Film & screen
Stories built to move.
Watt writes for the screen as well as the page, and adapts his own work. Delta country — rivers, storms, hunting camps, boys in trouble — is his native ground, and he knows where to put a camera in it.
- Adapted
- Alabama Moon, feature film, 2009
- Written & produced
- Alabama Dirt, feature film, 2017
- Represented by
- Lisa Vance
Aaron Priest Literary Agency - Optioned material
- Novels and nonfiction available for adaptation
Feature adaptation
Alabama Moon
The debut novel reached theaters in 2009 — a PG survival story about a boy raised in the woods, carried onto the screen without losing the weather in it. Available on Blu-ray and digital.
- Released2009 · Rated PG
- CastJohn Goodman, Clint Howard
- DirectorTim McCanlies
- SourceFrom the novel by Watt Key
Screenwriting
What the work brings to a production.
Twenty years of first-hand time in the country these stories are set in — which is the difference between writing a swamp and knowing one.
Locations that are real
The Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the Gulf Coast, the Mississippi cotton country. Watt has lived and worked in all of it, and can put a crew where the light is right.
See the delta writing →Books that already move
Survival plots, weather clocks, and moral pressure on a small cast. The novels are built on the kind of tension a camera can hold.
Browse the novels →Family through hard-edged
Material that plays to a family audience, and material — written as Albert Key — that does not. Both grounded in the same country.
Start a conversation →Rights & options
Lisa Vance
Adaptation, option, and subsidiary rights inquiries are handled by the Aaron Priest Literary Agency in New York.
Written & produced
Alabama Dirt
Watt wrote and produced this one outright — not an adaptation. Ty Hargrove wants to be a champion dirt track racer, but that takes money and support, and he is short on both. It gets complicated when he threatens to take his rival’s title and his girlfriend along with it.
Released in 2017, and in some markets as Furious in Alabama.
View on IMDb ↗ALABAMA DIRT
Written and produced by Watt Key
- DirectorTom Stout
- CastMichael Roark, Tracy Lawrence, Leslie Easterbrook
- Runtime1 hr 41 min