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Photo By Steve Ramos
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Startup.com co-directors Chris Hegedus and Jehane
Noujaim met through one of the founders of
govWorks.com
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Not all Cinderella stories have happy endings. The future looked bright when long-time friends Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman left their Wall Street jobs to co-found an Internet start-up called govWorks.com.
Young, hip and idealistic, these two twentysomething CEOs
felt confident their start-up company would change a little
slice of the world. The idea was that govWorks.com would help
individuals better interact with their local government. Basically,
govWorks.com would allow people to pay for their parking tickets
over the Internet.
The govWorks.com idea attracted plenty of excitement. It
wasn't long before the company had a "paper" worth of $50
million and 200 employees. Of course, nobody predicted the
Nasdaq would do its big about face. govWorks.com eventually
became one of those unbelievable, roller-coaster stories pulled
from the pages of the Financial Times. Luckily,
a film crew was on hand to document the entire soap opera
as Startup.com.
As govWorks.com was being formed, Isaza Tuzman's roommate
Jehane Noujaim, a friend from Harvard, was leaving a job at
MTV and harboring dreams of becoming a documentary filmmaker.
A govWorks.com exec put Noujaim in contact with the husband-and-wife
documentary team of Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker.
Hegedus and Pennebaker liked Noujaim's pitch about documenting
the story behind govWorks.com. Noujaim was thrilled with the
idea of working with the documentarians responsible for the
Bob Dylan film Don't Look Back (1967)
and the Clinton campaign film The War Room
(1994). A collaboration was soon formed with Hegedus and Noujaim
as co-directors and Pennebaker serving as the film's producer.
"Many of my friends were quitting their jobs to join Internet companies and interviewing with Internet companies," Noujaim says, speaking earlier at this year's Sundance Film Festival. "There was this dot-com craze. People were writing him (Isaza Tuzman) checks for $40,000 for an idea that didn't even have an office yet."
"In these films, one of the things you need most is access and the supreme access is to be somebody's roommate," Hegedus says, sitting alongside Noujaim at a Park City, Utah, lodge. "I met Jehane, and she hadn't made a lot of films before, but I could see that she had what it takes to do these types of things.
"The War Room was also kind of a buddy story of sorts, and this very much is, too. When we go at stories, we really look for characters and what interests us the most is watching people do something in their lives that means something to them and watching them take some kind of risk. And certainly the risks these guys were taking in their 20s were, for me, unprecedented."
The film shifts easily from New York City's Silicon Alley to offices in Palo Alto, Calif., but Hegedus and Noujaim always stay focused on Herman and Isaza Tuzman. Armed with mobile phones and laptop computers, the twentysomething CEOs wow many venture capitalists with their enthusiasm.
Using digital video cameras, Hegedus and Noujaim are there to document the
birth of govWorks.com, its glory days of hype and anticipation,
as well its subsequent financial death. The film begins in
the spring of 1999 with the creation of the company. Herman
and Isaza Tuzman are portrayed as idealistic heroes aspiring
to make it big as Internet entrepreneurs. They are sincere
and honest dreammakers, much like Hegedus and Noujaim themselves.
But most tales of idealistic ambition have a villain. In
Startup.com, it's the egotistical Isaza Tuzman who
eventually becomes the corporate villain. Amid the footage
of pitches to venture capitalists, rallies with newly hired
staff and a meeting with President Clinton, Hegedus and Noujaim
knew that they had to show some grit.
"I think that if you're Tom and you're getting fired from the company, obviously you feel that Kaleil is the villain," Noujaim says. "Kaleil is letting you down. But Kaleil was also under an enormous amount of pressure from other board members and from other people in the company to do this."
Still, Noujaim and Hegedus both agree that audiences will leave Startup.com
with their own interpretations. "People bring their own
instincts into films and I think that's certainly the case
with this film, too," Hegedus says. "I think there are people
who see Kaleil as charismatic and a leader, and other people
who see him as heartless for firing his friend and can relate
to Tom more because he has the human values they aspire to.
I don't think either is right. There is nothing you can do
about it. It's the nature of personalities and audiences."
By late 2000, the timing was perfect for Artisan Entertainment
to buy a movie like Startup.com. Failing dot-coms were
everywhere in the news. As the Startup.com was heading
to the 2001 Sundance Film Festival early in the year, its
story seemed perfectly in sync with the world around it. If
the goal of a documentary is to be timely, Startup.com
hit the zeitgeist bulls-eye.
Still, Startup.com steps away from the corporate
soap opera and shows Herman and Isaza Tuzman fighting over
money, neglecting their personal lives and screwing up their
own friendship. Much of their roller-coaster ride is disheartening
to watch.
But this emotional fall-out allows Startup.com to
find a humanist tale at the heart of the Internet revolution.
By emphasizing its human story, Startup.com becomes
more than just some cinematic chronicle of the heady rise
and subsequent fall of one Internet venture.
"My interest early on in doing documentaries was that I got dropped into these worlds that I never got to witness and really be a part of them," Hegedus says. "It fascinates me, and I hope it fascinates other people. I think that there has been a lot written about the dot-com world, and there are a lot of feature articles about it. But to really live it with people and get to know personalities is another thing. I think it's incredibly exciting, and it keeps me doing this kind of film as opposed to a feature film with actors."
Isaza Tuzman watched a screening of Startup.com at
Sundance. The experience was both thrilling and humbling.
Before the film's Sundance premiere, govWorks.com sold off
its assets leaving Isaza Tuzman and Herman with no financial
compensation for their hard work. But Isaza Tuzman has already
re-teamed with Herman in a new endeavor counseling owners
of failed dot-coms.
Still, Startup.com has permanently recorded Isaza
Tuzman's personal humilities for all of posterity. No matter
what he does, Startup.com will always be his cinematic
business card. ©
