The Dotcom Roller Coaster

S A N    F R A N C I S C O, May 9 -- When a director embarks on a documentary following real people doing realthings, he or she always expects the unexpected. But never in my wildestdreams did I imagine when I started "Goldrush-dot-com" last August that I wouldbe documenting the crash of the dotcom boom. At the time the stock marketwas down, but no one suspected the carnage to come.

Originally I set out to chronicle the intimate story of a start-up companyduring the latter-day dotcom gold rush, an extraordinary moment when a groupof smart people with a great idea could get millions of dollars to launch anew company.

I wanted to get a behind-the-scenes potrait of dotcommers atwork and at home. What I got instead was a much more interesting — ifunnerving — story: the drama of four people struggling against a Tsunami thatquickly crushed their expectations and threatened to wreck their fledglingcompany.

From the beginning, Bizmetric co-founder Vik Chaudhary and his partners agreed to let me film them withvirtually no limitations, and with a promise to let my cameras roll even ifthey failed. They also worked with me to convince investors and others tolet us film meetings that would normally be private.

Most of the filming took place in a single 15 x 15 room where the challenge was to make five people sitting atdesks visually interesting. To give the film a look of immediacy we shotalmost everything handheld, with far more close-ups, zooms and sharp anglesthan is normally used in news reporting.

We shot the film using digital cameras, which tends to give a look that isgrittier than traditional cameras. This — combined with a room that was nearlyempty of furniture at first, and was often flooded with sunlight — givesGoldrush the look of something that seems unformed and raw — a visualmetaphor for the start-up story.

What you will see is Vik and his fellow founders struggling mightily againstincredible odds — a storyline that you will see in their faces as they growexhausted and stressed out.