Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by ephemere (A) on May 14, 2004 at 11:27:36

I saw this last night on DVD. I avoided this documentary 3 years ago because the trailer just made it look wrong. As it turns out, this is a surprisingly efficient and successful crystallization of the whole dot-com bubble. One review called it "definitive", and I agree. It tells the story of two high school buddies, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, who in their late 20s started govWorks.com, a company to facilitate online payment of parking tickets -- "a 568 billion dollar vertical market", they pitch to an early investor. You can pretty much guess the "story arc", quite a dramatic one in this case. The two founders are very different from each other, and their weaknesses are laid painfully bare as you root for them (or not). I don't think I've ever seen a documentary that achieves this extraordinary feeling of eavesdropping, as one review put it. The unique Iranian film The Apple comes to mind, but that is not a documentary by any definition. One of the directors was Tuzman's roommate at Harvard. Apparently, she decided to film him leaving his job at Goldman Sachs and then just kept filming. The last shot of the movie was filmed just weeks before it premiered at Sundance.

I recently saw a PBS documentary about the tech bubble that followed several startups and people before and after. It was kind of interesting, but they just didn't get it. This film gets it. If you were involved, you'll remember. If you weren't, you'll find out.

Highly recommended.