REEL LIFE / FILM & VIDEO FILE : ‘Playmaker’ Success Has a Tragic Ending : Ventura’s Darren Block and wife Kathryn Nemesh co-wrote the erotic thriller. But she died of cancer before the film debuted.

In 1991, Darren Block was a desperate man.

The singer-songwriter-actor had gone broke trying to make it in the entertainment business. He and his wife, Kathryn Nemesh, had gotten some bit acting parts, but the jobs never amounted to much, and nobody seemed interested in the erotic thriller they had written called “Playmaker.”

So, with foreclosure pending on their mobile home, the two made a poster-board sign saying “need $1 million for film” and stood on Avenue of the Stars in Century City, trying to get somebody--anybody--to read the script they described as a cross between “9 1/2 Weeks” and “sex, lies and videotape.”

Friends told Block the sign was a stupid idea. He responded: “Maybe. But once you’ve scooped goat poop at Magic Mountain for a living, you’re amenable to anything.”

The couple got dozens of calls, some serious, some crank. One of the serious calls was from Peter Samuelson, who, along with his brother, Marc, produced the 1984 low-budget sleeper “Revenge of the Nerds.” The producers advanced the couple a few thousand dollars to stave off bankruptcy and eventually produced the screenplay.

Fast forward to the present. Tanned from a recent trip to Hawaii, Block, 34, sat in a modest apartment in east Ventura a month after “Playmaker” was released on Orion Home Video.

“It’s kind of weird. I’m so used to writing songs,” Block said. “When you write songs, you sit down with your guitar, record it and you’re done. With ‘Playmaker,’ it seems like we did it so long ago that now it’s like, yeah, big deal.”

Sadly, the story doesn’t have a happy ending.

“Kathryn had been getting sick all the time,” Block said. “We took her to the hospital and found out she had breast cancer, but it had spread to her bones, all over. She got better with chemotherapy, and while she was recovering I used to take my guitar to the hospital. That’s when we started singing together.”

After she left the hospital, the two sang at coffeehouses. They also opened for Acoustic Alchemy and Leon Redbone at the Ventura Theatre this year.

“The cancer had torn up her bones pretty bad,” Block said. “She had a couple of broken arms and a broken hip. I had to carry her up on the stage. It was pretty tragic, but we kept our sense of humor about it.”

Nemesh, 32, died in October, just one month before the film had its debut at the London Film Festival.

Before she died, the two had worked on their second screenplay. It’s a supernatural love story called “Touched,” which Block describes as a cross between “Forrest Gump” and “Ghost,” the 1990 supernatural romance about the death of a spouse.