Word: bergman
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...