PROMISING FUTURE: Denisha Fisher, a 26-year-old single mother and customer service representative for Regions Bank, is the first artist picked up by new local talent production company True Memphis Invisible. The group wants to help local artists promote their work. -- PHOTO COURTESY OF BOB COMPTON

When Bob Compton met the daughter of a family friend last year who wowed him with an impromptu recitation of some of her poetry, it gave the Memphis venture capitalist an idea.

Compton, a former Sofamor Danek executive who lately has stepped into the world of documentary filmmaking, decided to start a new business venture focused exclusively on finding and cultivating new artistic talent in Memphis. Denisha Fisher, the 26-year-old who impressed Compton with her poetry, provided some of the inspiration for that enterprise, which Compton has named True Memphis Invisible.

The venture is a talent production company. Compton rounded up two partners – Les Edwards, who has helped run the Indie Memphis Film Festival for about 10 years, and film director and editor Dan Treharne, another family acquaintance of Compton’s – to get it off the ground.

Money is no object

How True Memphis Invisible stands apart as a talent production firm, however, is that thanks to Compton’s financial support, all gross proceeds from the sales of any DVD or CD the company produces for an artist will go directly to that artist.

The partners refer to it as a “social enterprise.” Because other than the satisfaction they get from finding artists who might be living from one paycheck to the next and then providing a profitable artistic outlet for them, the partners will not make any money from the venture.

There’s no office space yet, and the partners are still tweaking details of the venture’s operation. Right now, the basic idea is they’ll record either a DVD or CD for an artist and sell those through a Web site, www.truememphisinvisible.com. Compton said he wants to make sure the business model works before the group branches out and finds new artists after working with Fisher.

Wealth and poverty

True Memphis Invisible draws its name from a poem written by Compton as a description of his love-hate relationship with Memphis. It reads, in part: “True Memphis is creative, corrupt, tainted, talented, hot, cool, rhythm, crime, just passing time.”

“To me, Memphis is a very creative and talent-rich city that is leadership- and capital-poor,” Compton said. “We have a lot of very talented people here. In Denisha’s case, she’s 25 (now 26) years old, is divorced and is living on $10 an hour. And she’s a gifted poet.

“But she had no means to think about the commercial potential for her art. So we got together for lunch a couple of times to talk about how we could turn her talent into a way to earn part of her living.”

From ‘feelings’ to market

Compton’s experience led to the creation of True Memphis Invisible and the vehicle through which Compton and his partners produced “Lovesick,” a DVD that contains 16 of Fisher’s performance poems. To launch the DVD, True Memphis Invisible is hosting a release party Friday at The Power House Downtown at 45 East G.E. Patterson Ave. from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

“I met Bob toward the end of last year,” said Fisher, who is a customer service representative for Regions Bank. “I went ahead and did one of my pieces for him, and he was in awe and said, ‘I can do something with that.’ It’s a real blessing that this has happened to me. People are actually going to be able to hear my feelings.”

Humility and ambition

The new venture is almost a natural progression for Compton, who made a dramatic entrance into the field of documentary filmmaking with last year’s film “Two Million Minutes.” Compton, who produced the film and spent half a million dollars of his own money to do so, used the movie to compare the divergent lives of a group of high school students from the U.S., India and China.

The film attracted attention on a broad scale and sparked a debate over the education system in the U.S. Publicity for the film was everywhere from The Washington Post to the ABC morning news show “Good Morning America.”

“When Bob got interested in making documentary films, he knew I had been involved with the (Indie Memphis) film festival, so he contacted me just wanting to get some advice about the film industry,” Edwards said. “And that was very flattering, because Bob is the kind of guy you usually approach to ask his advice on things.

“For True Memphis Invisible, he slowly began to realize there were a lot of very creative people in Memphis who really did not have the money to finance their work and didn’t have the expertise to market their work once they finished it.”

Compton has more films on the drawing board, but he’s now pivoting slightly and bringing the knowledge he’s acquired about the business to True Memphis Invisible.

“The other thing I’ve learned, having now been active in the film business for a couple of years, is the artists often get ripped off,” he said. “So I wanted to make absolutely sure we organized a company where the artist got 100 percent of the benefits. Because when you’re making $10 an hour like Denisha – if we sell a few thousand DVDs, that can make an enormous impact in her life.”