http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/30/technology/30DOCU.html
April 30, 2001

The New York Times
The Internet Bubble Bursts on the Screen

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Kaleil Isaza Tuzman walks into the office at the end of a very bad day. He
is returning from yet
another exhausting business trip, trying to save his struggling dot-com,
GovWorks. The $60 million
he helped raise for the company is burning away as if it were jet fuel,
workers have been laid off and he
has just dismissed a co-founder of the company, his childhood friend Tom
Herman, after a bitter power
struggle. Mr. Isaza Tuzman drops his bags, brings his hands together and
begins to chant a Hindu prayer.
On camera.

It is one of many compelling scenes from "startup.com," a documentary by
Chris Hegedus and D. A.
Pennebaker - who together made "The War Room," a documentary on the 1992
presidential campaign
- and a newcomer, Jehane Noujaim.

"Startup.com," which will open on May 11, is a text for fast times, a
roller- coaster history of one
dot-com's boom and bust that is appearing even before the general dot-com
bust has played out. And the
freshness of the events - closing titles with updates on the main characters
were revised just weeks
before the release date - makes "startup.com" seem less a documentary than
an instant replay.

The filmmakers call it "the rise and fall of the American dream," but the
documentary is actually a
squirmingly uncomfortable close-up of the Internet market mania of the last
few years: a small tale that,
under examination, tells a much bigger story.

It is only natural that the Internet bubble should burst on screen, since
the roaring 90's turned business into
entertainment.

As the stock market soared and millions of Americans became portfolio
managers, the nation's televisions
were tuned to CNBC and Internet executives became stars.

It is not the first time that filmmakers have looked to the boardroom; some
classic movies, including
"Citizen Kane," are set in the world of business. The heyday was the 1950's,
when Hollywood's biggest
names made movies about making money. William Holden starred in "Executive
Suite," Gregory Peck was
"The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and Alec Guinness was "The Man in the
White Suit." Directors have
since returned to business but rarely with the attention to the details that
made the earlier films so
memorable.

In the 1990's, however, the business of America seemed once again to be
business. At times the lines
blurred, as when the recently departed punk rock icon Joey Ramone wrote an
ode to the CNBC financial
reporter Maria Bartiromo. Even the TV idol William Shatner crooned for
Priceline, sending up the
ill-advised spoken- word rock album of his younger days. But when the good
times soured, the Internet
businesses looked more and more like reality TV, with precious few survivors
and plenty of weakest links.

And that could be why the new film is such a vivid document of the times -
and why a documentary,
rather than a fictional film, might have been the best way to capture their
hypercaffeinated spirit.

The original vision of the GovWorks founders was not particularly grand: to
improve the way people pay
parking tickets. But in time, the company saw itself transforming citizens'
relationship with government,
improving services and making government accountable 24 hours a day. They
also hoped to tap into a
market of some $4 trillion in annual government fees.

The documentary was conceived in 1998 when Ms. Noujaim realized that her
roommate, Mr. Isaza
Tuzman, was leaving a lucrative, secure job at Goldman, Sachs for the
promise of dot-com zillions. She
had been planning to quit her own job as a producer at MTV to start a film
in Egypt but realized she had
an amazing story in the messy bedroom down the hall.

She took a camera that she had bought with grant money from Harvard, her
alma mater, and began
following Mr. Isaza Tuzman around as he cleaned out his desk at Goldman and
began assembling the
skeleton staff of the company that eventually became GovWorks.

Shortly after Ms. Noujaim began filming Mr. Isaza Tuzman, mutual friends
introduced her to Chris
Hegedus, who was also hoping to make a documentary about a start-up company.

Ms. Hegedus said that she saw the entrepreneurs as rebels, "kind of right
out of the 60's, where I came
from."

Mr. Isaza Tuzman's story, she said, captivated her because "he had left this
very structured corporate
world, and it felt like a revolution."

When she began looking into Internet companies, "I wasn't exactly sure where
Silicon Alley was," Ms.
Hegedus said, but she was surprised to find that it resembled the downtown
loft scene she of the early
1970's, when artists and rock stars lived in many of the same neighborhoods.

