Actress Kristen Bell was nine months pregnant and lying in bed resting swollen feet when Veronica Mars writer and director Rob Thomas called and told her to turn on her computer.
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After trying unsuccessfully for six years to make a movie spin-off of their cancelled TV series, the duo had decided to go to crowd-funding site Kickstarter to raise $US2 million ($2.2 million) for a film that would hopefully make its money back in digital and direct-to-DVD sales. ''I kept clicking refresh on my computer and watching the numbers go crazy,'' Bell says of the record-setting campaign. ''We asked for $US2 million and we ended up with $US5.7 million.''
The 33-year-old is recalling the genesis of the film while sitting in the corner of the Edison nightclub in downtown Los Angeles a few months later, during a break from shooting a pivotal scene in which the characters attend their 10-year high-school reunion and a fight breaks out.
Bell plays the eponymous heroine, a former amateur high-school detective who is about to graduate from law school in New York when she gets a call from an ex-boyfriend who has been accused of murder. In typical style, Mars drops everything and heads back to her hometown of Neptune to take on the case.
Patiently waiting nearby, under a tent in the blazing summer heat, are some of the 91,585 Kickstarter donors who paid for the chance to be extras on set. ''We've had between two and 40 visitors on any given day with a large crowd scene,'' Bell says. ''And they would go through hair and make-up and wardrobe and get the whole experience because that's what they bought with their donation, so we were essentially hanging out with the producers of our film. I'd sit and eat lunch and hear where they came from and how Veronica Mars was introduced to them. It helped being around people so excited about the movie on set every day.''
A graduate of New York University's musical theatre program, Bell became a star with her 2004 breakthrough role as the teen sleuth with a dark past. ''Veronica Mars was this queen of the disenfranchised, a loner, a loser and an outcast,'' Bell says of the show's appeal. ''It's not a show about popular people. It's a show about a rejected girl and I think so many of us feel that, even on a tiny level, when you see someone acting like you would want to act when someone says something snarky to you, you want to root for them.''
The series had a fanatical fan base but was cancelled after only three seasons and Bell moved on to other projects including the TV series Heroes, Party Down and now House of Lies. She also kept a film career bubbling on the side with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Couples Retreat, Get Him to the Greek and as the voice of Anna in the Oscar-winning animated film Frozen.
She married actor Dax Shepherd last year and gave birth to their daughter, Lincoln, just three months before filming began, but as Bell looks over at her baby sleeping in a pram nearby, she says it was the right time to bring Veronica back.
''I have been looking forward to doing this movie with these people and getting this crew back together for so long,'' she says. ''There were moments of panic, right before we launched where we thought, 'what if we were listening to the same 20 people and they were just avid fans?' But luckily we were met with far more support than we had ever anticipated.''
Veronica Mars
Genre Mystery thriller
Buzz Great reviews and feedback at South by Southwest Festival premiere in Texas and sold-out fan screenings (including Sydney) suggest money-back guarantee
Stars Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, Krysten Ritter, Francis Capra
Director Rob Thomas
Released Available now to download from iTunes and all participating digital retailers
