There were long queues at the immigration desk when I arrived at San Francisco's international airport on December 18 1999. Like thousands of other foreign workers converging on the city at the dawn of the third millennium I was about to join the internet industry. After working in British television documentaries for five years I was thrilled to imagine myself as a pioneer in a new medium, and I soon stumbled into a job at "user-generated" video site Eveo.com.
Founded by French entrepreneur Olivier Zitoun, Eveo.com promised to revolutionise the entertainment industry by connecting film-makers directly with their audience via the internet. The company had raised more than $1m in seed capital with the slogan "Everyone's a director". Zitoun believed that the rapid growth of two industries, internet broadband and digital video, meant that millions of people would soon be making their own films, which they would be eager to distribute online. He spoke in charismatic terms about his desire to empower ordinary people to tell their own stories. Above all, as he said in an interview with film-maker community site IndieWire, "the internet is about people". I was seduced by the rhetoric.
The Chocolate Building in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square, an area thronged with seagulls and tourists, seemed an odd choice for the headquarters of an internet entertainment company. This feeling of oddity stayed with me as I walked into the Eveo office early last year, to face bare white walls and boxes of self-assembly desks. But as a newcomer to the brash culture of California start-ups, it was difficult to tell for sure that anything was wrong. I built my desk, plugged in my phone, and got to work.
Critics of the internet gold rush have rightly assumed that one motive for dot.com employees was greed. But in late 1999 and early 2000, there was also a millennialist optimism sustaining the fervour of those who embraced the new technology. The promise of new technology is that it will improve the spiritual, as well as the material lot of humanity, and I am quite sure that, however naively, I invested Eveo with this world-improving faith. Along with the idea of working in a new medium, in a new century, came the thought that this was perhaps a new world. I was not alone in my optimism. At a company meeting, marketing manager Tammy Karpanko, described Eveo as "video by the people, for the people". Linda Olszewski, a Dreamworks executive hired as fiction and comedy channel manager, suggested that kids in the ghetto might stop shooting bullets, and start shooting films.
As documentary channel manager my job was to get hold of as many short videos as possible before the site launched on February 20. Zitoun gave me a small budget for commissions, and I made some films myself, but my main task was to encourage submissions from aspiring video-makers. The company promised to pay $100 for every video received before the launch date, regardless of quality, in the hope that they could sell some of these films to other websites, or even to television. It seemed unlikely, but I reminded myself that I was part of a revolution, and kept my doubts to myself. "You don't need to worry about that," the vice-president Marc Ruxin reassured me, when I asked him how the company intended to make money. So, like all the other workers joining start-ups without clear revenue models, and the investors who gambled on them, I allowed myself to believe that the traditional laws of economics had been miraculously suspended.
The oddities multiplied. I tried not to worry, as Ruxin suggested, but it was difficult. In February I attended the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The company had spent several thousand dollars on an advert in one of the festival catalogues. "A truly inspirational thought for genuine artists," the copy declared, "sub-five-minute shorts can now make you serious bucks." A company flyer depicted an Eveo logo in the style of the giant Hollywood sign in the hills above Los Angeles, a tactic so self-important that some people took it as irony.
On my return to Ghirardelli Square, I expressed my concerns about the company's public relations strategy to Zitoun. He reassured me that it was early days. We soon began receiving videos in the post. The films ranged from excellent 16mm shorts by young directors to amateur footage of students being sick. Many people in the company began to suggest it should encourage the good material, and reject the bad. Zitoun disagreed. Shortly after the site's launch in March, venture capitalists gave the company $15m. I started getting phone calls from angry film-makers who had not received their $100.
Later that month, Zitoun rewarded our hard work with a company boat trip to Angel Island. It was during our games there that I had an epiphany about the way Eveo worked and why I had been feeling so strange. The games were random. People divided into small groups, which then divided into still smaller groups, before re-forming in new allegiances, with footballs and frisbees flying back and forth arbitrarily. It struck me that life in the office was scarcely different: emails flew back and forth, projects emerged and then vanished, people came and went without explanation or consequence. It was chaos.
In April I helped to produce a DVD, featuring the best work on the site, which the company gave away as a promotional tool at the Cannes Film Festival. A few days after packing the discs into boxes and sending them out into the world, Karpanko received an anxious phone call from Max Frankston, a New York film-maker and winner of an Eveo contest for a short documentary he directed about his son, which was meant to feature on the disc. Frankston had invited relatives to watch the film at his home, and was calling Karpanko to say that he had received the "wrong" DVD.
The disc had an Eveo label, and was packed in an Eveo box, but did not feature Eveo material. Instead, the DVD contained a hardcore porn film called Blackballers II, about a gang of black men who abduct and rape young white boys. Frankston was not alone in receiving Blackballers II, and Eveo film editor Marcy Charap spent several painful hours calling bewildered film-makers to apologise for the mysterious mix-up in the DVD pressing plant, which was never explained.
I might have seen the funny side, but I'd started making promises I could not keep, to people I respected. The angry phone calls from unpaid film-makers got angrier. The oddities multiplied to a surreal level, and I sank into depression. In February, I began talks with Colin Luke and Adam Alexander of the UK indepen dent production company Mosaic Films. The talks were still continuing when I left the company almost five months later.
In April I went to a film festival in Taos, New Mexico, and met Haskell Wexler, the Oscar-winning cinematographer of Days of Heaven. Listening to my pitch about global democracy, he agreed to give the company his video about Gladys Knight and Burt Bacharach in Cuba. But I no longer believed what I was saying, and Wexler's generosity shamed me.
Later that month, the Nasdaq slumped, and a string of internet companies went bust. But it was the end of the millennial optimism, not the stock market downturn, which led to my resignation on June 30. Like the investors who lost their shirts on overvalued stocks in April, I lost my innocence about the corporate world, and my naive faith in the internet.
Eveo survives today with a new business plan, based on licensing its services to other companies. But, for me at least, the idealism is over.
