Looking Back in Dismay.(dot-com disasters documented)(Brief Article)

Kaleil Isaza Tuzman has President Bill Clinton in stitches. Halfway through the documentary film "Startup.com," the 28-year-old is seated next to the president at a White House conference on the New Economy, poking light fun at one of the other panelists, a Harvard graduate school dean. Afterward, Isaza Tuzman slips Clinton his business card, and later boasts to co-workers, "I told him that if he moved to New York, he should consider a job with us." Just one month later, in May 2000, Isaza Tuzman's cockiness has vanished as he explains to his teary-eyed childhood friend and business partner, Tom Herman, that the board of directors wants him out. They don't think he's up to the job of chief technology officer. Herman is later escorted from the building.

The movie ends with the demise last January of their dot-com, GovWorks, which allowed users to pay taxes and parking tickets online. The company went bankrupt after burning through $60 million in funding. It was a fabulous flameout like dozens of others--except that it was all caught on film, due to a friendship between one of the filmmakers, Jehane Noujaim, and Isaza Tuzman. Noujaim hooked up with "The War Room" producers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, who set out to put a human face on the dot-com millionaires America had come to stereotype with a mix of admiration, envy and loathing. What we get, however, is a new wealth of voyeuristic detail that largely confirms our suspicions.

"Startup.com" is part of the first wave of films and books deconstructing the dot boom. "The Secrets of Silicon Valley," released in April by Berkeley, California, filmmakers Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow, reveals what they call "the dark side" of the boom: underpaid temps and hazardous assembly-line jobs. Next fall dot-bomb poster boy Stephan Paternot, 27, cofounder of theglobe.com, is publishing memoirs for which he already has a movie deal. Brad Pitt is said to be in line for a Hollywood morality tale, "Silicon Valley," about a young banker caught up in the boom.

These retrospectives are adding a touch of gray to a story so far told in black and white. "Startup.com" follows its subjects from bedroom to boardroom without narration or comment. If it has a moral, it comes in the words of one of three girlfriends of Isaza Tuzman's who come and go over 18 months. "With their cuff links, their little pens, their credit cards, they look like such ...