Smoke Lingers as ‘The Insider’ Does a Slow Burn

NEW YORK —  A year ago, when Michael Mann’s film was still in the works, called just “The Untitled Tobacco Project,” the folks at “60 Minutes” were the ones worried about their legacy.

Mike Wallace, in particular, feared the reputation he built over three decades as “60 Minutes’ ” marquee correspondent would go up in smoke, so to speak, if he was portrayed as a passive figurehead more interested in getting a hotel room with a Jacuzzi than an interview with a Hezbollah terrorist . . . and who caved in when CBS higher-ups killed an interview with a tobacco whistle-blower.

Fast-forward to last month’s opening of Mann’s movie, for Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures.

It now had a title, “The Insider.” It also had fabulous reviews: Critics gushed over the tale of a behind-the-scenes “60 Minutes” producer who prods a former cigarette executive to tell all about Big Tobacco, only to have the segment squelched by Big TV.

The film got that proverbial “Oscar buzz,” as well, with talk of nominations for best picture, along with Al Pacino for his crusading producer and for Russell Crowe as the flawed whistle-blower--even for Christopher Plummer as the wavering Wallace.

“The Insider” seemed poised to follow the path to success taken by other serious films in recent years, which allows for a slow build fueled by good press, heavy promotion, word of mouth and, finally, awards.

So why are the filmmakers now the ones worried about their legacy?

It’s due, in part, to continuing challenges to the accuracy of “The Insider,” complaints from such diverse sources as Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., and the Wall Street Journal that their roles in the real events were grossly distorted. The aging icons at “60 Minutes” have not let up, either--Wallace, especially, has refused to shrug it off as “just a movie.”

Mann has had to defend the dramatic license taken by him and screenwriter Eric Roth, of “Forrest Gump” fame: No, they were not making a documentary. Yes, they embellished to make their heroes more heroic and to pump up the suspense and--they hoped--put butts in those multiplex seats.

Therein lies the main reason for the flip-flop in who’s fretting now.

Despite the reviews, the Oscar buzz and the controversy, which might figure to help box office, “The Insider”--costing $68 million to make, and millions more to market--has grossed just $22 million. Even constant stoking by pop culture mainstay Rosie O’Donnell--who promoted the film on three of her shows in a single week, interviewing Pacino, Plummer and the real-life whistle-blower, Jeffrey Wigand--could not get the fires burning.

After four weeks in more than 1,600 theaters, Disney now expects the run to scale back, while awaiting February’s announcement of Oscar nominations.

Is it simply too long, at 2 hours and 38 minutes? Too complex? Or in an era of date movies and ghost stories and blow-’em-ups, is it mainly insiders who care about the insiders in the news biz?

Figuring this out is voodoo--why some sleepers awake and sure things flop. Whatever the reason, the disappointing launch has raised questions about more than the short-term bottom line. The long-term strategy could unravel, too, if Oscar panels ponder the box office and controversy and have second thoughts.

“Of course, I’d have liked it to have done more,” Mann says. “[But] the film stands, you know, on its own two legs. It’s going to be around,” he insists, “for a while.”

He also insists awards are “not something to live or die for.”

At “60 Minutes,” meanwhile, Wallace has watched the box office, too--with a chuckle.

Eisner Calls Hewitt

The mood has been somewhat lighter there since the grosses started coming in, along with a call from Disney, from a certain Michael. Not Mann--Michael Eisner, the CEO.

The message is a bit murky, for Eisner won’t discuss it and the man who got the call--Don Hewitt, “60 Minutes’ ” executive producer--refuses to go into detail.

Hewitt has his own opinion of “The Insider,” naturally--he wishes Paul Newman or Robert Redford had portrayed him. But “if I were the movie makers,” he says, “I’d be a lot more concerned with what Michael Eisner thinks.”

With that coy quip in the air, Wallace advises Mann to keep his healthy attitude about Oscars not being important.

“The best picture of the year? Please, give me a break,” the longtime symbol of “60 Minutes” says.

The man portrayed as the hero in “The Insider,” former “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman, says he cautioned Mann about exaggerating his role in the events that led Wigand, a former Brown & Williamson vice president, to go public as a critic of the tobacco companies.

