One script, two movies

Many people can point to an event that changed their lives forever. For Steve Zotnowski, it happened in Siberia, of all places.

The 48-year-old screenwriter, whose day job is selling cars at Chuck Patterson Auto World in Chico, and his wife were traveling there on personal business in 2005 when the woman they’d hired as translator said that she’d seen a wonderful German movie the week before in Moscow.

When she mentioned its title, Barfuss, Zotnowski was stunned. The word means “barefoot” in English, and he’d written and, in 1999, sold a screenplay with that very name. It had almost been made, but at the last minute the company that purchased the rights had gone bankrupt, taking his script with it.

Now, four years later, his Russian translator was telling him that it had been made into a movie after all—a successful movie, in fact, No. 2 at the German box office and winner of the German media’s Bambi award as the best film of 2005.

His script, Zotnowski realized, was alive and well.

Zotnowski grew up in Detroit, attended Michigan State, then moved to Los Angeles, where he studied film at UCLA. After that he worked for various production companies, including a two-year stint at DreamWorks. “I learned the business, the good and the bad of it,” he said during a recent interview, thinking back to his days prior to moving to Chico in 2003 in search of a more tranquil life.

When he returned from Siberia, Zotnowski contacted the Writers Guild of America, thereby initiating a three-year legal effort to reclaim his script. As he soon learned, it secretly had been sold to a German film company. In 2008, he retrieved the rights, but they were valid only for three years, after which they would revert to the German company.

Things looked good at first for an American film based on his script. Garry Marshall wanted to direct the movie, and $10 million in financing was lined up. Marshall’s most successful film, Pretty Woman, is much like Barefoot—a romantic comedy about unlikely lovers—and Zotnowski was thrilled by the possibilities. Then Marshall inexplicably pulled out (Zotnowski later learned he’d been diagnosed with cancer), and the deal fell apart.

Finally, in 2011, as the rights deadline neared, a deal with another production company began to take shape, and with just a week to go before time ran out, the contracts were signed.

A press-release synopsis of the film—which opens Friday, March 7, at the Pageant—reads that it stars Scott Speedman as Jay, “an indolent and self-indulgent black sheep of his family, who meets an unusual young woman (Evan Rachel Wood) in a psychiatric hospital and brings her home for his brother’s wedding. Also starring J. K. Simmons, Treat Williams and Kate Burton, the movie takes a playful look at an improbable romance between two damaged people.”

Barefoot was filmed in New Orleans in the summer of 2012 and put into limited release earlier this month. Originally, Zotnowski was to have enjoyed full access to the shoot. The director, Andrew Fleming (Nancy Drew), didn’t want the writer on the set, however, so Zotnowski was given only occasional visitor privileges. He was disappointed, but in the movie business, he said, “you have to let it go.”

Although critics have been lukewarm, audiences seem to enjoy Barefoot. When it screened at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in early February, it played to turn-away crowds, Zotnowski said.

He didn’t attend the festival, but recently he drove to Cupertino to see his movie. He returned happy to report that the final product was “much better than I expected” and that he really enjoyed it, as did the audience.

He likes the German version as well. There’s a dark element in the script that Fleming largely ignored, he said, preferring to make a sunnier picture, but the German version keeps the “seriousness” in the story, to good effect.

For his part, Zotnowski takes special pleasure in having written a script from which two movies were made. Not many screenwriters can make that claim, after all.