By Reshma Kapadia
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Blame gourmet coffee for the dot-com bust. That's one of the theories two Internet executives-turned-filmmakers uncover with a director friend in a documentary called "What Happened" that premiered at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival on Thursday.
"The advent of gourmet coffee contributed to a certain overexcitement and lack of questioning," Chas Mastin, writer of the film said, relaying one of the more popular and humorous theories for the bust provided by people-on-the-street and Internet players interviewed for the documentary.
While the dot-com boom has become a thing of the past, the effort to dissect it is just gaining momentum.
"What Happened" follows the success of "Startup.com," a documentary released last year that followed the rise and fall of Govworks.com. A slew of books have also hit the market explaining the rise and fall of the Internet boom and bust.
The new film points out that it cost $20 billion to invent the atomic bomb in the 1940s and another $20 billion to land a man on the moon in the 1960s. Dot-com start-ups burned through $20 billion in 1999 alone, according to "What Happened."
"My business was going very well for a couple of years and Chas' business in L.A. was going well," Michael LeFort, producer of the movie, said of their Internet businesses. "All of a sudden people owed me money and my clients were falling apart and my back started hurting and there wasn't a lot of work out there for us."
LeFort joined Mastin and director Aldo Bello to find out what was causing their pain. The film interviews a slew of people from unemployed dot-commers and a local Silicon Valley coffeeshop owner to Lycos founder Bob Davis and Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban, with each giving their thoughts on the bubble and some of their crazier anecdotes.
As part of the process they encountered some of the crazier dot-com ideas, such as a tale from a former Boo.com employee who said the online retailer spent $30,000 to fly a famous stylist across the Atlantic to help "do" the hair of the company's animated online guide Miss Boo.
The film also highlights dot-com successes such as Mark Cuban's decision to sell his Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for $6 billion. He later went on to own the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.
Everyone from Wall Street bankers and analysts, venture capitalists, investors and young, high-living executives have been blamed for the bubble, which saw the stocks of fledgling companies with no profits and little revenue reach dizzying heights.
"From the investment bank side (of the story), we found out that this was a game that had been played before and will be played again. They were the casino. The big money players were the VCs and the guys putting the money on the table were the small investors," Mastin said.
The trio came to many of the same conclusions others have reached: the speed of the Internet revolution, the amount of capital in circulation and the unfamiliarity with the sector helped with the frenzy that created the bubble and bust.
"The overall feeling that people are going to get, I think is, man, there was a real snow job here and we were just part of it," Mastin said. "This is a revolution I really believed in. I was one of the people that believed that basic economic principles were altered on the Internet.
Means of Production, the film and TV production company the trio is part of, also wants to create a monument to the dot-com bubble to make sure generations remember the excess, greed and hubris that contributed to the Internet period.
Among the ideas the group has gotten include a 13-story Frappucino that has stock options instead of chocolate shavings or a 20-foot Lucite tombstone like the ones given out by banks to companies that went public, engraved with the names of all the dot-coms that went public but are no longer with us.
Other ideas included a huge roll of toilet paper with the names of the fallen dot-coms, or a giant Aeron chair -- a piece of furniture found in most Internet start-ups even though they cost $600 to $700 a piece.
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