Startup.com: Less a Documentary Than a Horror Movie
Alfred Hitchcock summed up the difference between surprise and suspense with the following example: If a couple is having lunch at a cafe and a bomb goes off under their table, that's surprise. If you know the bomb is there before the couple sits down, and their conversation is intercut with closeups of the bomb you know about and they don't, that's suspense.
The codirectors of Startup.com, Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim, went into this project assuming, like all documentary filmmakers, that it would be about surprise; documentaries follow life, after all, and life never moves in predictable patterns. The Internet startup whose fortunes they chronicled rose and fell and, by January this year, crashed and burned. Now, a full year after the first indisputable New Economy danger signs, anybody who follows business news knows exactly how young dotcommers were destroyed. Which means that for informed viewers, Startup.com feels less like a documentary than a horror movie. No matter how loudly you shout warnings at the screen, the heroes just won't listen.
Noujaim, a young, first-time documentarian, came at this subject through personal connections. In 1998, she quit a job at MTV Films to become a filmmaker, and took a business venture by a Harvard classmate, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, as her first subject. She brought the idea to Hegedus, a nonfiction film veteran and the creative partner and wife of legendary verite pioneer D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back); according to the press notes, Hegedus realized that "having Jehane be the good friend and roommate of the film's subject offered extraordinary access to the film's subject."
Extraordinary is the word. Poke holes in the gaseous legend of cinema verite all you want; there is no form of documentary that takes viewers closer to actual day-to-day experience. And this movie gets about as close as anyone could hope for. Without voiceover narration, an onscreen host, talking heads or helpful graphics?only a few stylish intertitles to establish a timeline?Startup.com takes us inside not just the insane optimism of the information age, but inside the feverish brains of young, smart, ambitious men who had the chance to become billionaires purely on the basis of interesting ideas.
The interesting idea here is Govworks.com, a full-service website. It was cofounded by Tuzman, an eloquent, excitable, single, bull-necked, alpha-male leader-type, and Tom Herman, a quiet, married, bespectacled brainiac who's warm and accessible when playing with his toddler-aged daughter but seems socially inept elsewhere. The partners envisioned the company's website as a portal that would connect computer users with government at every level: national, state, local and everything in between. We think of bureaucracy as a wasteful but necessary public service, and it is; it's also a business, and each year, trillions of dollars flow (sometimes sputter) through its tangled infrastructure. The idea of Govworks.com was clever and in some ways noble: it would enable a person to do anything related to government?pay a parking ticket, find out the hours of a government office, get directions to a courthouse, you name it?at the click of a mouse. Govworks.com would earn its money TicketMaster-style: by making a laborious, inefficient process somewhat more centralized and convenient, then skimming a service fee off the top.
A good idea is not the same thing as a business plan; many dotcommers found that out the hard way, and Govworks.com was no exception. The company's founders had guts and heart, but, in hindsight, it now seems clear that they, like so many hundreds of millions of dreamers worldwide, fundamentally misunderstood that business was still business, and the New Economy would prove no different from the old one. If you know exactly what you're doing, spend frugally, build slowly, hold onto valuable assets and extinguish financial fires the moment they flare up, you can survive and even thrive. If you're lacking in any of those department, adios muchacha.
Startup.com is a case study of the arrogant invulnerability of youth. Tuzman and Herman are like any other twentysomethings with boundless energy and optimism: on some level, they must know the risks of what they're getting into, but they believe they'll be the ones who'll be standing when the smoke clears. Perhaps they'll even rewrite the rules of business and become a fantastic success story.
The documentary's early moments are heartbreaking if you know what the economy has in store for these upbeat, gung-ho guys. One scene finds Tuzman and Herman seeking funding from Bay Area venture capitalists and getting rejected. Enumerating the reasons for the rejection (dated business plan, dated presentation, East Coast headquarters, no executive on board with startup experience) Tuzman works himself into such a state of incredulous indignation that he might as well be wearing a t-shirt that reads "I'll show the bastards." Of course within a year every single thing the venture capitalist warned about contributes to their downfall; yet they did not, would not, and could not listen.
Equally engrossing is the film's portrait of a lifelong friendship destroyed by money. Tuzman and Herman at first seem perfectly matched: brawn plus vision, impetuous energy plus cool logic; Kirk and Spock. But this is real life, not Hollywood fiction, and in life, radically different personalities clash as often as they harmonize?and the company suffers. The brawny Tuzman confers coolness on Herman, even calling him "my brother rat," but deep down, he suspects Herman is too myopic and too internal to function in the business world. Herman respects his partner's energy and resourcefulness (invited to the White House for a high-technology luncheon, he slips a business card to Bill Clinton), but some part of him knows Tuzman's too impulsive, macho and combative for his own good. "We're giving different messages to different people, and we can't do that," Tuzman warns Herman, after the latter goes off on a meaningless tangent during a meeting with potential investors. "The act of contradicting each other," Tuzman adds, perceptively, "is so much bigger than the substance of the thing [we're arguing about]."
Despite major technical flaws?amateurish camerawork, a muddy video-to-film transfer, occasional blurred dialogue?Startup.com is an engrossing, sometimes revelatory movie that should be taught in every American business school. It's a case study in what can happen when youthful vigor blinds veterans to the hard lessons of experience. That's what happened to the people who invested in Govworks.com; that's what happened to the people who created the company. In a way, it's what happened to the whole Western world in the second half of the 90s, when the total reinvention of business seemed possible, and anyone who said otherwise was dismissed as a fatalistic ninny.
I write about Trumpet of the Swan solely to praise Disney. A lot has been written about the company's animated films, which tend to be technically innovative, lavishly funded and depressingly reliant on formula; but sitting through Trumpet of the Swan, an animated kidflick from rival Tri-Star, made me appreciate all the things Disney does well. Since the resurgence of the late 80s and early 90s, which brought The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, the folks at Disney proved that mainstream commercial animation could be fun, beautiful, accessible and exciting again. The company also revived the nearly lost art of making children's entertainment that appealed to adults, mainly through visual homages, postmodern jokes and characters who, despite their plain dialogue and simple desires, were written with a fair degree of psychological complexity.
Watching Trumpet of the Swan, you'd think the last 10 years of Disney never happened. It's flatly illustrated, crudely animated, incompetently paced, badly scored and chock-full of characters who lack even a thimbleful of charisma, humor or common sense. I saw it mainly to scout it for my cartoon-crazy three-and-a-half-year-old daughter; I'm glad I didn't pay money to see it, and I'm happy to urge you against doing the same.
Theoretically based on E.B. White's classic children's novel (to quote an audience member after a screening, "If that's based on E.B. White, then I'm related to J.R.R. Tolkien"), it deforms the author's tale of a misfit until it resembles the quasi-inspirational crap that used to stink up network schedules on Saturday mornings during the bad old days of the early 80s, when toymakers took over tv animation and hired sugar-addled monkeys to write their scripts. The makers of Trumpet of the Swan haven't even bothered to create a fairytale world with internal consistency. The hero, Louie, makes up for his voicelessness by embarking on a whirlwind career as a smooth jazz trumpeter, yet his friends and family back home live in a world where leaves and muck are given as birthday presents. The whole enterprise suggests a tax shelter scheme that was conceived and produced in another country under cover of night, then badly translated and unceremoniously dumped in the laps of American children like Fredric Forrest's severed head in Apocalypse Now. If the filmmakers approached this story with cynicism in their hearts, that's awful; if they truly believed they were making a quality film, that's even worse.