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Startup.com (2001) Starring: Kaleil Isaza Tuzman Tom Herman Kenneth Austin Tricia Burke Roy Burston Plot Synopsis: Friends since high school 20-somethings Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman have an idea: a Web site for people to conduct business with municipal governments. This documentary tracks the rise and fall of govWorks.com from May of 1999 to December of 2000 and the trials the business brings to the relationship of these best friends. Kaleil raises the money Tom s the technical chief. A third partner wants a buy out girlfriends come and go Tom s daughter needs attention. And always the need for cash and for improving the site. Venture capital comes in by the millions. Kaleil is on C-SPAN CNN and magazine covers. Will the business or the friendship crash first Review: Directors Chris Hegedus (The War Room) and Jehane Noujaim couldn t have imagined the drama that awaited when they began documenting the creation of the pioneering e-commerce site govWorks.com. For over a year they followed the company the brainchild of childhood-friends-turned-business-partners software geek and doting single dad Tom Herman and ambitious young business-school-grad-turned-company-CEO Kaleil Isaza Tuzman. During the rise of the Internet investment frenzy and the subsequent crash of the dot-economy the cameras remain keyed into the human dynamic: the lifestyle compromises the personal sacrifices and the clash of philosophies and personalities that ultimately tear boyhood buddies Tom and Kaleil apart...almost. Startup.com s portrait of the cutthroat nature of American business culture and the choices one makes (or doesn t) to succeed poses the one question most documentaries ignore: Is it worth it A fascinating cin ma-v rit documentary account of how two very young men-Kaleil Isaza Tuzman a Goldman Sachs employee and Tom Herman a techie-started an Internet company in New York burned through sixty million dollars lost their way and got swallowed up by another company all within eighteen months. The filmmakers Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedus nosed their way into meetings and arguments and drove around with the two men as they aired their desires and fears. Tuzman is burly and handsome with an easy ready way about him Herman who keeps growing and shaving a dark beard is high-minded and tends to be diffident about the fate of the enterprise itself. The two men emerge from the fiasco without any money but with their friendship intact. The movie s account of their dealings with one another is painfully funny and very intimate perhaps too much so: it would have been useful to have more detail about how the business actually worked and why it went wrong. -David Denby DVD Details: Actors: Kaleil Isaza Tuzman Tom Herman Kenneth Austin Tricia Burke Roy Burston Directors: Chris Hegedus Jehane Noujaim Format: Closed-captioned Color Dolby NTSC Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.) Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Number of discs: 1 Studio: Live Artisan DVD Release Date: September 18 2001 Run Time: 103 minutes
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