Documentary on Dot-Com Debacle May Be a Star Maker

I know it’s early, but if I was making my Oscar picks for the first half of 2001, one guy (no, it wouldn’t be Tom Green) already has a best actor slot reserved on the list: Kaleil Isaza Tuzman.

The name doesn’t ring a bell? That’s because Isaza Tuzman, though as handsome as Ben Affleck and as charismatic as Ewan McGregor, isn’t an actor. He’s a 30-year-old investment banker turned dot-com impresario who provides the dramatic kick for “Startup.com,” a documentary opening Friday that chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of GovWorks.com, the start-up company that Isaza Tuzman launched in 1999 with his partner and childhood friend, Tom Herman.

Directed by Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim, “Startup.com” offers a bracing inside peek at the Internet mania of the past several years as Isaza Tuzman and Herman go from boom to bust, both as businessmen and as friends. The movie has journalistic immediacy--the final scenes depicting the company’s collapse were filmed only last November.

The story has an eerie familiarity, especially in Hollywood, where dozens of highly touted entertainment Web sites have crashed in the past year, including Pop.com, DEN, Thirsty.com and Disney’s Go.com. When Theglobe.com co-founder Stephan Paternot saw the movie recently, he had instant deja vu watching a scene where Isaza Tuzman and Herman pitch a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. “This is freaky,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We were in that very office. We got the very same questions. . . . It feels like I’m reliving my youth.”

But it wasn’t just Isaza Tuzman’s Oscar-worthy performance that made him seem so compelling. For me, he was the latest incarnation of a show-business archetype: the Hollywood hustler. Going back to the days of the original movie moguls, the world of film, TV and the music business has been ruled by bigger-than-life characters who were consummate salesmen and indefatigable empire builders.

Seeing Isaza Tuzman buck up his troops, telling them, “Hang with me, it’s going to get bumpy, it’s going to get rough and tumble . . . but I refuse--refuse--to lose!” I couldn’t help but think that this is what it must’ve been like when Irving Thalberg ruled MGM and Barry Diller started the Fox Network and Jimmy Iovine launched Interscope Records. Of course, the difference is that GovWorks.com went down the drain. However, Isaza Tuzman hasn’t lost heart. Reunited in recent months with Herman, he’s started a new company that helps failed Web entrepreneurs get back on their feet.

“Henry Ford failed before he succeeded,” Isaza Tuzman told me the other day. “Abraham Lincoln lost 16 elections before he won one. The wonderful thing about this country is that you can get back up and start again.”

Isaza Tuzman and Herman were partners, but it’s instantly clear in “Startup.com” who’s the lead and who’s in the supporting role. “Kaleil reminds me of the rock stars of my generation,” explained Hegedus, who knows a star when she sees one, having made films about such epic characters as Jerry Lee Lewis, John DeLorean and James Carville--she and her husband, D.A. Pennebaker, were nominated for an Oscar for “The War Room,” the 1993 documentary about the Clinton campaign. “Even if the movie had never worked, I knew all along we’d have all this great footage of Kaleil when someday he becomes a big politician. He’s just one of those people who could talk people into anything.”

Isaza Tuzman seems perfectly at ease always having a camera peeking over his shoulder, whether he’s in a boardroom making a deal or in bed at 1 a.m., on the phone with his mother. It’s clearly an MTV “Real World” generational thing: If the filmmakers had tried making a documentary around Barry Diller when he was starting Fox, he would’ve tossed them out of his office in five seconds flat.

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Like any show-biz entrepreneur, Isaza Tuzman always has his eyes on the prize. He knows what he wants and how to get it, and he surfs from crisis to crisis riding a wave of self-dramatizing psychicenergy. When things go well, Isaza Tuzman hugs everyone in sight, telling Herman, “You’re one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known.” After a venture-capital pitch flops, he’s on the phone, groaning, “I’m so tired, I’m nauseous--I’m on the verge of collapse.”