Not that Bergman was averse to getting recognition for his work, over 14 years, ferreting out stories for the show’s on-air glamour boys, mainly for Wallace. “Oh, sure,” he told The Times’ Howard Rosenberg in 1994, “as I grow older, the desire to get more credit has grown.”

Soon after, he latched onto the tobacco story, and Mann--a friend and fellow University of Wisconsin graduate--immediately saw big-screen potential in the intrigue surrounding the interview with Wigand. Though he was not the most significant whistle-blower in the Tobacco Wars--an obscure paralegal had leaked reams of key documents--the testimony of a onetime top executive had symbolic power, and defied a confidentiality agreement he signed with B&W.;

Still, Bergman--now teaching journalism at UC Berkeley and reporting for “Frontline,” the PBS documentary series--says he told the filmmakers “you’re giving me too much credit and I’ll get attacked for that and you’ll get attacked.”

Even so, Bergman agreed they deserved leeway in making a film in which “nobody gets murdered. There’s no car chases. There’s no gratuitous sex. The message of the movie is that individuals can make a difference . . . in a world dominated by mega-corporations.”

If it took condensing, rearranging and dramatizing to get people in the tent, Bergman saw “60 Minutes” itself as a dramatization of the news; crafted to show a correspondent like Wallace as the hero who “appears to have done all the work, never makes a mistake and never loses an argument.”

“The Insider” starts with a blindfolded Pacino, as Bergman, arranging Wallace’s interview in Beirut with Sheik Fadlallah, the Hezbollah leader suspected of being behind the bombing that killed 241 Marines. While Bergman was a central player in the assignment, another journalist, Jim Hougan, actually set up that interview--without a blindfold.

The film ends with Pacino quitting CBS after scoring another huge scoop--the arrest of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. That, in reality, was the coup of CBS Washington correspondent Jim Stewart.

Mann argues for artistic license, saying he could have used five real incidents to show how Wigand felt menaced by his former employer. Instead, he and Roth invented a scene in which a burly man shadows him at a driving range.

“Was there a man at the golf course? No,” Mann says. “But [that was] pretty much the way it felt to be there. That’s what you do in drama.”

Yet a disclaimer at the end of the film--that scenes were fictionalized--was not much solace to the tobacco company. Nor did B&W; appreciate the suggestion it left a bullet in the man’s mailbox. It posted a rebuttal on the Internet--”Warning: Viewing This Movie Will Be Hazardous to Your Health”--including an FBI affidavit concluding that Wigand likely placed the bullet there himself to convince “60 Minutes” he was in danger.

The firm has conducted polls outside theaters to gauge the damage to its reputation, concerned about the impact on potential jurors in upcoming liability cases.

The Wall Street Journal, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on tobacco, similarly took offense when “The Insider” depicted it as relying on handouts from Bergman--and delaying a story at his urging. Even the Journal’s thumbs-up review (“Not since ‘All the President’s Men’ has a movie explored public issues and the workings of the press in such vivid detail”) noted in a headline, “It Misrepresents Our Role.”

That’s been the refrain, also, from “60 Minutes.”

Hewitt’s main complaint is that audiences might believe he could have used his clout as the boss of “60 Minutes” to get the Wigand interview aired, as scheduled. He insists there was no dissuading CBS brass, who thought the risk of losing a lawsuit was too great. “The only way I could have put that story on the air,” he says, “was to hire a bunch of gorillas and take the transmitter at gunpoint.”

Wallace says that while he, too, went along with the corporate decision, the script distorted how quickly he changed his mind--and publicly condemned his own network.

Wallace bought $5 “senior citizen” tickets, for his wife and himself, to see the movie on the Upper West Side. He arrived minutes before show time, almost unrecognizable in a long overcoat and baseball cap.

He sat stoically while the audience laughed at Plummer’s rendition of his mannerisms, and groaned when he was shown lamenting that he did not want to wind up in “the wilderness of National Public Radio.”

“I wouldn’t say that in a million years,” Wallace complained. “I happen to be a fan of National Public Radio. . . . How would you like to have words put in your mouth that you never said?”

Yet he agreed with the critics on one thing: the performances.

