Word: manne
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...Michael Mann says he wanted Crowe to play the pudgy 53-year-old biochemist at the heart of The Insider--age didn't matter. At the time, Crowe was 34 and in fighting trim from playing ice hockey for the film Mystery, Alaska. But Mann had an inkling that Crowe could connect with the whistle blower Wigand at his most depressed and paranoid, when the tobacco industry was trying to smear him, when his marriage was failing, when he was drinking and eating too much. Crowe, without even meeting Wigand, nailed the part in a single reading, says Mann...