Fatty Arbuckle of the dot-com era Analysis/Commentary If San Diego has its mad dogs (the Doomsday Comet Cult, remember?), San Juan Capistrano, Calif., now has its own rabid dot-communists. Wow, it could only happen in California, a.k.a. the land of Silk and Money, as well as incredible gullibility. Witness the extravagant rise and fall of Pixelon.com. But first, you ask, who's Fatty Arbuckle? Actually, only Arby's critics called him "Fatty." Roscoe Arbuckle was a stout, funny star of the silent Keystone Kops comedies, and the center of a scandal that rocked Hollywood for years. On the night of September 5, 1921, something very bad happened at a Hollywood party. Never mind that Arbuckle was probably innocent. He took the fall for the rape of a young female party-goer, and inspired the movie industry to adopt a strict morals code, off and on screen. At present, Pixelon also tells a tale of a raucous, devil-may-care era, a party to end all parties, followed quickly by scandal and public ritual expiation. (Did the "big guy" of the Pixelon fall into a cosmic black hole, opening into a forgotten time of excess?) David Stanley, an Appalachian preacher came to California in 1996. He lived out of his car for a few months and changed his name to Michael Fenne before starting a digital video company. The company blossomed into a well-financed Internet streaming "dot-com" called Pixelon.com. In early November 1999, Pixelon subsidized its "iBash" launch, a concert party featuring The Who, Tony Bennet, and Kiss. A few days later, Stanley was discovered to be a fugitive, a convicted embezzler of funds from wealthy churchgoers among his Virginia people. The Californians never even did a credit check on him before handing over millions. Stanley allegedly spent upwards of $12 million on the Pixelon inaugural bash. And in the dot-com feeding frenzy, movie stars and studios elbowed each other to sign investment checks. Pixelon, currently reorganized and downsized to a skeleton crew of management employees, anticipates going under. Oddly, a sales representative from the company spoke to this journalist in March, before the scandal fully exploded. According to him, the Pixelon browser boasts a frame rate of 30 (better than existing video players) and operates effectively at full screen size. (Is the software genuine or paste? Only the patent office or courts know for sure.) In hindsight, the Hollywood of the '20s and the Netwood of the '90s bear a definite resemblance. And David Stanley turned out to be a very convenient for investors and creditors who might have lost increasingly steep seeding funds, whether Pixelon proved eventually profitable or not. June 28, 2000