“Crowe--he persuaded me he was, indeed, Jeffrey Wigand,” Wallace said. “He got all of the subtleties, all of the insecurities.”

Plummer? “Look, he’s a fine actor. And he got my moves, in effect, down beautifully. But. . . . “

If not quite an Oscar nomination, close enough.

Such an outcome was, from the start, a key part of the “tortoise” strategy to market a film whose natural audience has to be “nudged out of their chairs” in the words of Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, the box-office tracking firm.

“Who watches ’60 Minutes?’ They are not the biggest moviegoers in the world,” he notes. “They don’t have to run out the first weekend.”

Thus the early November release: Disney Studios Chairman Joe Roth wanted to give “The Insider” a few weeks to nudge that audience before the holidays, when Hollywood offers up its big-budget crowd-pleasers-- and Oscar hopefuls , like “The Green Mile” with Tom Hanks and “Hurricane” with Denzel Washington.

Now, after the painfully slow opening, Roth asks himself, “Why didn’t you just go in two theaters at Christmas and bank everything on the awards?”

Disney executives wonder whether this fall simply was a hard time for serious films, however good.

But they’re not giving up on “The Insider.”

“It’s hanging in there just well enough,” says Richard Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Group, “that we are going to be able to navigate it into Christmas and hopefully [beyond], if we are fortunate enough to be recognized by many of the critical groups.” Then, “ ‘The Insider’ can reemerge . . . as a ‘must-see.’ ”

Roth says he has reassured Mann that the “East Coast-West Coast sniping” over the film “doesn’t mean anything to an Oscar voter. . . . You go in the theater, the lights go down . . . you have a personal experience. And [small] box office didn’t keep ‘Chariots of Fire’ from getting best picture.”

It could not have been overly reassuring to the filmmakers, though, when they learned that Disney’s Big Boss had phoned the enemy camp.

Hewitt, who took the “surprise” call from Eisner, tries not to fan the flames, saying, “I’m not going to characterize what he said. I didn’t gloat over it.”

Wallace gives a less harmless account: “Michael Eisner, I’m told, calls what’s-his-name, Michael Mann, a crazy missionary and wishes he’d never gotten involved.”

Disney’s chief corporate spokesman, John Dreyer, says that’s not true. It was basically a courtesy call to an old friend, he says. Eisner wanted to speak to Hewitt, but only after the film came out--so it would not look as if he were interfering.

Eisner did “somewhat commiserate” with Hewitt, the Disney spokesman says, about how it feels to be at the other end of a stinging narrative, especially when you’re “used to delivering.” That aside, “he’s proud of the film and hoping it does well in the awards circuit.”

Mann? The director accepts the Disney version, not Wallace’s. “Michael [Eisner] saw the film, liked the film a lot. I think that it’s vulgar and irresponsible for Wallace and Hewitt . . . to smear this film. Their comments are more fictionalized and synthetic than anything in the picture.”

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Counterpunch

‘Insider’ Team Files a Brief for the Defense

By MICHAEL MANN and ERIC ROTH, Michael Mann directed “The Insider”; Eric Roth and he wrote the screenplay

Originally published: Los Angeles Times - Monday December 6, 1999 Home Edition, Calendar, Part F, Page 3, Entertainment Desk; 16 inches, 560 words

It’s interesting that print journalists, who have independence at stake, are repeating the distortions of a smear campaign against “The Insider.” If the writers of “Smoke Lingers as ‘The Insider’ Does a Slow Burn” (Dec. 3, by Paul Lieberman and Myron Levin) had been in the crisis at “60 Minutes” in 1995, there’s little doubt which way they’d have gone. They are not Lowell Bergman.

There are so many opinions and falsehoods stated as fact in the article that it would take a treatise to set it right. Additionally, it is unbalanced. To not be so would have required lead writer Lieberman to return our calls or to perform the arduous scholarship of looking stuff up. And it would have required a little skepticism about protests from Brown & Williamson and Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt.

