FILIAL FILM : This Shared Screenwriting Credit Didn’t Send Anyone to Arbitration

Nearly 60 years ago, Endre Bohem, then in his 30s and flushed with the beginnings of Hollywood success, started writing screenplays that he hoped one day to produce. Although he went on to make such successful films as “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” “Alias Nick Beal,” “The Redhead and the Cowboy” and the “Rawhide” television series, he never got to bring his first and favorite project to the screen.

Now, three years after Bohem’s death at 89, that project, written in 1935 and titled “Twenty Bucks,” is finally being released. A labor of love for Bohem’s son, Leslie, who shares the screenwriting credits with his late father, “Twenty Bucks” opens Friday in Los Angeles, Seattle and New York, after having been shown earlier this year at the Sundance, Seattle and Edinburgh Film Festivals, and receiving Deauville’s Critics’ Prize.

Directed by documentary filmmaker Keva Rosenfeld (1986’s “All American High”), the comedy follows one $20 bill as it changes hands among several people, changing their lives. The stars include Linda Hunt, as a homeless person who first finds, then loses, the bill; Christopher Lloyd as a robber; Elizabeth Shue; Steve Buscemi and Brendan Fraser.

Bringing a 50-plus-year-old script to production posed some logistical problems. In fact, Bohem’s original script was, after several rewrites and a workshop at Sundance, finally scrapped as being too dated, though both Les Bohem and Rosenfeld say they believe the final version is true to the spirit of the original.

“My father was a writer in silent movies,” Les Bohem says. “Somewhere, in between jobs, he saw ‘If I Had a Million’ “--the 1932 hit film in which several story lines are connected by $1 million--”and thought that a $20 bill would be better than a million, because it can mean nothing to one person but life or death for another.

“Everybody has looked at money and wondered where it was before it was in their hands. There is something in that notion that suggests a world where you could walk right by somebody who could mean a lot in your life and you don’t even know they exist.”

Les Bohem, 42, who played in the quirky pop band Sparks from 1980 to 1985, has also written a similar script called “Guitar,” which follows a Fender Stratocaster from 1957 to the present. He says that not only is “Twenty Bucks” an “homage” to his father, he realized during the Sundance workshop that it had become a story about his father.

“In the first story, a character tells about his coming to America--it’s virtually the story of my dad coming to America from Hungary in the 20s. . . . By the time Keva and I reworked it, there was nothing left of my father’s script but all this stuff from my father’s life.” Rosenfeld agrees: “One of the thematic overlays besides money is this father-son relationship. Even the robbers have a father-son relationship.”

And the fact that the story has its roots in a gentler time, says star Linda Hunt, translates well to the modern product. “Les has managed,” she says, “to keep a kind of tenderness in the film that is of the era in filmmaking when his father wrote it.”