Who Says Dreams Can’t Come True? : Hollywood: Couple options movie script after panhandling on a street to lure producers.

When last we saw the husband-and-wife writing team of Darren Block and Kathryn Nemesh, they were panhandling on a Century City street, holding a sign asking for $1 million to transform their script into a movie.

That was in August.

Hooked by the gimmick, a Hollywood producer looked at the script, loved it and showed it to a director, who also was wild about it. It is too early to be certain, but they hope to get the project--a psychological thriller called “Playmaker”--onto the big screen next year.

They have optioned the project to New Era Productions, a company headed by Peter Samuelson and his brother, Marc, whose credits include the 1984 low-budget sleeper, “Revenge of the Nerds,” which ended up grossing $90 million.

“If we’re dreaming this, don’t wake us up,” said Block, a waiter, who with his wife, a former TV weather broadcaster from El Paso, Tex., lives in a Canyon Country trailer park.

Tacked to the wall of their living room are dozens of scribbled reminders of the days immediately after they pulled their stunt, when their phone almost never stopped ringing.

“I think we attracted every flake in the state,” Block said, referring to the phone calls.

“There was the guy whose first words were: ‘I can do this for $100,000.’ I said: ‘Don’t you think you should at least see the script?’ And then there was the woman who said: ‘Our people are ready to move as soon as you give the OK.’ She turned out to be a shut-in living at Big Bear Lake.”

But to their amazement, there were also legitimate calls.

In the end, the couple whose friends said they were nuts for taking their dream to the street--even if the street was Avenue of the Stars--had four offers to choose from.

As it stands, Block, 31, and Nemesh, 29, whose acting credits have been confined mostly to TV commercials and bit parts on soap operas, will star.

Once three months behind on their mortgage payments and on the verge of foreclosure, the couple has been advanced a few thousand dollars--”enough to keep the wolves from our door for the time being,” Nemesh said.

“We may be a long way from seeing any real big bucks, if ever,” she said, “but right now that’s the last thing we’re concerned about.”

The film is tentatively budgeted for $2.5 million, and Peter Samuelson is hopeful of lining up a distributor soon.

The script, which has undergone three revisions at the hands of director Michael Schroeder, “is now very, very good,” Samuelson said. “What’s more, Darren and Kathryn are exceptional actors.”

As soon as he saw the couple’s story in The Times, Samuelson dispatched an assistant to Century City to track them down.

“I thought, what the heck, I’ll read their script,” he said. “What was startling to me wasn’t that they would be out there trying to sell it, but that it turned out to be a very good project.”

He might not have bothered but for a previous experience.

In 1979, while trying to produce a film with Donald Sutherland called “A Man, A Woman and a Bank,” Samuelson, needing money to finish the project, saw an article in The Times about Ted Field and persuaded the department store heir to put up half the financing.

“He told us someone had been willing to take a chance on him when he needed a break,” Nemesh said of Samuelson. “I guess maybe we were at the right place at the right time.”