Art meets crafty in the indie market

"She did not have a ready audience in the traditional film industry," says Brown, who earned his fortune as one of the 1980s kingpins of direct mail (his then-company spawned years of legal travails). Recently Brown has been helping progressive groups such as the indie New York radio station WBAI, and FAIR, the national media watch group, raise money and get their message out, often through ads in publications such as the Nation and the New York Review of Books.

"The Nation has the right demographics and reasonable ad costs. I had to figure out what might appeal to these people," Brown says. "The subject itself did not have general appeal. It wasn't war or sex or celebrity, so it had to be an appeal based on a general ethos of the Nation reader to support underdog causes that had social merit."

Carin, a 32-year-old Bard College graduate who now likes to go by the moniker La Prez, has been working on the script for "Don't See This" for eight years. She says she has an investor willing to put up 20% of the film's budget, which will probably be between $3 million and $5 million, and is trying to cast a few name actors to boost the film's commercial viability.

So far, however, the ad (just days out) hasn't sent a deluge of Nation readers Carin's way. "I've gotten three donations," she says, though she still sounded optimistic.

--

rachel.abramowitz @latimes.com