Kaleil Tuzman and Tom Herman, friends since they were 14 years old, decide to start an online business. Govworks.com is established in May 1999 to assist subscribers with government bureaucracies over things like parking fines. Without too much difficulty, it seems, the friends raise $60 million and set up an office in New York employing a couple of hundred people. Kaleil, the more outgoing of the two, hob-nobs with President Clinton. And then it all starts to go sour...Chris Hegedus and her partner D.A. Pennebaker have been making fly on the wall documentaries, much like the ones Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson make in Australia, for some time now. In this new film Hegedus is partnered by Jehane Noujaim, and their subject is one of the `dotcom` companies that flourished briefly at the end of the 20th Century. It`s amazing how lucky the filmmakers were to pick on the characters of Kaleil and Tom, whose business and friendship undergo some spectacular highs and lows during the course of this utterly riveting film.Comments from Margaret Pomeranz.This is a documentary that isn?t quite as insightful as I would have wanted it to be. It?s about a friendship and a business partnership and the impact one has on the other. But in documenting the establishment of govworks.com there seem to be significant information gaps so that while you get a gist of the whole, the details are tantalisingly elusive. It shouldn?t be necessary to fill a couple of those significant gaps at the beginning of the end titles. With the friendship you get the facts ? that Tom and Kaleil went to high school together, you get emotional bear hugs ? ?I love you bro? ? but you don?t get a sense of the basis of the friendship, except that it was based on wanting to establish a business together. I couldn?t quite get why Tom was such a failure in the business except that his technology wasn?t quite up to scratch. Why couldn?t they hire someone else? They had over two hundred people employed at that time. Or was it just that Tom was the scapegoat for the turnaround in the business. Too many unanswered questions to be entirely satisfactory, but at the same time, it takes you on a voyage of the establishment of a dotcom business and the problems the two men encounter on the way to its demise.
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