Kristen Bell wears a Baume & Mercier Linea

The kitchen scene comes late in the 2014 Veronica Mars movie. Veronica, played by Kristen Bell, leans against a counter cluttered with a dish rack and a soda can, facing Logan Echolls across the cutting board where her left forearm rests. The film exists at all because of its fans. A 2013 Kickstarter campaign raised $5.7 million from people who had never let the canceled TV series go, one of the largest crowdfunded films of its time, and it put the grown Veronica back in Neptune to clear an ex-boyfriend accused of murder at their high school reunion.

On her wrist, just visible on the cutting board, is a Baume & Mercier Linea, reference 10070. It is a small steel watch, a 32mm case with a Swiss quartz movement and a light champagne dial, and the Linea's signature is a quick-change strap system that lets the wearer swap the bracelet for a strap in seconds. The watch shipped with both a steel three-link bracelet and a black leather strap, and the press write-up at the time said the leather version was the one Mars wears in the film. In this scene she has the steel bracelet on, which is a small reminder that what a brand sends out and what ends up on screen are not always the same thing.

What makes the choice fit is the price. At $2,400 retail in 2014, the Linea was attainable luxury, expensive enough to mark a young lawyer who had built a real career, cheap enough that a fan could plausibly own the same watch. That is a neat piece of symmetry for a movie the fans paid to make. The grassroots ethos ran right down to the wrist: the people who funded the film could go out and buy the watch its star wore in it.