by Lawrence K. Grossman
Lawrence K. Grossman is a former president of NBC News and PBS. He is a regular columnist for CJR.

"It’s only a movie, for heaven’s sake," Don Hewitt insists. "I don’t understand what all the fuss is about since it’s an old story by now. Besides, I’m surprised that [producer-director] Michael Mann allowed such a big gap to exist between what the movie says happened and what actually happened."

The movie that 60 Minutes executive producer Hewitt is complaining about is The Insider, a two-and-a-half hour theatrical film released in November that purports to re-enact the true story of how 60 Minutes and CBS caved in to pressure from Brown & Williamson, the giant tobacco company, and caused bitter personal divisions inside the news show that rankle to this day.

In November 1995, CBS corporate executives spiked an exclusive Mike Wallace 60 Minutes interview with the highest ranking tobacco executive ever to blow the whistle on his industry. B&W’s former vice president of research, Jeffrey Wigand, had described to Wallace on tape how cigarette manufacturers manipulate nicotine levels and lied under oath to Congress about nicotine addiction. Fearing that a ten to fifteen billion dollar lawsuit by B&W could bankrupt CBS and, some suggested, derail its then pending purchase by Westinghouse, the network’s lawyers and top executives refused to allow 60 Minutes to broadcast the Wigand interview. It finally aired on the network months later, after The Wall Street Journal and others beat CBS News to its own exclusive, a great embarrassment to a once proud news organization. The 60 Minutes debacle had become a highly publicized scandal.

The Insider, which focuses on that unhappy chapter of what the movie calls "the highest rated, most respected TV news show in America," is a Walt Disney film. That itself is an oddity since Disney owns rival network ABC, which had suffered its own embarrassment over its news division’s tobacco exposé just a few months before the 60 Minutes experience. The movie stars Al Pacino as larger-than-life investigative producer Lowell Bergman who, armed only with a hyperactive cell phone, single-handedly fights the fearful corporate bureaucrats to get the controversial story on the air. Christopher Plummer plays Mike Wallace as a pampered, superstar correspondent who fails to stand up for his news producer-partner in the clutch. And Russell Crowe portrays the flawed but brave former tobacco company executive Wigand, the whistle-blower who gets hung out to dry by CBS.

The movie kicked up a big fuss well before its release largely because Wallace, who was slipped an early version of the screenplay, complained publicly that it falsely portrayed him as "selling out" the tobacco exposé; that words he never said were put into his mouth; that he, too, actually battled hard and publicly to air the interview; and that Bergman was not the Lone Ranger he claimed to be. In fact, after first being quoted along with Hewitt in The New York Times supporting "the lawyers’ decision" to kill the interview, Wallace quickly changed course and went public to protest the decision with great vehemence.

Wallace was not the only one to complain about the movie’s script. B&W asserted that it was full of lies about what the company did. Jeffrey Wigand protested that the movie distorted his personal life and exaggerated Bergman’s role. Even The Wall Street Journal threatened to bring a libel suit over the way the original script portrayed a fictional Journal editor eager to run a planted news story about Wigand without even bothering to check it out. The newspaper asked Disney either to remove all scenes involving the fake editor or use a fictitious name for the paper in the movie. The script was changed but the Journal’s name stayed. Its editors are still mad about the way the paper’s role was treated in the story. (One minor detail the movie got wrong: the Journal’s editor agrees to break away to meet Bergman in the middle of the day at "PJ’s," a restaurant on upper midtown Manhattan’s chic East Side, much too far from the newspaper’s headquarters way downtown for a busy news editor to get to with deadlines approaching.)

To avoid libel, lawyers say that reality-based movie scripts should try to stick close to the truth because truth is a defense in American courts. But, as literary lawyer and agent Mort Janklow told The Wall Street Journal, since "certain liberties are almost always required to be taken" by filmmakers, they are likely to be safe as long as they merely convey "the essential truth."

That is undoubtedly the defense The Insider will make for trashing top CBS executives. The network’s chief legal counsel, Ellen Kaden (called Helen Caperelli in the movie), is depicted as a cold, mean-spirited corporate bureaucrat who insists on getting the story killed, partly to protect the value of her CBS stock. Along with Wallace and Hewitt, former CBS News president Eric Ober (called Eric Kluster in the movie), who is also shown to have a financial stake in the coming Westinghouse merger, is depicted as a journalistic weakling who abandons Wigand after the whistle-blower loses his tobacco company job, his family, and his personal reputation, thanks to a vicious B&W national smear campaign. The movie also has the CBS News president scoring a cheap shot at the expense of Dan Rather. The news executive is shown dodging an intense discussion over what to do with the Wigand interview by explaining that he’s got to go deal with Rather, who’s "complaining about his chair again."

By contrast, Bergman and Wigand, the heroes of The Insider, are portrayed as "ordinary men caught in extraordinary circumstances." They bravely stand up to and finally defeat the bullying corporate Goliaths and their callous mercenary armies of highly paid lawyers and public relations lackeys (among them, the well-known real-life publicist John Scanlon, played by a bearded Rip Torn).

