April 14, 2000, marked a pivotal milestone for the New Economy as technology stock investors and Internet companies witnessed the market collapse on NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. The impact of the market affected a severe stock devaluation of most dot-com companies, as well as for larger corporations like Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. Afterwards, the New Economy fell into a tailspin that continues a year later. In the past fourteen months, hundreds of e-commerce companies have folded or filed for bankruptcy, and dependent consulting and marketing companies have suffered similar setbacks &emdash; either closing for good or scaling back to fewer employees and perks. Scores of e-commerce dreams launched by yesterday's fast companies are now registered casualties whose fates are documented regularly on fuckedcompany.com, a web site that sardonically observes this phenomenon through its bulletin board. The ensuing "dot bomb" has not only yielded startup failures among dozens of dot-coms, it has also generated mass layoffs that have grown in number each month since last summer. Internet-related companies, including dot-coms, have produced 74,000 job-cuts in a six-month period through June 2001, according to the Chicago outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Industry morale has hit an all-time low. Set against this economic upheaval that has transformed the Internet bustling with e-commerce startups into digital ghost towns, a handful of filmmakers have turned their lenses on the drama that has unfolded in the past year or more. Jehane Noujiam and Chris Hegedus have been fortuitous to document the life cycle of govWorks.com in their film &startup;, which intimately offers a close-up view of the company's two founders. Similarly, Wonsuk Chin profiles Kozmo.com's road to failure in &edreams;. And on the under-side of the IT industry, contract labor's hidden struggles and the hardscrabble existence of a Palo Alto Internet non-profit are exposed in the &secrets;, a new film by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufmann. Combined, all three films capture a snapshot of individuals who contributed to the New Economy, and floundered in its subsequent turbulence in the past year. Beyond frequent business headlines announcing the latest spate of layoffs and dot-com closures, a sense of nostalgia sets in when watching these films. Both &startup;, in particular, and Secrets of Silicon Valley resonate with the immediacy found in home movies, as the camera rolls unencumbered without voiceover narration. &startup; and &edreams; recently appeared at the Seattle International Film Festival in May-June for their Seattle premiere. Each film played before sold out audiences, despite unfavorable screening times, venue reshuffling, and small theaters. Considering that Kozmo had recently folded its nation-wide operations in mid-April, Kozmo's former Seattle branch staffers and their friends could have easily sold out the only screening of &edreams;, for example. Fortunately, at the last minute, festival programmers moved the film to a larger venue at the Egyptian Theater. &secrets;, on the other hand, was screened before the film festival's run. The film was freshly completed by late March, and had a quiet debut locally at the Seattle Art Museum in May, co-sponsored by WashTech and the Independent Media Center. Of the three films, &startup; has generated the most buzz on the festival circuit since its premiere at Sundance in January, and is the most anticipated documentary about the dot-com phenomenon. Tracing the rise and fall of govWorks.com, a fledgling Silicon Alley startup in Manhattan, the film not only profiles the firm's progress from concept to development, but also exposes the exuberant business and personal relationships between the company's two co-founders and their ultimate fallout. Filmmakers Jehane Noujiam and Chris Hegedus have created a remarkable film, compiled and edited from nearly 500 hours of footage Noujiam shot in a year-and-a-half. The film, in part, is remarkable because Noujiam, who lived with one of the film's subjects, was able to command a fly-on-the-wall intimacy from behind the camera with the company founders. The final cut achieves a seamless cinema vertité quality that avoids routine approaches in many documentaries. And Hegedus, a veteran documentarian, was able to collaborate with Noujiam to achieve a polished result. Hegedus co-directed "The War Room," a documentary that captures President Clinton's high stakes campaign for President in 1992. In &startup;, Kaleil Osaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, close childhood friends and Amherst High School graduates, reveal their mutual enthusiasm for establishing a dot-com from scratch. Fueled with the seductive drum-and-bass remix beats by Kruder & Dorfmeister, the film opens with Kaleil, the charismatic leader of the two, boxing his personal affects, and shutting down his computer for the last time at investment firm Goldman, Sachs. Kaleil and Tom set up shop nearby, working out of cardboard boxes in a near empty office in Manhattan's Silicon Alley with fewer than 10 employees. Aspiring to cater an untapped niche, both Kaleil and Tom envisioned their business to help "make government efficient" through an online service portal. How will they do so? The film depicts their preliminary conflict about their business model, communicating different ideas about what kinds of services they would offer. After some struggle, Kaleil ironed out the core goals of their site. The govWorks.com site initially planned to allow individuals to pay off their parking tickets, and later offer additional services like fishing license purchases and driver's license renewals, for instance, and feature town meeting webcasts. In a pitch to venture capitalists, Kaleil confides that what keeps him up at night are potential competitors &emdash; entertainment portal sites like citysearch.com and sidewalk.com &emdash; who might get there first. The film's upbeat first-half depicts the whirlwind of activity both Kaleil and Tom share, including criss-crossing the country to meet venture capitalists in San Francisco, assembling their board of directors, sharing a meeting with President Clinton, and enjoying the media spotlight in the financial pages and television news. Of course, not everything happened without snags that mar their course. Both Kaleil and Tom face operations tensions when a third co-founder is bought out for a sum, an amount that aggravates their company's investment earnings. And months after meeting with a competitor from Atlanta, govWorks corporate offices are ransacked and Kaleil's computer is stolen. Although these two events are not necessarily connected, office security was stepped up to safeguard production documentation and office equipment. By April 14, 2000, when the NASDAQ stock market crashed, the quickening pace of startup company growth was curtailed. Optimism gave way to uncertainty, and impacted govWorks.com's production plan and internal operations. After some question about technical management, which was under Tom's responsibility, Kaleil called for