Second chance

BRAD and Jen are together again and back in L.A. OK, not that Brad and Jen -- in this case the pair in question is Brad Zions and Jennifer Westfeldt, producers of “Ira and Abby,” which Westfeldt also wrote and stars in.

Premiering tonight at the L.A. Film Festival, “Ira and Abby” is a return engagement for both -- four years ago, they shared similar credits on the indie hit “Kissing Jessica Stein,” which premiered at the festival and was subsequently bought by Fox Searchlight.

The two are hoping something along those lines will happen for “Ira and Abby,” which follows a year in the life of a mismatched couple who marry, divorce, remarry, divorce, remarry and somehow wind up in therapy with both sets of parents.

“It’s a long year,” Westfeldt says with a laugh. “It’s a bumpy, rocky year. But also funny. I hope. Very funny.”

She wrote the film after a year in which she and her boyfriend (who is not, by the way, Zions -- a self-proclaimed “single guy”) went to “something like eight weddings” and witnessed almost as many divorces. “But there everyone was saying the same vows about forever despite the reality.”

Meanwhile, she happened to see both “The Music Man” and “The Iceman Cometh.” She concluded -- and she may be the first person in the history to do so -- that they were essentially the same story and one that related directly to her growing wedding issue.

“Both plays are about how we would rather delude ourselves than face reality,” she says. “So I thought, what would happen if you had a couple who gets married and divorced and married and divorced with their vows becoming more and more pragmatic each time? I mean, marriage is the only institution I can think of in which people fail over and over again and yet no one thinks to change it.

“But,” she says again, drawing a breath, “I wanted it to be funny.”

Westfeldt, who describes herself as “really just an actress,” is pretty and enthusiastic in a “Stage Door” kind of way that seems almost quaint, given the jaded nature of our times. Her career is bicoastal and multimedia -- eight years ago she starred in the ill-fated TV series “Two Guys, a Girl and Pizza Place”; two years ago, she was nominated for a Tony for her work in “Wonderful Town”; and she’s about to begin shooting “Notes From the Underbelly,” a new series on ABC in which she plays a woman experiencing an unexpected pregnancy.

In between there have been other TV and movie appearances, including “Jessica Stein.”

Westfeldt is the kind of woman who makes it sound like things just happen to her. She got “Two Guys” after she tagged along with an actress friend coming to L.A. from New York for pilot season; she wrote “Jessica Stein” with Heather Juergensen after the two met at a theater retreat and Westfeldt later found herself between shoots with, as she says, “nothing else to do.”

“ ‘Kissing Jessica Stein’ was a complete fluke,” she says. “I don’t really like the act of writing. It’s too solitary, and I tend to go overboard -- stay up all night drinking pots of coffee. The goal was to do more interesting parts.” She laughs and flicks her hair out of her face. “It’s a bummer that one time around didn’t quite do it so I had to write another.”

Creating a part was not, of course, the only reason Westfeldt wrote “Ira and Abby.” Another, more persistent reason was Zions. An entrepreneur and former executive with America Online, Zions met Westfeldt in 1999. He had just left AOL and was deciding whether his next step should be film production; she was trying to buy back the rights to “Jessica Stein” from Interscope, where it was languishing. The same friend whom she had followed to L.A. for pilot season introduced her to Zions; he read the script and agreed to produce it.

The experience was so good -- made for under $1 million, the film got positive reviews and grossed almost $8 million -- he was anxious to repeat the process.

“He kept saying, ‘What are we going to do next?” says Westfeldt. “I told him I had no ideas, no script, no hope for any other ideas. But he is very dogged.”

Sitting in living room of his North Doheny home, with a glass wall at his right revealing a glorious view of West Hollywood, Zions fits the image of an entrepreneur turned producer as well as Westfeldt embodies the ingenue.

His slouchy jeans and T-shirts belie the sleek, pristine order of his home, and he quietly cedes the floor to his colleague as she tells the story of how “Ira and Abby” came into being, creatively -- although he was happy to act as sounding board, he didn’t participate so much in the script development.

But when he comes to discussing the gritty details of financing, he is more than happy to explain the difference between shooting a movie when no one knows who you or your cast members are and shooting one after you’ve produced a hit and are now employing Tony nominees and stars including Frances Conroy and Fred Willard: $9 million.

“Let’s say we came in under $10 million,” he says diplomatically. “It’s just gotten more expensive to shoot in New York, and we had to be union this time.”

After putting in his own money, Zions turned to the folks who invested in “Jessica Stein,” at least 10 of whom were willing to pony up again and even bring in a few friends.

Still, it was touch and go, with Zions pushing the schedule because he knew even after they got the film in the can, he had to come up with the money for post-production.

Zions still identifies as an entrepreneur -- he’s half owner of Young, Fabulous and Broke, a clothing line (which makes several appearances in “Ira and Abby”), but mostly he likes being a producer. And with a half-dozen projects in various stages of development, it looks like he’ll remain one for a while, or at least until he gets sick of being snowed with scripts.

“They come from everywhere,” he says. “One of the crew members, a friend of a friend. I was sitting in Starbucks and someone overheard me on the phone and offered to let me read his script. And I do, I read them all. That’s what I love about L.A. Everyone has a script.”

He has high hopes for “Ira and Abby,” with the benefit of not being as emotionally attached as Westfeldt. “Of course I want it to do well,” he says. “But it’s not my face 12 feet high.”

Westfeldt says she doesn’t quite know how she will make it through the premiere.

“I feel very exposed in this one,” she says. “And our expectations are definitely different. With the first one we were incredibly naive, and that worked out for us. Now we know more about the business, about what can happen.... “

“We’re not outsiders anymore,” says Zions.

“But of course,” he adds with a laugh, “we’re not exactly insiders either.”