Some months later Lynskey agreed to play Melody, a lonely young woman in Los Angeles who mistakenly receives mysterious mail meant for someone else. She gets caught up in a secret pen-pal romance and loses her grip on reality. A parallel pen-pal story takes place in Northern California's suburban Mountain View, where an Englishman gets sucked into an arranged marriage to save his Bosnian refugee friend.
"Here is a movie that is all about receiving letters and receiving postcards and using old-fashioned mail to correspond and become friends, and that's how I cast my leading actress, sort of becoming her pen pal."
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Kines also recruited actors Wil Wheaton, Corin Nemick, and Yelena Danova, and work got underway. Julia Stemock signed on as producer, and the team began raising "start money" through investors. Despite an initial delay due to lack of funds, production began in LA in July, 1997.
But by late 1997, with the budget ballooning to around $500,000, Kines needed cash fast. Just about every mainstream movie has a high-financed website aimed at marketing new releases, but Kines took another road: He decided to create a site in order to raise awareness of the film before the movie even existed.
He registered a domain name, forcor.com, and launched the day before Thanksgiving.