Thursday, May 18th, 2006. Startup dot com
Interesting failure. The first quarter or so is almost unwatchable, especially in full screen, my only option on the DVD. According to the production notes, they went digital for the convenience, and because they didn't want to have to re-enact anything. I would certainly hope not, as by the end they had an incredible four hundred hours of footage to edit down. Most of which was presumably shot by a short, drunken 12-year-old who wandered in from a wedding reception with his dad's digicam. Actually, the painful part is, Dad could never justify shelling out for that camera for home movies, and Junior would have probably allowed us to occasionally orient ourselves to the set instead of the insides of noses.
But maybe the first hundred hours of shooting taught them something, because the next three hundred were somewhat more reasonable. The sound problems (easily solved by slapping some more of those painfully juvenile iMovie subtitles on a few of the important bits) persisted to the point that I had to rewatch a few scenes before I could be confident that my failure to understand what was going on was not due to my inability to hear anything.
Which brings me to the next area that screamed "we have all the footage in the world and no fucking clue how to use it": the editing. Mystifying. Decisions were made, but not by human beings. One of the two women responsible for the doc quit her job at MTV to make it. I'm not going to take a cheap shot here, but I feel it should be noted that if her sensibilities were honed on music videos, that would explain an awful lot.
This not-a-review is topheavy with technical concerns, but so was the movie. The story is unfortunately obscured and overshadowed by these problems, to the point where it loses all sense of direction or purpose -- or would have, except that of course we know all along where it is going, and how it will end.
We see Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, best friends since sixteen, so deeply symbiotic that it's surprising when a set of brunettes show up to play their neglected girlfriends later in the film. Tom is a geek with poor social skills but an infectious enthusiasm, and Kaleil is politician in training, warm and personal but at arm's length, commanding but still vulnerable, so that, as a black guy, he is not intimidating to the powerful white people he has to beg money from. With a handful of friends and a few million in seed money, they set out to get a piece of the power and wealth for themselves. Watching their giddy naivete from the comfy armchair of the future, we know we are here to watch a disaster unfold.
But the payoff doesn't come, at least not how we expect it. The company fails, of course; we watch it move from eight to seventy to nearly three hundred employees, as subtitles inform us of the month and the number, inviting us to snicker with our retrospective wisdom about the impossible-to-sustain growth of a business that has no functional product. For the next two hundred hours of shooting, nobody talks about this. Instead, they talk about the investors, and how to get more of them, and how many nifty great things their product will be able to do some undefined day, the only value known for which is 'not today'. And more than any of that, they talk about their feelings. They process. They discuss themselves into the ground. Ultimately, the avalanche of bankruptcy is almost left out of the film. It isn't necessary. Everybody knows how, and why, already. This is not a flaw, but one of the film's rare moments of true self-possession. One thing it is sure it wants to do is not tell us things we already know.
At least, what those who weren't up close and personal to the tech crash don't know. They might watch this movie and think it's not about the dot-com wave at all, but a bunch of ambitious screw-ups and their personal problems. The rest were just nodding along, because they know that guys like these were a big part of what went wrong. This is, in fact, the story. One of the girlfriends addresses the camera from a coked-out haze with her sunglasses on indoors. She tells us that she finds all this business stuff funny, because the guys are like overgrown children playing grown-up with their suits and credit cards and cell phones. (Delighted to be on camera, she whips off her sunglasses at the end of this speech, and instead of obnoxious, it's charming, as if she herself has become a child.)
The final hundred hours provided the best stuff, and a more experienced crew could have really done something with it. As is, an inexperienced but inspired crew sort of did something with it. The resentments between Kaleil and Tom, and between Tom's self-image and reality, grow until they snap and security is hustling Tom out of the building. More talking about feelings and processing follows, though for a moment Kaleil teeters on an interesting personal edge between decency and hubris. But nothing can come between them; in the end, they meet over free weights in a gym, and after all their squabbling about how much money Tom should be bought out for, grimly confirm that neither of them will get anything at all.
The film ends with a footnote which explains that govWorks raised $60 million in the year of its existence, and that Tom and Kaleil went on to form a business 'to help failed dot-com startups'.
But maybe the first hundred hours of shooting taught them something, because the next three hundred were somewhat more reasonable. The sound problems (easily solved by slapping some more of those painfully juvenile iMovie subtitles on a few of the important bits) persisted to the point that I had to rewatch a few scenes before I could be confident that my failure to understand what was going on was not due to my inability to hear anything.
Which brings me to the next area that screamed "we have all the footage in the world and no fucking clue how to use it": the editing. Mystifying. Decisions were made, but not by human beings. One of the two women responsible for the doc quit her job at MTV to make it. I'm not going to take a cheap shot here, but I feel it should be noted that if her sensibilities were honed on music videos, that would explain an awful lot.
This not-a-review is topheavy with technical concerns, but so was the movie. The story is unfortunately obscured and overshadowed by these problems, to the point where it loses all sense of direction or purpose -- or would have, except that of course we know all along where it is going, and how it will end.
We see Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, best friends since sixteen, so deeply symbiotic that it's surprising when a set of brunettes show up to play their neglected girlfriends later in the film. Tom is a geek with poor social skills but an infectious enthusiasm, and Kaleil is politician in training, warm and personal but at arm's length, commanding but still vulnerable, so that, as a black guy, he is not intimidating to the powerful white people he has to beg money from. With a handful of friends and a few million in seed money, they set out to get a piece of the power and wealth for themselves. Watching their giddy naivete from the comfy armchair of the future, we know we are here to watch a disaster unfold.
But the payoff doesn't come, at least not how we expect it. The company fails, of course; we watch it move from eight to seventy to nearly three hundred employees, as subtitles inform us of the month and the number, inviting us to snicker with our retrospective wisdom about the impossible-to-sustain growth of a business that has no functional product. For the next two hundred hours of shooting, nobody talks about this. Instead, they talk about the investors, and how to get more of them, and how many nifty great things their product will be able to do some undefined day, the only value known for which is 'not today'. And more than any of that, they talk about their feelings. They process. They discuss themselves into the ground. Ultimately, the avalanche of bankruptcy is almost left out of the film. It isn't necessary. Everybody knows how, and why, already. This is not a flaw, but one of the film's rare moments of true self-possession. One thing it is sure it wants to do is not tell us things we already know.
At least, what those who weren't up close and personal to the tech crash don't know. They might watch this movie and think it's not about the dot-com wave at all, but a bunch of ambitious screw-ups and their personal problems. The rest were just nodding along, because they know that guys like these were a big part of what went wrong. This is, in fact, the story. One of the girlfriends addresses the camera from a coked-out haze with her sunglasses on indoors. She tells us that she finds all this business stuff funny, because the guys are like overgrown children playing grown-up with their suits and credit cards and cell phones. (Delighted to be on camera, she whips off her sunglasses at the end of this speech, and instead of obnoxious, it's charming, as if she herself has become a child.)
The final hundred hours provided the best stuff, and a more experienced crew could have really done something with it. As is, an inexperienced but inspired crew sort of did something with it. The resentments between Kaleil and Tom, and between Tom's self-image and reality, grow until they snap and security is hustling Tom out of the building. More talking about feelings and processing follows, though for a moment Kaleil teeters on an interesting personal edge between decency and hubris. But nothing can come between them; in the end, they meet over free weights in a gym, and after all their squabbling about how much money Tom should be bought out for, grimly confirm that neither of them will get anything at all.
The film ends with a footnote which explains that govWorks raised $60 million in the year of its existence, and that Tom and Kaleil went on to form a business 'to help failed dot-com startups'.