One part of the Wallace-Hewitt spin that goes unchallenged, though contradictory documentation was supplied to your writers, is that they pled helplessness in the face of CBS corporate’s decision not to air Wallace’s interview with former tobacco industry executive Jeffrey Wigand. Walter Cronkite differed: In 1996, he told PBS’ “Frontline”: “The management of ’60 Minutes’ has the power there, quite clearly, to say, ‘I’m sorry. We’re doing this because we must do it. This is a journalistic imperative. We have this story and we’re going with it. We’ve got to take whatever the legal chances are on it.’ Well, they didn’t. They felt it was necessary to buckle under the legal pressures. . . .”

The article also repeats the Wallace complaint that he acquiesced only for a short 24 hours. The film doesn’t clock time, but his protest evades the point: However long it was, it was long enough to condone CBS’ decision to excise an exclusive interview with a whistle-blower on what would become a $246-billion issue. In the process, Bergman’s source was abandoned.

Another example of faux protest is the cry by Wallace that he would never disparage National Public Radio! Meanwhile, the issue he’s evaded is the line of dialogue immediately prior: “What do you think? I’m going to resign in protest? To force it on the air? The answer is ‘no.’ ”

Until their actions were criticized in the media, Hewitt and Wallace accepted the corporate decision. According to a New York Times story (Nov. 9, 1995), “Both Mr. Wallace and Don Hewitt . . . said they agreed with the lawyers’ decision and supported the revised report to be broadcast.” The boosterish Hewitt even bragged that “the revised piece [without Wigand] was better, I think, than what we had before.”

About Bergman and his supposed glorification, Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and an anti-tobacco industry veteran who has had frequent dealings with Bergman and appeared on “60 Minutes,” said last month on KCRW-FM’s “Which Way L.A.?”: “Bergman . . . was absolutely obsessed with protecting Jeffrey Wigand. He felt that he had helped facilitate getting Wigand to stick his neck out and that CBS was sawing the limb off behind him. . . . People have said, ‘Is Bergman being portrayed too heroically?’. . . I think in terms of the process--and his faith in the integrity of the process, which was shattered--that’s all very real.”

Regarding the central issue of reportage versus dramatization, when real events are approached from the level of human experience, they come alive in ways that they cannot as news or factual report. That’s what drama does. To protest that “The Insider” is a dramatization, as if drama is automatically tantamount to falseness, is ridiculous. “The Insider’s” dramatization is faithful to the truth.

People are judged by their actions, not their rhetoric. Meanwhile, Hewitt and Wallace continue to address only personal issues of reputation and legacy. None of what they did then or say now addresses the motion picture’s central issues: the compromise of independence in journalism and the totalitarian crush of quite-legal corporate litigation, investigation and smear upon the heart and will of an insider who would speak out.

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Fact, Fiction and ‘The Insider’: A Key Figure Comments

Originally published: Los Angeles Times - Saturday December 11, 1999 Home Edition, Calendar, Part F, Page 4, Entertainment Desk; 26 inches; 911 words

Type of Material: Letters to the Editor

In your piece about “The Insider” (“Smoke Lingers as ‘The Insider’ Does a Slow Burn,” by Paul Lieberman and Myron Levin, Dec. 3), you report that the movie gives me credit for things I did not do. It does. I have always acknowledged that. But you also report that I should not be given credit for things I did in fact do. You do that because your reporters never asked me about these events, nor did they check their facts.

Case in point: the Unabomber story. You credit “CBS Evening News” correspondent Jim Stewart with the “scoop.” The fact is--and Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, acknowledged this in a memo to the staff at the time--I was a principal reporter on this story. Further, I did make a deal with the FBI to hold the story for three weeks to a month, and reported that to executives at CBS News. At the end of that time period, another CBS News producer was alerted to what was happening and notified Jim Stewart, and we wound up running the story as the FBI reacted and decided to make the arrest. Afterward, the FBI acknowledged that CBS News had acted responsibly and held the story until they were ready.

Further, your story implies that I did not meet alone with representatives of the Hezbollah. That too is untrue. Jim Hougan did make the initial contacts for the interview, but I had one-on-one meetings with them too, and these meetings were key to Mike Wallace appearing on location.

And while it is true that I never met with a Wall Street Journal editor, I did--as the movie shows--recruit a private investigator, Jack Palladino, who did meet with the reporters involved. Palladino could have told you about this, if you had asked him.

