New Movies Chronicle Ins, Outs of Dot-Coms

The Depression gave us “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” World War II produced “Catch-22” and “The Naked and the Dead.”

It’s too soon to tell whether the Internet bubble will lead to works of art that will endure, but a creative boomlet of documentaries and dramatic films has already begun.

In the last few months, three very different nonfiction films about the technology mania have surprised their creators by reaching sell-out crowds.

The documentary “Startup.com” follows the leaders of a chaotic New York City Internet company, GovWorks.com, from the drafting of its business plan through the hiring of more than 200 workers to a stark shot of rows of empty cubicles after the firm crashed. “Startup.com” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and recently began a run in Los Angeles.

“Secrets of Silicon Valley,” which has been playing at Bay Area theaters, chronicles a beleaguered charity’s director and a worker activist fighting for better conditions at a high-tech factory.

And “21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com”--a biting 90-minute monologue by Mike Daisey, a former mid-level Amazon employee--had a three-month run in Seattle. There’s also a Web version of his monologue at https://www.mikedaisey.com, and in the next few months he is scheduled to perform in Portland, Ore., Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“We’re a little amazed” by the demand for “Secrets,” said co-director Deborah Kaufman of Berkeley. “We’re getting deluged by people all over the country who want us to come” for a screening.

One reason for the early success is the hunger for a true inside view of what happened during the dot-com boom and bust. Once deluged with upbeat prognostications from Wall Street, many people want an unvarnished second look at the dot-com frenzy.

Even many dot-com employees didn’t understand what was happening at their companies.

Mike John-Baptiste was among several veterans of GovWorks.com, the failed company in “Startup.com,” who caught the film at a recent San Francisco showing. “It’s educational for people who worked there,” he said. “It’s an eye into [something] you don’t see unless you’re the CEO.”

GovWorks raised tens of millions of dollars and generated significant media coverage with a plan to allow citizens to pay parking tickets, taxes and other obligations to local governments online. Other companies had the same idea, and the Web operation was riddled with bugs. But the big problem, as the CEO’s girlfriend observed, was that the leaders resembled children playing dress-up.

Ex-GovWorks staffers in the audience for a recent showing cringed at a number of scenes, such as when the company’s young founders are in a venture capitalist’s office and have an hour to decide whether to accept the complex terms of a funding offer. Faced with the biggest decision of their lives, they can’t get their lawyer on the phone.

The film also captures the feelings of personal betrayal by friends who brought them into GovWorks. Cameras record both sides of a horrible phone conversation in which the company’s chief executive fires his chief technology officer, a fellow founder and friend since childhood.

Even for viewers who weren’t touched by the dot-com bubble, such films can resonate.

Silicon Valley dot-coms have “taken on a mythic status,” said Ellen Spitz, who lectures on the psychology of art at Stanford University. “There’s almost a fairy-tale aspect of the young man who goes off and seeks his fortune. . . . It has a kind of Oedipal quality: There’s a triumph over the father, and then he gets his comeuppance.”

Those who were envious of the young Internet millionaires can watch and feel vicariously triumphant at their fall, Spitz said.

“Secrets of Silicon Valley,” by contrast, homes in on the majority who never had a chance at millions.

“The biggest secret in our story has to do with the outsourcing [done by] companies like Hewlett-Packard,” said “Secrets” director Kaufman.

In the documentary, activist Raj Jayadev takes a job at a temporary employment firm that places him in an assembly job for a Hewlett-Packard contractor in San Jose, where things run much as they might have 60 years ago.

Most of the manufacturing employees are minorities. The pay is as low as $8 an hour. And housing prices force many to commute 75 miles or more each way.

After workers complain they have been shorted on their paychecks, Jayadev helps organize a successful petition, and later he complains about respiratory illness common on the plant floor.

Eventually, he testifies before a California Senate hearing on poor working conditions at tech companies. “I actually think there’s nothing new about the ‘new economy,’ ” he says. “I want that myth destroyed.”

The film satisfies a desire to see the other side of something usually described in glowing terms, Spitz said, much like historic tours of Southern cities that now include former slave markets as well as the mansions of the rich.

If the two films follow opposite extremes of the tech boom, the Amazon monologue is from the point of view of an everyman.

Mike Daisey began his job as an Amazon.com customer service grunt, where he improved his closely tracked “average resolution time” for handling consumer calls by hanging up on people in mid-sentence.

But Daisey got caught up in the Amazon fever, winning a promotion to a business-development team where he was warned that every deal had to be as rock-solid as Amazon’s (subsequently disastrous) investment in Pets.com.

Daisey is at his best when he examines his own complicity in the mania: He, too, thought Pets.com was brilliant. But “you can’t fool all the people all of the time. That’s called common sense,” he said in his monologue.

Daisey said his life was ruined when he stumbled on a spreadsheet listing his co-workers’ bigger salaries, soaring stock options and implied net worth. He quit soon after.

“I thought I could change the world through commerce,” Daisey said in an interview. “I look back on my expectations and they seem so absurd--we were selling books.”

Daisey now fields 100 e-mails a day, many from similarly disillusioned Internet workers who have watched the Web version of the monologue, and he has a book deal with Simon & Schuster.

“It’s about what we do with our lives, what does it mean to devote yourself to something,” he said. “There is no more important topic in American life.”

Many other dot-com victims who have time on their hands are making their own films or writing about their experiences.

Among them is Silicon Valley native Jason Ward, who made “I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley,” a fictionalized film account of his own homecoming to a once-relaxed area now full of rich young braggarts with cell phones and laptops.

“It’s a kind of feeling I have, but definitely taken to an extreme,” Ward said. “It lets people know that there was something here before Netscape had their IPO.”

Even if such films never get wide distribution, they can serve a purpose for those who make them.

“Any time humans have gotten into trauma, they have made art,” said Cathy Malchiodi, past editor of the journal of the American Art Therapy Assn. “If it didn’t feel good, people wouldn’t do it.”