American Cinematographer - June 2001 - 24

A Tangled

Web and Sci-Tech Winners

pursue any

national

television to

stars

promote his

fledgling
Internet

our

time."

a Sony VX-1000 miniDV
acquired with the help of a
Harvard grant, Noujaim began following
her roommate around during his initial
steps to start Govworks.com. Ironically,
veteran documentarian Chris Hegedus
was also searching around New York at
the same time for a story involving the
dot-com explosion. Together with her
husband and partner D.A. Pennebaker,
Hegedus has worked on some of the
most acclaimed documentary projects of
recent times, including The War Boom
(which was nominated for a 1994
Academy Award; see AC Jan. '94),
Moon Over Broadway, The Energy War,
DeLorean and Depeche Mode 101.
"I was really fascinated by the
Internet, although I didn't know too
much about it,' says Hegedus. "I met a

Using

site,

camera

Govworks.com.

Internet Access

to return to her native

by Chris Pizzello

first

Egypt to start her
documentary project. She realized,
however, that a remarkable and timely
story was unfolding right in her own
apartment. Noujaim's roommate, Kaleil

she'd

During the rollicking high of the
Economy in 1999, an upstart ruling
class of cocky, charismatic and impossi¬
bly young Internet entrepreneurs inspired
equal parts intrigue, annoyance and
envy. Now, of course, the business page
brings daily tidings of doom for the tech
gurus and dot-com impresarios who not
so long ago beamed confidently from the

Harvard,

friend who

year

York

of Fortune 500 and Business

new

New

covers

Week.

Jehane

Noujaim and Chris
Hegedus's amazingly intimate documen¬
tary startup.com offers a virtual case
study in how it all went so wrong so
quickly, focusing on the nearShakespearean rise and fall of the nowdefunct site Govworks.com.
Fresh off a producing job at MTV's
reality-based program Unfiltered, young
filmmaker Noujaim was living in New
York City in 1998 and debating whether
22 June 2001

much money was

being given out to
idea, provided it made some
kind of sense. These guys were the rock

Kaleil Isaza
Tuzman appears

Isaza Tuzman, a classmate of hers from
was quitting his $400,000-ajob at investment firm Goldman
Sachs to start an Internet company with
a noble but untested concept: allowing
citizens to interact directly with their
local governments via a revolutionary

Web site.
"The energy

of the dot-com world
I felt when
I quit my own job at MTV," Noujaim
explains. "I wanted to do my own film,
even if it meant that I had to use up all of
my savings. It was inspiring to me to see
Kaleil leave a $400,000-a-year job to
start this company with his friends. It
was an amazing period when people
were dropping out of business school,
law school and really great jobs because

was

the

same

sort of energy

was a

consultant at

New

venture-capital firm called Flatiron
Partners, which was funding a lot of the
early startups. He told me how wild it
was, with kids in their twenties coming
in to make pitches and getting millions
of dollars. I started sitting in on some of
the pitch meetings, trying to find an
entrepreneur to follow, and figured I'd
follow the story from the venture-capi¬
tal side also because they were good
characters."

Hegedus

learned

Isaza

Tuzman's company through an associate.
"The company's new marketing director,
who

coincidentally was a friend of ours,
us up and asked if we'd be inter¬
ested in directing a startup story," she

called

EAnterrtoaiismafn.

courtesy

Phot s

American Cinematographer - June 2001

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