There was never any doubt what Dutcher would do someday. Not in his mind or anyone else's. He never made an announcement or a conscious decision; it was just understood.

"I never considered doing anything else," says Dutcher. "It would be either films or novels."

Says Jorgensen, "He always had a real passion for writing and acting. For years my husband and I have been waiting for him to do this. I told my husband when we got married that this guy is going to be famous someday. He has that something about him."

His love of writing and storytelling came at least in part from growing up alone. His mother was working, his father was gone and his older brother (by 2 1/2 years) was off with his own friends. "I had to make up stories to entertain myself," he says. "I didn't have any money, so I couldn't go anywhere." He wrote his first novel when he was 11. (Years later he realized it was a rip-off of "Alive.")

When he was 13, Dutcher was profoundly moved by an article he read in the Ensign, an LDS Church magazine, in which church President Spencer W. Kimball urged LDS artists to tell the Mormon story.

"It was exciting, thrilling," he says. "We had a really big lawn in Kentucky, an acre and a half of grass that I mowed with a push mower. That's how I would occupy my time, thinking about stories or how to make films or novels."

His love for telling stories came to include the art in all its various forms — writing, theater, movies, acting. It was all the same.

He wrote a play in high school — "It was terrible," he says — and he began acting in plays.

"People loved to see him in our school plays," says Jorgensen. "He'd improvise during the play and have the place roaring with laughter. It would throw the other actors for a loop. It was great. You could see he had an absolute talent for it. He was constantly writing things and acting."

Dutcher spent a year at BYU and then took a series of jobs to pay for a church mission. He pumped gas and changed tires in Arizona, and he cooked pizza, worked in a nursing home, pressed apple cider and drilled for oil in Kansas. Through it all, he would come home at the end of each day, clean up, write his stories, send them to publishers and wait for the next rejection slip.

"I thought the only way to get out of those jobs was to publish a book or sell a script," he says.

After serving his church mission, Dutcher returned to BYU and began to audition for locally produced movies. He had small parts in church films, TV movies and independent films. After graduating from BYU in 1988, he moved to Los Angeles to find more movie roles, but they were hard to come by.