During his 10 years in L.A., he was a substitute schoolteacher and worked the graveyard shift at 7-Eleven while pursuing a career in movies and supporting his wife and children. For a time, he stayed home with the kids, writing scripts and managing apartments on the side while Gwen worked. An art major at BYU, she was a master sculptor for Disney's collectible porcelain figures — Winnie the Pooh, Cinderella, Thumper.

"We certainly got to see what it was like to struggle financially, but they were incredibly happy years," says Gwen. "That's what I expected when I married an actor and filmmaker. We lived paycheck-to-paycheck occasionally. The worst it got was when we maxed all our credit cards. All we had was our gas card, so we'd get our groceries at the gas station."

Dutcher waited for the big break that never came. Nobody was going to discover him, he realized, so he decided the only solution was to make his own movie. He wrote, directed, produced, marketed and raised money for "Girl Crazy," a romantic comedy. He made the movie with $50,000 and no name actors.

"That's where I learned how to make films," he says. "That was my graduate school."

It took five years to complete the project, and Dutcher put every dime he had into it. He sold the movie to HBO, but didn't make enough to cover his costs. When Dutcher met with a distributor about international sales — which would have provided him with significantly increased profits — he was told that he must add nudity every seven or eight minutes. Dutcher, who had become so entrenched in Hollywood and making movies that he was slowly drifting away from his religion, was at a crossroads.

"It was at that moment that I wondered what am I doing here," he says. "I knew I wasn't going to do that. I walked out really in despair. I thought there is no way I can be LDS and be a successful filmmaker. It was a real turning point. I thought I was going to have to give it up. I had come to a place where I had to choose. I knew the formula (for a successful movie) by then. I even had the film in my head that if I made it I would have everything I needed — recognition and money. Then suddenly you have a career. I even started shooting the film.

"I was lying in bed one night and saw where I was heading and it wasn't a good place. I was really going down the wrong path. I wasn't being true to the kid. These weren't my stories; I was just responding to the market. Mormonism was a big part of it. These films could have been made by anybody."

Dutcher quit the movie business and planned to become a full-time schoolteacher and novelist. Or so he thought. One day he was barbecuing hamburgers in the yard when his eye fell on the L.A. Times movie section.