Pretty much every studio executive who read the screenplay for (500) Days of Summer -- a boy-meets-girl story with Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) told exclusively from Tom's point of view -- liked it. But they all wanted a tiny tweak or two before they would commit to the project.

``One guy said, `I have an idea. Why don't we start off with Tom driving in a car, and he's crying, and his face is covered with blood, so people spend the movie trying to figure out what happened!' '' says Marc Webb, who wound up directing the movie, which opens today.

``My favorite one was, `We like the script. We want to buy it, and we want to make it. We just need to change one thing: It can't be about a relationship,' '' Webb says, laughing.

``I always thought this was a pop movie. It's accessible; it's funny; it has heart. But every big studio passed on it, because they didn't know how to market it. It doesn't fit into a box.''

A box is almost where the script for (500) Days of Summer ended up after Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber finished it. The screenplay was born from the friends' conversations after Neustadter was dumped by his girlfriend. But the result was so personal that it felt to Neustadter like ``a long diary entry,'' and the risk of ``embarrassment at being judged horribly'' was almost too great for him to risk letting anyone read the script.

The process of writing (500) Days of Summer was therapeutic for the heartbroken Neustadter, who came away with a newfound ability to ``understand what had happened and how to make sure it never happened to me again. Everyone has been on both sides of this coin. We've liked people more than they've liked us, and we've been liked more than we wanted to be. Both of them are terrible.''

And when the two writers finally decided to let other people read their work, they were surprised by the number of men who told them they had gone through the same hell after discovering the woman they loved did not feel quite the same ardor.

Despite the universality of the material, Neustadter and Weber believe most studios said no to (500) Days of Summer because their script -- with its non-linear timeline, fantasy sequences (including a song-and-dance number set to Hall & Oates' You Make My Dreams Come True) and wry voiceover narration -- departed too much from romantic-comedy formulas.

``Romantic comedy has become a dirty word,'' Weber says. ``People are turned off by that term, because Hollywood hasn't been making them well for a while now. But we love the genre when it's done right. Scott and I became friends because our heroes were Woody Allen and Cameron Crowe. There's no other movie genre that is more relatable, because we've all been in love, and we've all been in relationships.''

The only studio willing to take a chance on (500) Days of Summer was Fox Searchlight, distributor of Sideways, Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler. Executives loved the script and offered to make the movie, albeit for ``not a lot of money,'' Weber says.

Enter Webb, a veteran music-video director eager to make his first feature film. Webb says he originally thought his debut would be a horror picture, because he loves that genre so much and had actively pursued a shot at directing last summer's home-invasion thriller The Strangers.

``The horror genre is really all about the craft of filmmaking, because it's about creating tone and atmosphere, whereas a lot of times the romantic comedy is about personality management and hitting certain tropes,'' Webb says.

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