The film even captures the Young Hustler--Isaza Tuzman--glad-handing the Old Master--Bill Clinton--when the GovWorks entrepreneur is seated next to the president at a White House conference. Seeing the event replayed on C-SPAN, Isaza Tuzman’s colleagues watch spellbound as he buttonholes Clinton afterward. One of them asks Isaza Tuzman if he really handed the president his business card. “I did,” Isaza Tuzman says. “I also talked to him about the CEO job.”

Like Clinton, Isaza Tuzman is irresistible, especially to the opposite sex. But his two girlfriends in the film have the same complaints: “You never return my phone calls.” Girlfriend No. 2 is seen trying to get Isaza Tuzman’s attention while he returns e-mail. “You’re not, like, looking at me,” she complains. “You’re supposed to be on vacation with me now.” Isaza Tuzman doesn’t look up from the computer: “Any minute now,” he says.

The filmmakers--who seem a bit under his spell too--say it’s a true sign of Isaza Tuzman’s ineffable charm that he’s still friends with all his exes. “He just started a bikini business with one old girlfriend,” says Noujaim. “And he’s doing a book with another one.”

Noujaim, who’d been a producer at MTV before teaming up with Hegedus, went to Harvard with Isaza Tuzman and was his roommate during the course of the film.

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The women started filming without financing. Everything was informal: “Kaleil never did the dishes at our apartment,” says Noujaim. “So I’d say, ‘Just get me into that venture-capital meeting and I’ll get Chris to come over and do the dishes.’ ” A few months into the project, they assembled a half-hour sampler tape and showed it to Artisan Entertainment’s Amir Malin, who’d distributed “The War Room.”

“It was the most Hollywood moment of the whole experience,” recalls Noujaim. “He watched the footage and said, ‘Great. I’ll make it. What’s next?’ ”

Noujaim’s friendship with Isaza Tuzman gave her extraordinary access and trust. But when GovWorks went sour, the filmmakers found themselves in the midst of a bitter conflict, with Herman calling Isaza Tuzman “Machiavellian” and Isaza Tuzman having Herman escorted out of the building after the two split up. Hegedus calls the result “a buddy story gone awry.” Noujaim found herself torn between being a filmmaker or a friend. “Here was Kaleil, trying to choose between losing his friendship with Tom or losing his business,” she recalls. “And there I was, trying to decide whether to pick up the camera and film him or have a real conversation with him.”

Hegedus and Noujaim make it clear that they are not objective journalists--in fact, they went out of their way to portray Isaza Tuzman as an engaging character. Noujaim says she shot a lot of film of Isaza Tuzman when he was in emotional turmoil because “it shows his vulnerability--it’s something that will make people more sympathetic.” When Isaza Tuzman asked that a couple of scenes be taken out, saying they were “fundamentally misrepresentative” because they only showed parts of a conversation, the filmmakers consented.

Despite all their efforts, when they showed the film at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, most moviegoers saw Isaza Tuzman as more of an opportunist than an idealist, perhaps because you rarely see any examples of GovWorks’ public-spiritedness in the film. Noujaim remembers people coming up to her, saying, “Kaleil seems like a [jerk], like a poster boy for greed. He’s your friend. Is that the way you intended to show him?”

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Isaza Tuzman watched a rough cut of the movie just before the filmmakers took it to Sundance. “It was excruciating,” he admits. By the second time he saw it, the shock had worn off. Isaza Tuzman saw the movie through the eyes of a salesman: not as a setback, but as an opportunity.

“I tried to see it as a form of business analysis,” he says. “That was so fruitful that I asked Jehane and Chris to let Tom and I watch the outtakes as a learning tool.”

Nonetheless, Isaza Tuzman has no plans to go before the cameras any time soon--at least not in so naked a fashion. “It may sound schmaltzy,” he says, which, of course, is the pitch every good salesman makes when they’re about to sell you something off the bottom shelf. “But my life has been about following my dreams and living without regrets. I’ve learned that life is always gray, but film is different--it looks very black-and-white.”

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“The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have ideas, comments or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.