Cyber meltdown

>> Startup.com captures an Internet company going bust

by MATTHEW HAYS

It's become a staple of this style of filmmaking. Cinema verité, the documentary type best personified by the films of Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker, is often marked by twists of fate, shifts that take the films away from their original focus and into new and unexpected turf.

Such is the case with Startup.com, a striking doc from Pennebaker (who exec produces here) and partner Chris Hegedus, who codirects with Jehane Noujaim. The filmmakers, who began capturing images for the story three years ago, chose to focus on a new dot-com company. With Internet stocks soaring and billions of dollars being pumped into such ventures, the subject appeared to be a good one. The find was govWorks Inc., a company that intended to create a Web site that people could log onto to deal with any interactions with government. Want to sidestep long lineups at city hall and avoid bureaucratic inefficiency? Just log on at govWorks, went the hype, and all your problems will be solved through your own computer.

Company founders gave complete access to the filmmakers, thinking, as dot-commers tended to then, that the sky was the limit as far as the Web went. Not so, of course, and the beauty of this film is that it completely captures in microcosm the meltdown that deflated the NASDAQ .

We watch as company founders grovel for tens of millions of investment, gloat on one of those horrendously monotonous CNN business programs, conference call their lawyers to check their latest deal and execute highly questionable New-Age-like morning chant sessions. These guys look sordid even while trying to put a fresh young face on corporate greed and it's hard to feel sorry for them as it all begins to blow up in their faces. The competition has moved in, investors begin to bail, panic spreads and layoffs are necessary.

But then another truly unexpected thing happens. Forced to cut, one of govWorks Inc.'s founders (Kaleil Isaza Tuzman) is pushed to turn on another founder (Tom Herman) and oust him from the company. It all seems extremely cold-blooded, until you witness the genuine pain these two suffer as they negotiate Herman's departure. The two, it's revealed, have been friends since they were 15. This presents a cliffhanger of sorts for the film: will profit prevail over friendship and humanity?

Startup.com will certainly resonate with Montreal audiences, seeing as the city has been a hi-tech capital of sorts and thus has been especially struck by NASDAQ's evaporating fortunes. It doesn't quite pack the punch that Hegedus's and Pennebaker's Oscar-nominated '94 doc on the Clinton spin doctors, The War Room, did, but it still does what excellent cinema verité does best. It takes a subject, shoots over 400 hours of it, and edits it down to a few stark moments of revelation.

Startup.com opens Friday, May 11