The dude with no name (12/8/01)
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Startup.com [Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim, 2001.]
The chemist Kekule tells this story about his discovery of the structure of benzene:
“During my stay in Ghent, I lived in elegant bachelor quarters in the main thoroughfare. My study, however, faced a narrow side-alley and no daylight penetrated it....I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.”
The art of prophetic dreaming has, alas, fallen into decline over the last century-and-a-half, and by the time we arrive at the commencement of this documentary it has degenerated to this: a couple of guys, one of whom [the guy who hustles money, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman] looks good in a suit, one of whom [the geek, Tom Herman] does not, are jointly struck by the inspiration that you should be able to attend a city council meeting in your underwear; following the implications of this stroke of genius, they realize that there is no real compelling necessity that requires your physical presence at City Hall to pay a parking ticket, or at the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew your driver’s license, and, on the basis of a back-of-the-envelope calculation which seems to indicate that these petty encounters with the lower echelons of the bureaucracy amount to a sixty-billion-dollar-a-year market, and invoking the familiar and all-important argument that they must Get Big Fast, persuade their backers to let them run through twenty million dollars and a couple of hundred employees before the parabolic arc of their fortunes — whose apogee falls just short, alas, of the IPO that would have allowed them to bail out with a fortune and leave their investors holding the bag — returns them to the penniless ground whence they sprung.
Thanks to the [somewhat more substantial] miracle of digital video and some rather more canny investments on the part of executive producer D.A. Pennebaker, they are dogged throughout this giddy flight by Ms. Hegedus and Ms. Noujaim, who managed to put 400 hours of raw footage in the can following the protagonists around sixteen hours a day — on the road shilling for money, at the gym, arguing in the office — before [as Pennebaker apparently predicted when the project was first described to him] CEO A [the suit] stabs CEO B [the geek] in the back and shoves him out of the company and seizes the controls just in time to auger in all by himself.
Obviously this is fascinating. — The first question that comes to mind as you watch it is, of course, what made these bozos think they deserved to become billionaires? The second question is, why should they not? — I wish Mr. Tuzman and Mr. Herman better luck next time; though I suspect, on the evidence here presented, that Ms. Hegedus and Ms. Noujaim have brighter prospects.
____________Not the marrying kind (12/6/01)
