Coming Attraction: Going Broke

Welcome back to the dot-com bust.

Cinematically speaking, of course.

As if there isn't enough economic dread to go around in 2008, Hollywood has made a movie to summon up the bad old days of 2001 and 2002.

In August, debuting in New York Friday, we watch queasily as Josh Hartnett's suddenly-rich internet impresario Tom Sterling struggles against becoming suddenly much less rich.

Though the filmmakers are quick to insist that the story -- written by Howard A. Rodman (he also wrote Savage Grace) and refined by him with director Austin Chick (XX/XY) -- is not based on an actual person or company, Sterling and his Land Shark do have a certain overlap with Razorfish and its founder Jeff Dachis.

There's a vagueness that's often gone with the territory in web ventures, and though Razorfish is now known as Avenue A/Razorfish and its business is still "enterprise solutions."

What Razorfish promises on its website -- "studying users," "deconstructing data," "developing game-changing ideas," and "understand[ing] just what makes the digital sphere so different" -- does resemble a speechlet the supercilious Sterling made in a meeting with some smart young suits from a major client.

What they need and want, he tells them in the movie, is: "E. Pure E. Not 'e-commerce.' Not 'e-business.' Not 'click-and-mortar,' dear God, please not that ... You want 'E.' Pure 'E.' Not old, not tired, not stepped on. Not a gram of 'E' and 10 grams of baby laxative. 'E.' "

It hardly qualifies as a spoiler, given that we know early on we're watching an undercapitalized, egocentric Web impresario wielding a flawed business model in the summer of 2001, but Sterling is heading for a crash.

More specifically, he's headed for a buyout at a greatly reduced share price -- most of the innovative Web concepts ultimately found a home at a bargain to the buyers, at much cost to the ego and solvency of the upstart geniuses behind them. And they cried all the way to the bank.

(In the film, a very effective David Bowie, who told the director he would play the predatory venture capitalist as "More Kray brothers than Brooks Brothers," delivers the fiscal coup de grâce.)

Jason Calcanis, who appears in the film introducing Sterling at a conference for a strange meltdown speech, became one of the post-crash pioneers with weblogs.inc, selling his concept for a reported $25 million) 18 months after starting it. (He'd previously, in the boom days, started a site called Silicon Alley Reporter; Rodman's original script was titled Silicon Alley).

Calcanis watched the Razorfish implosion from nearby: "Dachis was bold, brazen and when the end came he not only didn't give up, he bought more Razorfish stock ... wait for it ... personally. Ouch."

"I think what happened was around the time of the great dot-com boom," says Rodman. "There was a certain amount of gleeful celebration of just floating in thin air.

"There was a kind of strange ethos in the air. I remember pretty early on, when Amazon announced that it had lost far more that quarter than the quarter before and the stock went way up," Rodman added. "Because if you were losing money it meant you were investing in the future, and if you were just making a little bit of money then clearly you had no ambition and weren't scalable.

"So there is this down the rabbit hole way of looking at the world where the worse your company was doing, the more your stock was worth."

Chick's film introduces Sterling as a sort of rock star -- Mark Cuban will perhaps wish he'd had the film's tailor and props people around when he started flaunting his pile -- but the grinding electronica on the soundtrack warns us early on that he's headed for trouble.

The movie is a step forward for Harnett. "He's tended to play more passive roles," says Chick, "Part of what makes that character interesting is the kind of friction between the Tom character as written and how you naturally want to perceive Josh Hartnett."

Though it's Hartnett's film, there are other fine performances.

Adam Scott, who played Howard Hughes' publicist in The Aviator, is intriguing to watch as his Web-prodigy brother not buying Tom's act, and Chick is proud he's made a film "about relationships."

With Rip Torn as the brothers' cynically professorial father and Naomie Harris as Tom's estranged girlfriend, we see the results of Tom's arrogance made visible in painful scenes of disconnection.

But it's still a business movie in the sense that Oliver Stone's Wall Street was. And it's no small irony that this cautionary tale of Web 1.0's arrogance will be celebrated on this Friday when Hartnett and others from the film ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

The film will need all the promotion it can get. In this summer of tent-pole behemoths -- Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Dark Knight, and on and on -- even an art-house film that won plaudits at the Sundance Film Festival faces a challenge.

Rodman, who earlier this year won praise for the real life story of the Baekeland family in Savage Grace, has been inhabiting the sphere of rich folks screwing things up for a long time now. "In some really weird and subterranean way, both the Baekeland fortune and the world of August are about the social consequences of what happens because of a change in technology," he says.

Calcanis, who also appeared in Wayne Wang's Center of the World as an internet bubble C.E.O., suggested to the filmmakers "to have the final scene be the two brothers plotting a video site called MeTube, showing that no matter how naive folks considered us at the time, we still made it big."

Rodman's take is slightly different: "Web 2.0 didn't emerge immediately from the ashes of 1.0. You know, it took a while. And I think there is a kind of dark forest that they are going to have to walk through for a while, but my faith in them as characters is that they will be able to get there from here. But only if they do it together."

Given the state of the stock market Hartnett, et al. will briefly be presiding over this Friday, a little optimism is welcome.