The filmmakers who created “The Insider” are clear. It is not a documentary. Unfortunately, your article pretends to be nonfiction but does not in my opinion live up to the standards of basic reporting.

LOWELL BERGMAN

Berkeley

*

After a year of complaints from various groups that Hollywood turns out one cheap sex, crass comedy, violence-laden film after another, where is the support for a smart, dynamic, exciting film? Director Michael Mann and co-writer Eric Roth have done an exemplary job in translating a character-driven story, full of ideas and talking, into a compelling film of dramatic images, outstanding acting and entrancing music.

Yet the audience for the film is perceived as wanting the absolute assurance they’re going to be entertained and not have to think too hard. Well, I was entertained, as was everyone I’ve talked to who has seen the film. (And if this film constitutes thinking too hard, then the next millennium will be darker than the last.) But if the film is neglected by its audience, i.e., those who want to see “better” films, then next year, instead of another film like “The Insider,” we’ll have three more versions of “Big Daddy” to whine about.

WILLIAM COLE

Venice

*

At least “The Insider’s” filmmakers didn’t publish a K-12 study guide to glorify their artistic license. Nor has anyone denied the fact that CBS withheld timely release of its story on big tobacco. The front office overruled “60 Minutes.” So long as the film is not billed as a documentary, the artistic license taken may show controversial judgment, but that’s all.

By the way, has anyone ever told us how many hours of tape CBS shoots to get its 20-minute segments? And how it is edited?

WALT MEARES

Burbank

*

The movie fails to tell the real story of what sparked the new legal revolution against the tobacco industry and caused the companies to pay billions of dollars to settle the state attorney general lawsuits.

The fire that lit the fuse of public outrage was not the revelations of Wigand with the assistance of former “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman. Instead, it was an award-winning investigative piece by another “60 Minutes” producer, Walt Bogdanich, who (then with ABC News) exposed tobacco manufacturers’ secret manipulation of nicotine to addict millions of Americans--more than a year before Wigand was interviewed.

Bogdanich’s startling report in February 1994 galvanized the Food and Drug Administration to open its historic tobacco investigation, prompted Congress to convene the hearing where seven tobacco chief executives lied under oath about nicotine addiction, and led to the filing of the first-ever class action on behalf of injured and addicted smokers.

What was Bogdanich’s reward? ABC’s brass sold him out when Philip Morris bullied them into settling a $10-billion libel suit, even though the network had reported the truth, and nothing but the truth, about the cigarette companies’ manufacturing practices. Bogdanich refused to sign ABC’s bogus apology, and his report still stands as the biggest story in the tobacco wars since the 1964 surgeon general’s report.

CLIFFORD E. DOUGLAS

President, Tobacco Control

Law & Policy Consulting

Ann Arbor, Mich.

*

If I were Don Hewitt, I’d be after Eric Roth and Michael Mann for grammar abuse. There I am, caught up in the drama and intrigue of the “to air or not to air” controversy, when the tension of the moment is shattered by the Hewitt character’s line “. . . they’re even talking to Mike and I.” I? I???

Even if Messrs. Roth and Mann didn’t know the difference, surely somewhere in the assemblage of actors, crew and the 812 people whose names appear on the movie’s credits, there had to be one lone individual who could differentiate between subject and object. This may be an insignificant quibble to the folks touting the movie, but I can assure you this glaring dissonance ruined what should have been a most climactic moment.

BERYL ARBIT

Encino

*

If there was ever a movie that was preordained not to have an audience, it is “The Insider.” It’s just a labored retelling of events that everybody already knows happened. The studio should have considered doing it as a low-budget direct-to-video release or perhaps an ultra-low-budget feature like “The Blair Witch Project.”

MATTHEW OKADA

Pasadena

*

Instead of asking top people in the industry why the film is not making much money, why don’t you take a poll from a cross-section of all the many people in L.A. who have seen the film? I saw the first 2 1/2 hours and I could not understand who all the characters were. I really stuck with it and concentrated, but I got lost so I gave up.

I knew who the Mike Wallace character was. The actor playing him was a bit stiff, which Mike Wallace is not--he comes over on TV as very relaxed and has a laid-back air about him, yet still getting his point over. But as for the other characters, God knows who they were.

SANDY ALLISON

Hollywood