Word: wigand
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...