Dana Packard and Jennifer Nichole Porter feel like they are letting go of their baby.

Their Maine-made indie film, “40 West,” gets its first taste of national distribution this week. Packard and Porter, a husband-and-wife team, have kept tight reins on the film until now, shopping it around to various festivals across the country and overseas while winning numerous awards and accolades.

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“40 West,” set in east Texas but shot entirely in Maine by Dana Packard and Jennifer Nichole Porter, is now out in DVD. The movie stars Porter and, among others, the singer and actor Wayne Newton (in hat at right).

But with the DVD version of the movie now out there, the fate of the thriller is out of their control.

“It’s out of our hands now, so we’ll see how it does. We’re at the point now where we lose control of it, in a way. It’s like sending your kid off to college or something,” said Packard. “You can only promote it to a certain point. At that point, the larger public decides whether it builds its own momentum. Small movies without big marketing budgets live or die on their strength — or perceived strength.”

Packard and Porter are best known for their work in The Originals theater troupe, in residence at the Saco River Theater over in Buxton since 1990.

“40 West” is a bit of a leap. Porter wrote the script, and stars. Packard directed. Among its stars is Wayne Newton.

Yes, that Wayne Newton.

The filmmakers brought the singer-actor up to Buxton in spring 2010 for a few days of filming. In a film that’s heavy on violence, Newton’s character — a vengeful, dangerous man — tops the list. Let’s just say he puts a pair of tin snips to good use in the film’s harrowing final scene.

“We took a chance. We had never seen him act,” Packard says.

The couple had hoped to interest Kris Kristofferson in the role. Kristofferson’s agent also represents Newton, and told Packard and Porter that their movie was too small for Kristofferson. But Newton might be interested, he said.

“We talked about it for about five minutes and thought it was a brilliant idea,” Packard said. “It was so unexpected, in a way. He plays a homicidal character with a cowboy hat. It seemed like a good fit.

“He came up (through the ranks) with Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra. He was mentored by those people. He’s a wonderful old-school actor. He came prepared, and was very gracious.”

“40 West” gets its name from the highway that runs from North Carolina to California, through Texas. It’s about a woman, played by Porter, who finds herself trapped in a hotel room with her violent husband, who has just been released from prison and tracks her down, and a stranger who passes himself off as a good Samaritan, but isn’t really.

She is trapped by these two men, and the tension in the movie centers on who among them gets out alive.

In the interest of clarity, there are several vengeful, dangerous men in the film. Porter’s husband in the film, played by the Boston-based actor Brian A. White, is truly evil. And the supposed good Samaritan, played by the late Scott Winters, isn’t much better. This film is chock full of evil.

Porter got the idea for the script after spending a night in a scary hotel room in rural Texas.

“Dana and I stayed in a $12-a-night hotel. Literally. It was 1995, and it was one of the scariest places I have ever been in my life. Amazing,” she said. “The floor was linoleum from the 1960s. It was a metal hospital-looking bed, a dirty mattress. The bathtub used to be white but was now yellow. There were Rottweilers in the lobby.”

The experience got her thinking about desperate times and the lengths to which people will go to survive. In the movie, the woman must depend on someone she cannot and does not trust. She has no choice but to put her faith in him to help her out of her life-or-death predicament.

“The story is really about the emotions and conflict that come up in a situation like that,” Porter said.

The movie screened in Portland earlier this year, and will screen again at 6:30 and 9 p.m. Thursday at the Nickelodeon Cinemas in downtown Portland.

The film premiered in New York not quite a year ago, and has won 17 international awards and been nominated for seven others. Among the awards: Grand Prize Jury at the Amsterdam Film Festival, Golden Palm Award at the Mexico International Film Festival and Best Narrative Feature at the Alaska International Film Festival. Porter has also won several individual awards for her script, score and acting.

In addition to Porter, the movie features several local actors, including Kathleen Kimball, Rob Cameron, C. James Roberts, William McDonough III and Dylan Chestnutt.

Most of the crew was local as well. And although the movie is set in east Texas, it was filmed entirely in Maine — in Buxton and Hollis, specifically.

Packard and Porter converted the performance space at the Saco River Theater to look like the dingy hotel room. Other scenes were filmed around the area, including Your Country Store and the Salmon Falls Country Club in Hollis, and the Roost, a country dance hall on the Chicopee Road in Buxton.

“I grew up here,” Packard said. “This is my hometown. It was ideal for us to stay at home and drive three or four miles to our theater to do the work.”

The couple had no trouble making Maine look like east Texas. Along I-40 in east Texas near the Louisiana border, much of the landscape feels something like Maine, with rolling hills and tall pine trees. The key was making the outdoor scenes look uniquely American.

Visually, it was an easy sell, Packard said.

Besides, most of the action takes place over one very long night in a nasty hotel room.

Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at 791-6457 or:

bkeyes@pressherald.com

Twitter: pphbkeyes

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