Friday, Feb. 14, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
It's been like old home week for Anna Maria Davis.
The Boulder City native, who now resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, was in Las Vegas this week to attend Thursday night's VIP screening of the film "Fools Rush In," at the United Artists Theater in Henderson.
The movie opens nationwide today.
"I love coming home," said Davis, the movie's co-producer, earlier this week from Los Angeles. She anticipated the screening would be "kind of like a reunion."
Especially since Davis has strong, long-standing ties to Southern Nevada.
Her Anglo father and Hispanic mother moved to Boulder City in 1941 and graduated from Boulder City High School, as did Davis, who was a cheerleader there, and her two brothers.
The small town, she said, "gave me a foundation ... a sense of myself, that I could really accomplish my goals. The fact that Boulder City is such a cohesive community, I really know what a community is. We had an incredible education growing up there.
"I'm still really close to all of my friends (there). It's still home."
The film is based loosely on the courtship and marriage Davis had with the film's other producer, Doug Draizin, 12 years ago.
The two met shortly after she graduated with a merchandising management degree from the Fashion Institute in Los Angeles.
"My ex-husband and I knew each other for six weeks when I got pregnant" at age 23, Davis says. The couple went on to have three children.
During their marriage, Draizin pitched ideas for movies to studios. "But they'd say, 'We like your and Anna's story better,'" Davis recalled.
So they sold the rights to their lives and went to work on "Fools Rush In." The movie was six years in development.
All along, Davis worked closely with the writers, "making sure things were accurate, as far as the portrayal of Las Vegas and the Latino culture."
"I really feel we accomplished that," she said.
She also had a hand in casting actress Selma Hayek ("Desperado") in the leading-lady role.
Hayek plays Isabel Fuentes, an aspiring photographer from Las Vegas, who has a one-night stand with Alex Whitman, a Manhattan yuppie, corporate-type, played by "Friends" star Matthew Perry.
The union results in a pregnancy and impetuous marriage that soon falls apart.
The similarities weren't meant to be so obvious, though. "We didn't plan it like that," Davis assures. For example, in the movie, Isabel gives birth to a daughter. In real life, Davis had a son.
She and her children spent several months in Las Vegas last spring while the movie was filmed at Hoover Dam, Lake Mead and Valley of Fire State Park, among others area sites.
"It was really wonderful. I hadn't lived at home since 1979," Davis says, adding that the kids even played on a Little League team in town.
"Everybody was so embracing and that's what we wanted to show (in the film). I miss it."
But not enough to give up her new career in show biz and come home.
Davis' next project is a movie called "Outlaws," a "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"-genre film.
"But instead of two men, it's two women," she says.
Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammargren, who oversees the Nevada Motion Pictures Division, hosted the VIP screening along with members of the Greenspun family, which has contributed to the Nevada Motion Picture Foundation.
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