As an indie film that cost only $11 million to produce, "Find Me Guilty" will be lucky if it can muster enough screeners for academy voters and members of various Hollywood talent guilds to watch this awards season. Mancini figures they will need at least 10,000 copies, which would cost about $65,000 for the DVDs and mailings.

They hope Oscar voters will consider the film for best picture, Diesel for best actor and Lumet for best director, along with actors Peter Dinklage, Ron Silver, Alex Rocco and Annabella Sciorra for their supporting roles. Lumet, Mancini and Robert McCrea are the credited screenwriters.

"The academy alone has 6,000 members," Mancini said. "The Producers Guild has 3,000. Then you've got the Directors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Golden Globes. A real campaign costs hundreds of thousands of dollars because you've got publicists, big, full-page ads [in newspapers and magazines] and all of that. We don't have any of that.... It's like the elections in the United States. You can have the greatest candidate in the world, but if no one finds out about him, what good is it? This may be the greatest movie you never saw."

The pair said they were going to friends and family for money to campaign for the independent film, and criticized the Yari Film Group for not already agreeing to foot the bill for the screeners.

For its part, the Yari Film Group has yet to decide its overall Oscar campaign plans, but Immerman noted that "if [Mancini and DeBrino] are willing to pay for 6,000 screeners to go to academy members, that is something we would certainly consider. But that request has not come across my desk."

The Yari Film Group, however, has already drawn the line at sending screeners to members of the Producers Guild of America because of a pending lawsuit over producer credits.

Bob Yari, who financed "Find Me Guilty" and has a producing credit on the film along with Mancini, DeBrino and Robert Greenhut, sued the PGA and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences earlier this year, claiming they unlawfully denied him a producer credit on last year's Oscar-winning film "Crash."

"We don't recognize the Producers Guild as having an equitable method of selecting who is entitled to a producer credit," Immerman said.

Even if screeners do become widely available, some wonder whether a movie that came and went at the box office has any chance this awards season.

Frank di Giacomo, a New York advertising executive who brought the real-life mob trial project to Mancini and who receives co-producer credit on the film, said: "My criticism is not with performances or the direction. It was just never marketed properly."

Neither Diesel nor Lumet could be reached for comment, but Di Giacomo said, "I touched bases with [Lumet] a couple of weeks ago and it's his feeling this movie can never recover from that kind of release."

Di Giacomo said he ran into an acquaintance earlier this week who said to him, " 'Frank, when is your movie coming out?' I said, 'It's been out and it's in DVD now.' "