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Author
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Topic: Startup Dot Com
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 05-15-2001 09:44 PM
I saw this tonight at a screening which, oddly enough, was sponsored by Boston.com. Hmm...
Anyway, it's good. It's the typical story of a couple of basically good people who have an essentially resonable idea for a high-tech startup (pay your parking tickets online) that might, someday, be profitable. The problem is that, like just about everyone else involved in high-tech startups over the last few years, these people had basically no clue about how to raise money or run a business, yet somehow expected to become millionaires. The story hits somewhat close to home for me, since I worked at this type of company for about a year; I've been there, done that, got the t-shirt (and the baseball hat, polo shirt, shot glass, and insulated coffee mug). I've seen firsthand what happens when a company has a good product that customers like yet can't get funding to put the product into production. We were developing high-speed routers,while the guys in the film were developing a web site called "govworks.com", but there are plenty of similarities.
In any case, the filmmakers chose (wisely) to concentrate more on the personal relationships of the founders rather than on the technology (which is interesting, but would have made a really boring film). This is a nice little snapshot of what happened to far too many companies (as well as the many companies that deserved to die by doing stupid things like spending half of their VC money on parties or Super Bowl television commercials) over the last couple of years. It's sad in some ways, yet has some tremendously funny moments.
I saw this in Boston (home of many such high-tech startups) and many of the audience members (including muself) found this documentary to be all too real. It couldn't have been any better had it been entirely scripted.
This was produced by DA Pennebaker ("The War Room," "Don't Look Back," etc.) and co-directed by his wife. It's typical cinema verite with good editing. Unfortunately it's shot on video (probably DV, judging by the compression artifacts and almost nonexistant overexposure latitude). The picture quality is pretty bad, but the story is compelling enough to make this worth watching. Apparently it's supposed to go into limited release this Friday. I doubt it will do great business, but I do recommend it.
<rant>why do people shoot stuff like this on low-end video? If they can't or won't use 16mm or 35mm film, can't they at least shoot on Betacam SP or some other decent video format? I'm really sick of this sort of cheapness. The tape-to-film transfer wasn't so hot either...this one was done at Tape House in NYC, and the 35mm print looked inferior to the 16mm video-to-film print that I saw of Haskell Wexler's "Bus Riders' Union."</rant>
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