The Insider takes some serious heat from tobacco execs, CBS and Mike Wallace

By LOUIS B. HOBSON - Calgary Sun
Wednesday, November 3, 1999

HOLLYWOOD -- Three years ago, investigative journalist Lowell Bergman stumbled on what would become a $246-billion US story.

Bergman needed someone to simplify a report he'd received on the tobacco industry.

He contacted Jeffrey Wigand, a former senior official of tobacco giant Brown & Williamson. To his amazement, Bergman discovered Wigand had proof the tobacco industry had for years been adding chemicals to their cigarettes to increase the effects of nicotine.

Bergman found a way for Wigand to circumvent his confidentiality agreement with Brown & Williamson, so he could testify at a Mississippi hearing.

In exchange, he asked Wigand to tape a segment with Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes.

Before any of this came to fruition, Wigand and Bergman would discover just how malicious and devious the tobacco giants could become.

Bergman and Wigand's incredible story has become the film The Insider, which opens Friday.

"I had met Lowell five years before he became embroiled in this issue," says Michael Mann, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay for The Insider.

"Lowell and I were trying to develop a film based on some of the episodes he'd produced for 60 Minutes. I was fascinated by a journalist's quest for information."

Mann became one of a handful of people Bergman confided in while he was trying to break the tobacco story.

"In February of 1996, I finally told Lowell to forget about the arms merchants story we were working on. I told him what he was living through at that moment was the movie I wanted to make."

Mann had directed Al Pacino in Heat a year earlier.

He knew instinctively who had to play Bergman in The Insider.

"As an actor, Al is devoid of any fear of embarrassment. He's completely courageous. I needed someone who'd infuse emotional energy into the film because it was going to be a movie stripped of action."

Pacino says his primary goal was "to keep Lowell from seeming too self-righteous. I wanted to avoid all the hero cliches.

"Having access to Lowell was invaluable because I could talk to him about his motivations for specific actions."

Finding a Wigand proved more difficult.

Mann talked to more than a dozen A-list actors.

Disney had agreed to produce the film and asked Mann to interview Russell Crowe, the Australian actor who made such an impression playing an American police detective in L.A. Confidential.

At the time, Crowe was in Canmore filming Disney's hockey movie Mystery, Alaska.

"Russell was working six days a week, so he had only one day to fly down to L.A. and meet with me," says Mann.

"He was also about 20 years younger than Jeffrey, but within an hour he was able to show me the inner annihilation Jeffrey had experienced."

Crowe recalls Mann assured him he "didn't have to walk, talk and look like Jeffrey. That was noble of him, but it was like saying

I could play Abe Lincoln with a moustache and blond hair.

"I did everything I could to look, sound and act like Jeffrey."

Crowe impressed his most difficult critic.

After seeing The Insider, Wigand admits "it was like deja vu. Russell did a remarkable job of capturing me physically and emotionally.

I didn't think it was possible because, in real life, he is so unlike me."

From the moment the cameras began rolling on The Insider, Mann was inundated with letters from lawyers for the tobacco companies, CBS Entertainment -- which produces 60 Minutes -- and Mike Wallace, who is portrayed by Christopher Plummer.

Against Bergman's protests, CBS and Wallace originally aired the tobacco story without Wigand's interview because of pressure from the tobacco industry.

"All the people portrayed in The Insider are alive and kicking," says Mann.

"Some are kicking a lot harder than others, but they can't sue us."

Pacino finds it ironic that CBS and Wallace should have tried to prevent the film from exposing their folly.

"They're just admitting they don't like the cameras pointed at them in exactly the same manner they point them at other people," says Pacino. "But I guess that's natural. No one likes cameras pointed accusingly at them."

Mann emphasizes that "all these things happened. Everything in our movie is documented. It's all in the public domain."

This said, Mann quickly adds that The Insider is "not a documentary. We dramatize the headlines of 1995 and 1996, making this a deeply personal story of what it must have been like to be Jeffrey Wigand for that year.

"It's frightening what happened to him and his family when he was called upon to tell the truth," says Mann.

"And it is the truth, or else the tobacco companies wouldn't have been willing to pay the $246 billion."

(Subsequent to the events depicted in the film, the tobacco industry settled lawsuits filed against it by 50 U.S. states for $246 billion.)

Pacino says he hopes The Insider "has solid entertainment value. I hope we move people with this story. We all took liberties in telling the story to make it more dramatic, but we never tampered with the facts."

Bergman is hurt that Wallace and CBS have denounced The Insider.

"They all saw a much earlier version of the screenplay.

"They have refused to see the finished version, yet they continue to speak out against it.

"The movie is about a very important moral and health issue. The clashes I had with CBS and Mike Wallace are just added colour."