his termination. Their esteemed professional relationship and friendship was left uncertain following these events, and personal tensions ensued. By film's end, Tom and Kaleil decided to reconcile differences, and felt their friendship was more important than to perpetuate govWorks and pursue its dubious business endeavor without Tom. In the film's credits, the ultimate punchline is that both Tom and Kaleil have teamed up again, and started another venture &emdash; Recognition Group &emdash; which is a business formed to help small venture capital-backed technology companies with restructuring and reorganization. &edreams;, which chronicles the rise of Kozmo.com, from startup to nation-wide operation, is more like a case study of a dot-com that reached profitability in a few of its national markets, but ultimately had to shut down. Joseph Park, another former Goldman, Sachs employee, was initially excited by the compelling power of e-commerce, but saw shortcomings in convenience. As he describes in the film, he wanted to purchase a book through Amazon.com, but unsatisfied at the prospect of waiting for the book to arrive in the mail, he bought it at a nearby Barnes & Noble. Determined to find a better fulfillment model than Amazon.com, Joseph launched Kozmo.com, an e-commerce service to cater to New York City residents offering books, movies, and music &emdash; all delivered within the same day. Joseph established Kozmo.com in an office across from Goldman, Sachs, in New York, and expanded not only his services online, but his corporate offices as well. Occupying ten floors, Joseph leveraged his business foothold in Manhattan filling out staffing needs from technical and customer support to the daredevil bicycle couriers that streamed through New York delivering movies, candy, and other goods within the advertised hour timeframe. &edreams; captures Kozmo's burgeoning success rate, opening new markets around the country, and Joseph's plans to spread the business into Asia. Kozmo's profitability goals might have been secure, had Joseph not made a faustian bargain with Starbucks's Coffee. After establishing Kozmo's Seattle branch location, Joseph made frequent visits to the Jet City to nurture the Seattle division, and to negotiate a contract with Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz. The contract arranged for the manufacture of Kozmo movie rental drop-off boxes &emdash; which were built in Seattle, and were installed in coffee houses and small businesses for Kozmo customers. Starbucks also allowed the drop-off boxes in each Starbucks store, but the deal came at a price. In a co-marketing exchange, Starbucks and Kozmo struck a deal in February 2000 that clearly favored the Seattle coffee chain. Kozmo would have paid $150 million in five years for the privilege of brand awareness through some 500 drop-off boxes tucked away inside Starbucks coffee shops in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. &emdash; locations that Kozmo already offered their service. However, after one year, Kozmo had only forked over $15 million to Starbucks. This contract did not single-handedly put an end to Kozmo, but ultimately curbed Kozmo's plans for market penetration and expansion when its 10 national markets were struggling to achieve profitability. By the time the company shut down in April 2001, Kozmo had raised $250 million. While both &startup; and &edreams; documents the higher profile operations of e-commerce startups in New York, &secrets; is about the less visible struggles at the opposite end of the New Economy. In San Jose and East Palo Alto, California, &secrets; exposes two distinct stories about individuals empowered to effect social change in their work environments. Although these stories never intersect, the film presents a sensitive portrait of the high tech industry's underclass in northern California. Described as a film depicting "the dark side of the Internet and New Economy," &secrets; is actually a sobering view about labor and skill empowerment. The film profiles two individuals working in the Bay Area's digital economy. Raj Jayadev, a young man who was employed as a Manpower temp worker at a Hewlett-Packard printer assembly plant in San Jose, believes Manpower and Hewlett-Packard fired him for organizing workers. The film presents the banal world of Manpower's hiring process, and assembly line processing centers that Hewlett-Packard operates, which gives an insider's perspective on the Raj's work environment. Many temp and contractor workers are women, Latino immigrants, and are from other multicultural backgrounds that shape a demographic portrait of the Bay Area's working underclass. Weeks after Raj was hired by Manpower to work at Hewlett-Packard, he found that Manpower's payroll accounting protocol suspect, and called into question the shortcomings he and other co-workers had with their paychecks. Evidently, Manpower had not paid their contract staff fair compensation for hours worked. After Raj filed a complaint with the contract agency, workers received adjusted payroll checks at the Hewlett-Packard assembly plant. But the problems did not stop there. Later on, respiratory infections hit many employees, as Raj learned firsthand. After sharing discussions with his co-workers about their ailments, Raj called into question the health conditions at the Hewlett-Packard assembly plant. He had contacted both Hewlett-Packard and Manpower management about these health and safety issues, but he was ultimately served with a termination notice. The film presents his ongoing struggle to raise awareness about these and other related work issues, particularly in the absence of labor representation on behalf of light industrial workers in the Bay Area. Magda Escobar, who runs a computer resource center in East Palo Alto, depends on corporate donations to sustain her organization. As the head of East Palo Alto's non-profit computer center called Plugged In, she endeavors to bridge the digital divide and to provide Internet access and computer training for low-income families in her Silicon Valley community &emdash; mostly young immigrants, Latinos, and other people of color. &secrets;, which ends on a tentative but hopeful note, suggests that there are several unanswered questions about labor costs in the New Economy. Who speaks for undocumented workers and temporary employees when there is no union representation? And if there is no union representation, what options are available to these employees to ensure their safety and fair treatment? The filmmakers' contend that shortly after their film had a limited theatrical run in the Bay Area, the San Jose Mercury approached Hewlett-Packard for commentary about the film. When Hewlett-Packard was asked about the nine assembly plants operating in Silicon Valley, the company flatly denied their existence. In this light, &secrets; presses for further discussion about these issues in its portrait of Raj and Magda, and evidences a grassroots activism emerging from their efforts. ../img/e-dreams.jpg ../img/silicon-valley.jpg ../img/startup-dot.jpg > Digital Dreams seized in the moment: "e-dreams," "Secrets of Silicon Valley," and "Startup.com."