Truth & Consequences

By Richard Lacayo

Here's how art imitates life. It's the spring of last year, and Mike Wallace--immemorial TV journalist, much honored anchor of 60 Minutes--is on the phone to film director Michael Mann. Mann is making a movie about one of the less exalted episodes in Wallace's career, the time four years ago when 60 Minutes suppressed its story on Jeffrey Wigand, a tobacco-industry whistle blower. Mann's film moves on two tracks. One is the anguished dealings between Wigand and Lowell Bergman, a 60 Minutes producer who is leash holder and hand holder for the tormented Wigand. The other is the no less anguished dealings between Bergman and his friend and mentor Wallace, who (at least onscreen) ultimately caves when the corporate powers want the story killed.

Wallace had persuaded Mann to let him see an early version of the screenplay. Now he has called to ask for factual corrections and other changes in scenes that make him look vainglorious or blind to journalistic ethics. "His language is very acute," recalls Mann. "Stunningly funny and smart and ironic. He gave this long speech. I told him I'd have to use it in the film!" Which Mann did. It became an onscreen outburst that Wallace delivers sarcastically to Bergman, his once devoted younger colleague: "Oh, how fortunate I am to have Lowell Bergman's moral tutelage to point me down the shining path, to show me the way!"

So there you go. How art imitates life is bumptiously, changing it around so that the story tells better. What's so upsetting to Wallace is that as he sees it, Mann has changed not just the details of the Wigand story but also the crux of it, making Wallace one of the heavies in a drama about nothing less than integrity--who has it, who lacks it, who's willing to pay the price for it.

Mann's film, The Insider, which opens around the country next week, is also a drama about credibility. So the movie asks if Bergman can trust the insular and somber Wigand, who says that Brown & Williamson, the tobacco company where he once worked as chief of research, knowingly added cancer-causing chemicals to its products. Can Wigand trust Bergman, who keeps pushing him to go public with his story, though it cost him his severance pay, his peace of mind and his marriage? Can Bergman trust Wallace? And can anybody trust 60 Minutes, the most lustrous of TV newsmagazines, if it runs when Big Tobacco huffs and puffs at its door?

As it happens, the debate that has blown up around The Insider is also about credibility. Although neither Wallace nor 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt has been allowed to see the film in advance of its release, the two argue that it merely reflects the point of view of Bergman, played by Al Pacino, who now works as a free-lance documentary producer and who was a consultant on the film. Wallace insists that throughout the whole fight, he and Bergman "were two peas in a pod, stood shoulder to shoulder" in their determination to air the interview. But the film sums up Wallace's final position in a single devastating moment, after Hewitt nixes the Wigand piece, when Wallace looks at Bergman and says briskly, "I'm with Don on this."

Two weeks ago, Hewitt also came out swinging. The Insider is being released by Touchstone Pictures, a division of the Walt Disney Co., which also owns the ABC-TV network. Talking to the Washington Post, Hewitt pointedly recalled that Disney was charged with squashing a segment of ABC's 20/20 that probed allegations of pedophilia at, ahem, Disney World. In the interim, however, Hewitt appears to have decided that controversy just sells tickets, so he's sounding cooler. He swears he's not upset by the movie. "I'm not. I'm really not."

Mann says the film is faithful to the truth in its large outlines, although, he admits, some scenes and dialogue were invented. "The big, broad truths of this are all public record," he says. "In that sense the film is basically accurate." Pacino says that even his Bergman character is not quite Bergman: "He was a composite of three or four people in Michael's and [co-screenwriter] Eric Roth's mind, including aspects of themselves." But none of that appeases the folks at CBS. CBS News president Andrew Heyward complains that "because of the distortion of the filmmakers' dramatic license, we now have a person [Wallace] who has done nothing but the best for broadcast journalism who's being hurt."

