"HELP 'Bella.' "
That's the message of a recent e-mail imploring fans of "Bella" to do whatever they can to keep the small-budget, family-oriented movie with an anti-abortion story line in theaters during the height of the fiercely competitive holiday moviegoing season.
The PG-13 rated movie, which features a largely Latino cast with a mix of English and Spanish dialogue, tells the story of a New York waitress, played by Tammy Blanchard, who struggles over whether to seek an abortion because of an unplanned pregnancy. She is befriended by the restaurant's chef (Eduardo Verastegui), a onetime international soccer star who is haunted by a tragedy in his past.
Behind the scenes of the heartwarming indie film is an aggressive grass-roots marketing campaign that began more than a year before the film's release in October. In the campaign, such unlikely forces as adoption advocates, Latino groups, church leaders, businessmen and an army of folks from various walks of life took up the cause of "Bella" and its pro-adoption theme. Since its Oct. 26 release, "Bella" has grossed nearly $6.8 million in North America. This past weekend, it grossed $426,764 on 435 screens. At its widest, it reached 457 screens. By comparison, the grisly horror film "Saw IV," which opened the same week as "Bella," reached nearly 3,200 screens.
But producers fear the intense competition for screens at the holidays could impede their efforts.
"We're alive, but at any moment we could die," said Sean Wolfington, one of the film's producers. "Every week we're trying to survive because we don't have ad budgets. Every week there is some type of publicity that helps us survive."
The film's box office performance shows it has a following, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office tracking firm Media by Numbers, who noted: "A lot of these smaller films are lucky to get to $1 million or $2 million. This movie has had a little bit of a groundswell and risen above what sometimes these smaller films are able to do."
The film has yet to open in Mexico, where one of the lead actors and the director are from. Singer and actor Verastegui, 33, starred in five highly rated "telenovelas" or soap operas (his biggest soap was "Sonadoras") in Mexico before making "Bella."
