Lawrence.com

Los Angeles — Early in the documentary "Startup.com," the newly hired chief executive of govWorks.com tells employees he hates the name. Kaleil Isaza Tuzman says he wants to call the company, "RenderuntoCaesar.com."

For Steve Stanford, co-founder of the defunct Internet animation site Icebox.com, the scene rings uncomfortably true.

"When we started the company, we went through that whole naming thing that they did in the movie, where we were just agonizing over it, getting into these heated discussions over what the name should be," Stanford said.

"We were fighting with our initial investor, who wanted it to be 'e-something.' We said, 'The Internet happens to be our distribution medium, but it's not about the "e" or the "I" or any of those kinds of things. It's about what we're doing.'"

Stanford and Lisa Crane, former chief executive of defunct Web broadcaster Soundbreak.com, recently watched "Startup.com" and said the film fairly portrays the enthusiasm of the Web's earliest days.

It also documents the befuddled agony that swept over many companies when the investment climate suddenly turned after a technology stock crash in April 2000, and previously golden Internet businesses faltered, then failed.

"That was one of the things that hit home," Stanford said. "You did all the things you told the investors you were going to do. The rules changed in the middle of the game. Despite all that, things finally started working the way you wanted them to work. But just because of the timing, it didn't matter. No one cared and no one wanted to invest in anything with a "dotcom" at the end of the name."

"Startup.com" focuses on the relationship between childhood friends Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, who joined to start govWorks.com, a Web site designed to make it easier for people to deal with local governments, including paying parking tickets and buying fishing licenses online.

"You have to follow a story arc when you're making a film and I really wanted to make something for a general audience," said Chris Hegedus, who made the film with Jehane Noujaim. (Hegedus' husband, D.A. Pennebaker, produced the film. They received an Oscar nomination for chronicling Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1993's "The War Room.")

"The fact is we wanted to follow a dynamic human story and it was a choice to not show 20 minutes of guys sitting typing on their computers," Noujaim said. "We didn't want to make a process film about how to build an Internet company."

The film's narrow focus, plus the lack of access to the board of directors � where many of the strategic decisions were presumably made � might serve to reinforce a stereotype of Internet entrepreneurs as clueless kids who squandered millions and cared little for the outcome.

"That's the thing that really bothers me," Crane said. "We were not a bunch of bumbling idiots who didn't know anything. There definitely were some young kids there who made, I think, some wrong decisions.

"But with a good portion of the Internet companies, you actually did have good business people with them and those investors at board meetings. And one thing that didn't show in the movie is that they really were discussing real business stuff. It's not like they were out there on their own making ..."

"... just crazy decisions and spending tens and hundreds of millions of dollars doing dumb stuff," Stanford chimed in.

"It just didn't happen, in most cases," Crane said.