauty that I could create," says Shriner, who divides his time between L.A. and Fort Lauderdale. "We created a fake town, Coconut Cove, and it's up the street here in Lauderdale, the school's in Hollywood (Fla.). We took a helicopter from Miami to Punta Gorda and shot sailboats and shrimpers. I wanted the film to be a kind of '50s postcard."

Still best known for his late '80s talk show The Wil Shriner Show (and for his twin brother, Kin Shriner of soap opera fame), Shriner recently experienced, ahem, "deja view" when he sold his house in L.A. and found a box of 200 hours of three-quarter inch tapes from the show. "Interviews with Bob Hope, Michael Landon, early Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr ... what do you do with all this stuff? Group W has the rights and they've got it in an underground vault somewhere."

Shriner says film and video always figured in his career. He quit studying journalism at U of Florida to enroll in UCLA film school in L.A., and, as a Comedy Store comedian, did onstage voiceovers for pre-taped film bits. One of his films, about his dog stealing his car and taking it for a joyride, aired on Letterman, "and that got me a part in (Francis Coppola's) Peggy Sue Got Married. So suddenly I'm an actor."

But he says his stint as a talk show host effectively marked the end of his acting career. "Suddenly in sitcoms I'd be cast as the emcee at an awards show ceremony or a deejay."

With acting drying up, he got an assist from another friend, Kelsey Grammer. "We were at a thing at the Museum of Television honouring (legendary sitcom directors) Jimmy Burrows and Jay Sandrich, and Kelsey said 'I didn't know you wanted to direct. Come to Frasier. And I went to Frasier and spent a year of due diligence asking questions. And at the end of the season, they said, 'Would you like to direct one? I assume that's why you've been hanging around all year.'"

He won a Humanitas Award for that episode, titled Something About Dr. Mary, and went on to become a prolific hired gun at sitcoms in the past decade. (Everybody Loves Raymond, Norm, Becker). It was on the short-lived Bob Saget sitcom Bringing Up Dad that he met child actress Brie Larson, the pop star who, in Hoot, plays tough-girl Beatrice, whose brother Mullet Fingers (Cody Linley) is an animal-protecting "wild child" living in the swamp.

He reached into TV land for other bits of casting too, including Robert Donner (Exidor on Mork & Mindy) as a crazed German guard dog trainer, and his brother Kin as Jerry the Clerk. "I told Kin, 'Why don't you change your look? A different haircut or something. You look like Scotty from General Hospital.

"He says, 'I'm an actor, I can get beyond that!' I said, 'Just do what I say. I bet Ron Howard, when he gives Clint direction, Clint says, 'Whatever you want, Ron.'"

As for the latest career turn, Shriner says he's in talks with Hiaasen about adapting another book, Flush. "I realize the only reason I got to direct is because I wrote (the script). Nobody was knocking at my door saying 'You wanna direct my movie?'

"But (since Hoot) I actually have had people ask me. One's a return-from-Vietnam movie, a comedy but very dark. And another is an Imax movie about pirates.

"I've never had a game plan. I just want to go from fun thing to fun thing."