Alarm bells went off for Wallace as soon as he saw that early version of the script. It opened with a scene in which Bergman is doing advance work for an interview with leaders of the terrorist Hizballah in Lebanon. During a meeting with one of the group's leaders, Bergman's cell phone rings, and it's Wallace in New York City wanting to make sure that the hotel in Beirut has Jacuzzis. Never mind that it wasn't Bergman who was the advanceman; all sides agree that Wallace never made such a call to the producer who was there, and it has been cut from the film.

Part of the problem is that The Insider tells a complicated story involving true insiders, people who confer in closed-door corporate meetings. Wigand had signed a confidentiality agreement with B&W promising never to discuss company matters in public. CBS News execs were warned by lawyers for CBS Inc. that the segment could bring on a multibillion-dollar lawsuit by the cigarette maker. The movie makes top management out to be concerned that any such lawsuit might derail the profitable sale of CBS to Westinghouse Electric, a deal that was at that time near completion and promised to earn CBS executives millions individually in stock options. 60 Minutes eventually did run its interview with Wigand on Feb. 4, 1996, but only after his claims had become public record in a lawsuit against the tobacco companies and only after the show had been embarrassed by reports about its in-house struggle.

It was during all this that Mann, who had met Bergman two years earlier and had been discussing story ideas with him, realized that the embattled producer was himself at the center of a terrific story. Bergman, he recalls, "would say stuff like, 'You'll never guess in a million years what Don Hewitt said to me today.'" Eventually Mann acquired the rights to a piece about Wigand by Marie Brenner that appeared in Vanity Fair in May 1996.

Screenwriter Roth (Forrest Gump) says that at first he thought it might be no more than a TV movie. "Then I found it was character driven as much as story driven, exploring the unlikely nature of two men who wouldn't normally have been friendly." He spoke frequently with Bergman, but his contacts with Wigand were limited by the same confidentiality agreement that had complicated matters for 60 Minutes.

All the same, Wigand, who now runs a one-man antismoking foundation, Smoke Free Kids, is happy with the film. He got Roth and Mann to obscure details about his children and to avoid showing any of the characters smoking cigarettes; but Roth says Wigand didn't try to intervene at all in the way he was depicted. "When Jeffrey read the portrayal, warts and all, he didn't ask us to change anything." That includes an invented scene in which Wigand appears to be on the brink of suicide. Wigand says he "never got that despondent" but is "very comfortable with the way Michael Mann and Eric Roth created the same mood, the same menace, the same atmosphere."

Bergman is pleased with the film too. "It's not a documentary," he says. "It's more of a historical novel." But he's angry with his former colleagues at CBS, who are claiming that he was negotiating with Mann to make a film about the Wigand blowup even while it was going on. "It was apparent to anybody in the editing room," says Wallace, "that he was frequently on the telephone [to Mann] with a play-by-play while he was producing the piece for us." Bergman insists he didn't start thinking about making the story into a film until after Wallace told him he was about to be fired by Hewitt for having brought Wigand--then the subject of a false smear campaign--to the show in the first place.

In the end, as audience members we're all outsiders on this story, at least about whether Wallace betrayed Bergman, to say nothing of his own ideals. Much of what we may ultimately believe could be based on what we intuit from the performances. Because Pacino plays him, Bergman is guaranteed a certain moral passion. (Think Hurricane Andrew as Carl Bernstein.) Meanwhile, Christopher Plummer plays Wallace as a man possessing not only a worldliness that might incline him to compromise with his corporate bosses but also an ample self-regard that would keep him mindful of his reputation--and one whose careful intelligence could well point him in either direction.

For now, Hewitt is professing comfort at the thought that movies don't last at the multiplex forever. 60 Minutes, he says, "has been around for, like, 30 years. A movie, if it's lucky, is around for maybe a week." Or is it? There's already talk of possible Oscar nominations for Russell Crowe, Pacino or Plummer. That would keep the film alive well into next year. And then there's the video release. All that could mean a long stretch ahead for 60 Minutes. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick...

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York