The dot-commers, she said, "were almost like the rock stars of the new age."

The women decided to collaborate. Each filmmaker saw a benefit in the
partnership: Ms. Hegedus would
be in at the very beginning of a promising company with almost total access
to meetings and top executives
at all hours. Ms. Noujaim would gain the experience of working with one of
the best- known documentary
teams in the world, Ms. Hegedus and Mr. Pennebaker.

"I felt incredibly lucky," Ms. Noujaim said. She recalled thinking, "This
film is going to be seen if Chris and
Penne get involved."

With Mr. Pennebaker as producer, Ms. Hegedus and Ms. Noujaim shot some 400
hours of film over
more than a year of 18- hour days, in meeting rooms, gyms, cars, elevators
and bathrooms, even following
Mr. Isaza Tuzman to the White House, where he participated in a conference
on the New Economy.

Ms. Hegedus joked to Ms. Noujaim, "You're doing Proust here."

But Ms. Noujaim responded, "No, I just don't know when to put the camera
down." After all, they said,
no one knew how the story would end.

It does not give away too much of the story to say that things do not end
well. The exhilaration of the
building phase gives way to the raw exhaustion of the breakdown - and the
ugly break between Mr.
Isasa Tuzman and Mr. Herman, which ends, like so many conflicts today, in a
slurry of letters, lawyers,
cell phones and bile.

The subjects, Mr. Isaza Tuzman and Mr. Herman, say they admire the film and
the dedication of the
filmmakers. Mr. Herman, 30, said it was "an honor" to receive this form of
celluloid immortality. But he
also complains that the movie minimizes his leadership role in the company
and the technological hurdles
his team successfully overcame; the software they developed at GovWorks was
acquired by a another
company and is still in use in cities like Boston, Memphis and New York.

Mr. Isaza Tuzman, 29, said he was mortified to see that the filmmakers
included scenes showing the toll
that his round-the- clock work schedule took on his relationships with one
girlfriend and then a second.
"It's just excruciating to watch," he said.

Ms. Hegedus had her own observation. "When people do this, they really give
us their lives; we're
eternally grateful to them," she said. "If they see you're involved, and
they see you take them seriously and
respect them, they'll let you into their lives."

Both Mr. Herman and Mr. Isaza Tuzman, however, said that "startup.com" had
sacrificed realism in the
interest of telling a good story. "They focused in on conflict, which makes
good drama," Mr. Herman said.

As evidence of their continuing friendship, they point to a fact that seems
incredible to anyone who has
seen the film: Mr. Isaza Tuzman and Mr. Herman are back in business again,
together.

After going through the wrenching experience of seeing the assets of his
company sold off, Mr. Isaza
Tuzman realized that the residual value to be found in dying dot-coms is
often lost because most
bankruptcy experts do not really understand the nature of the businesses
involved. In other words, he saw
another market. So he called Mr. Herman out of retirement, and they teamed
up once again to form the
Recognition Group.

The company helps its clients, which include the failing companies'
financial backers, work through the
legal and emotional maze of bankruptcy and near-bankruptcy. This time, they
hope to change the way
Americans fail.

"Pain is the greatest teacher," Mr. Isaza Tuzman said. "It may sound
schmaltzy, but I have a strong spiritual
center. I felt that there's a reason for everything, including missteps."

The men said they had learned from their mistakes and that their new company
had achievable goals and
defined milestones - and, not surprisingly, a tight focus on quickly making
a profit. "If there's not a
revenue- generating outcome for something you're working on, you're wasting
your time," Mr. Herman
said.

Mr. Isaza Tuzman, displaying the forcefulness that led venture capitalists
to give millions to his young team
at GovWorks, said he hoped that others would similarly learn specific
lessons of the dot-com boom and
bust and not just dismiss it as some kind of mass hallucination.

"If people let this pendulum swing too far in the other direction and all of
these extraordinary, visionary and
gutsy people go back to exactly what they were doing before and are
disillusioned with entrepreneurship,"
he said, "that's an enormous loss to the economy."

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