The Insider may be only a movie, but it does recall a remarkable period during which every top national television news organization was deeply embarrassed by a major newsmagazine scandal. In 1993, NBC apologized to General Motors and paid millions of dollars in legal fees over a faked investigative report on Dateline that planted an "incendiary device" in a GM truck to make sure the truck exploded in a crash. Two years later, ABC apologized to Philip Morris and paid $15 million in legal costs for a story on Day One alleging that the tobacco company "spiked" its cigarettes with nicotine, even though many thought the piece was right on target. Later that year came the 60 Minutes tobacco debacle. And in 1998, CNN joined the malfeasance parade, repudiating its own investigative report on "Operation Tailwind," narrated by Peter Arnett, alleging that the United States had used poison gas in a raid inside Laos during the Vietnam war.

It is unlikely that all these major journalistic and corporate transgressions could have happened in an earlier, more responsible era of network news. As the movie suggests, part of it has to do with the diminishing importance of news on the organizational charts and balance sheets of today’s vast media conglomerates. Part of it has to do with the lowering of TV’s journalistic standards, the tabloidization of TV news, and the blurring of the line between news and entertainment in today’s no-holds-barred race for ratings and profit.

The Insider, produced, directed, and co-written by Mann, whose previous credits include Miami Vice, Police Story, and The Last of the Mohicans, takes substantial liberties with the real-life events it portrays. A skillfully crafted, remarkably well-acted melodrama, the movie contains scenes and dialogue that the real-life principals say never took place, alters the true sequence of events to further the plot, and is clearly played as drama, not documentary. The film’s opening sequence, for example, shows a blindfolded Bergman/Pacino, sitting alone in the back seat of an army truck winding its way through the menacing streets of war-torn Beirut, surrounded by a fierce cluster of raffish armed guards. The 60 Minutes producer is on his way to a dangerous rendezvous with a Hezbollah terrorist sheik. In fact, according to Wallace and free-lance journalist and Middle East expert Jim Hougan, who had set up that rendezvous and actually accompanied Bergman, neither of them was blindfolded. It was simply the movie’s way of dramatizing a tense and dangerous situation.

To achieve the appearance of reality, The Insider is chock full of authoritative-sounding newsroom production jargon. ("Cut here and drop in that shot from the B roll.") It also employs a full arsenal of show-biz devices: a menacing, evocative film score; shadowy lighting; startling sound effects; sinister camera angles, close-ups, and quick cuts. But what gives The Insider its special frisson is the gossipy thrill of seeming to tell the true story of a recent big-time scandal, featuring real characters played by popular movie stars. The audience is promised not only to be entertained but also to get an authentic insider’s view.

Hewitt certainly should not have been surprised that Michael Mann would fudge the truth to produce a more dramatic tale. Movie-makers are not journalists; they worry far more about entertainment value than about accuracy. It’s the illusion of truth they’re after. Reporter Marie Brenner, on whose investigative article in Vanity Fair the film is based, makes the point that, "In the movie the drama builds up to an emotional truth; it’s unimportant to cross every ‘t’ and dot every ‘i.’ I’ve been impressed," she says, "with how hard they tried to be accurate – it’s emotionally and philosophically accurate."

Mike Wallace disagrees. He’s angry that The Insider portrays him as finding his "moral compass again only under producer Lowell Bergman’s tutelage" – a "mindless, insulting, and absolutely wrong-headed fiction," he says. In a barrage of phone calls, faxes, and letters, Wallace stubbornly lobbied Mann, with some success, to make the movie script more accurate and less damaging to his reputation. In the end, still upset at the way he thought the film would portray him, Wallace implored the producer to use a fictitious name for the correspondent in the script, which Mann, obviously, would not dream of agreeing to do.

In fact, the identities of the people in The Insider are a confusing mishmash of verisimilitude, make-believe, and truth. The movie uses real names for some characters (Mike Wallace, Lowell Bergman, Jeffrey Wigand, B&W president Thomas Sandefur). It uses fictional names for others (the CBS News president and CBS general counsel). It has real people playing themselves (Mississippi attorney general Michael Moore, private investigator Jack Palladino). And in two scenes, former New York Daily News columnist and editor Pete Hamill seems, to this observer at least, to be playing both himself and New York Times reporter Bill Carter, who goes unnamed in the movie, leading those who recognize Hamill to wonder what on earth he’s doing there.

Notwithstanding the artifice the movie-makers employ to tell the real story, no one will leave the theater under the illusion that Christopher Plummer is actually Mike Wallace, that Al Pacino is really Lowell Bergman, or that The Insider is an entirely faithful and factual account of what happened, although most people undoubtedly will feel, as Marie Brenner does, that the movie version is close enough to the truth.

But "close enough" is an ironic standard for a "true story" about journalists; journalists do cross every ‘t,’ dot every ‘i,’ and check every fact because when fact and fiction are blurred, the world of reality becomes the world of make-believe. Therein lies the difference between how journalists and moviemakers tell stories.

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