Inside “The Insider”

Mark Jurkowitz

Wednesday, Nov. 3, 1999 | 9:30 a.m.

Lowell Bergman isn't exactly a movie buff. He doesn't go to many films, and he walks out on a high percentage of those he does catch. But he gives a hearty thumbs-up to "The Insider," Disney's much-hyped tale of tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and the tortuous battle to get "60 Minutes" to air the interview that cost him his family, his bank account, and nearly his sanity.

"I sat through it. I didn't get restless," Bergman says. "And it wasn't just because Al Pacino was playing me."

As the "60 Minutes" producer who fights to get a reluctant CBS to air Wigand's devastating indictment of the tobacco industry, Bergman is a major protagonist in a movie that could be named "The Insider" for another reason. It has the media elite's insular fraternity in a tizzy. The buildup to the film's Friday opening has consisted of grumbling by "60 Minutes" star Mike Wallace and executive producer Don Hewitt -- who are depicted as initially caving into corporate pressure to spike the Wigand interview -- that Disney (which owns rival network ABC) did a hatchet job on their reputations. As the movie makes clear, the Wigand interview finally ran on "60 Minutes" in early 1996.

"It may be a great story. It's not a true story," Betsy West, CBS vice president for prime-time news, says.

Wigand says: "The fidelity to actual facts is exceptional."

Amid the early buzz about possible Oscar nominations, the Washington Post declared that "The Insider" could spark a "war between giant corporate mega-powers" CBS and Disney. The New York Times' Frank Rich called it "the most high-profile screen account of big-time brand-name journalism since 'All the President's Men.' " The current Time magazine devotes an astounding five pages to the "Insider" versus "60 Minutes" controversy. And the prestigious Columbia Journalism School hosted a discussion, with Bergman as one of the panelists, on the topic "Hollywood and Journalism: Uneasy Partners?"

"The Insider" is an ambitious Hollywood effort to examine journalism. "The issue of the censorship of television news is being presented to a mass audience," says Bergman, who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's not in a journalism review or alternative publication."

Media scrutiny mixed

Therein lies the rub. When the big screen has tried to scrutinize the morals and methods of its media bretheren, the results have been decidedly mixed. Some films, such as "The Front Page" (1931) or "Network" (1976), are classics. Others, such as "The Killing Fields" (1984) and "Quiz Show" (1994), win critical acclaim but don't connect with a broad audience. And some, such as "Absence of Malice" (1981) or "The Mean Season" (1985), fade into the woodwork.

In fact, Hollywood history suggests that the intelligent and stylish "Insider" will have to overcome a daunting pattern: The more excited the journalistic community gets about a movie, the less likely the public is to flock to the theater.

"None of these things do well," says media and cultural critic Jon Katz of such films. "This movie is really about a conflict between a producer and a TV show. It's one of those classic media brawls that media critics have an orgasm over. But the public doesn't give a hoot."

"I don't think we're intrinsically fascinating in the media," West adds, speaking of journalists. "But we do get involved in some fascinating stories."

"The Insider," directed by Michael Mann ("Heat," "The Last of the Mohicans"), does have something of a traditional white hat/black hat tale to tell. Pacino's Bergman is a fiery bastion of journalistic integrity teaming up with the brave and battered Russell Crowe (as Wigand) to challenge both the tobacco industry's efforts to silence Wigand and the amorality of CBS bean-counters who don't want to risk tobacco's wrath by giving Wigand his say.

"First of all, I don't think it's just about journalism," says Wigand, who now runs the Smoke-Free Kids foundation in South Carolina and who was recovering from an auto accident this past week. "If you look at this, you walk away (thinking) here is big tobacco trying to intimidate. ... They go after individuals to keep the truth from coming out."

"I assume (moviegoers) are going to identify with Russell Crowe because I think he does such a complex job of presenting an average American," Bergman adds. "Average people are the heroes in our story."

Explaining that such popular TV shows as "Law and Order" often feature stories of courageous witnesses who are cultivated and then hung out to dry by the authorities, Slate magazine film critic David Edelstein says, "I think Americans will definitely respond to the idea of a whistleblower who's co-opted by media forces who ultimately don't stand by him."

Yet Edelstein also sees "The Insider" as "a big unwieldy piece of work," one that injects confusing issues -- including journalistic ethics -- into the melodrama. And many observers say that the movie and media cultures don't mix well.

"Journalists are from Pluto and Hollywood producers are from Jupiter," media analyst Tom Rosenstiel says, explaining that journalists are paid to haggle over details while filmmakers favor sweeping morality plays.

Often, as in the case of films such as "The Killing Fields" and 1982's "The Year of Living Dangerously," journalism is just a backdrop to a gripping adventure tale. As Edelstein notes, "it's like no one gave a damn" about New York Times correspondent "Sydney Schanberg's dark night of the soul in 'The Killing Fields.' All they cared about was (his loyal assistant) Dith Pran getting out" of the bloody nightmare that was Cambodia in the 1970s.

"The Insider" not only eschews such dramatic plotlines. It tackles the tricky task of providing a bird's-eye view of the journalistic sausage factory, with lots of attention to TV editing sessions, reportorial tricks, strategic leaks and confidentiality agreements. Although "All the President's Men" managed to make old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting watchable, Wayne State University film studies instructor Richard Ness wonders "how you get people excited about watching guys taking notes and going through library cards? (You need) a balance of commercial appeal and journalistic ethics."

Inherent risk

And at a time when the public holds a distinctly jaundiced view of media behavior, any film that examines journalistic morality as closely as "The Insider" is inherently risky.

"Like the popular legal fiction of a John Grisham, Hollywood treatments of media ethics ought, at best, be seen as a rousing impetus to go out and read the print sources that contain the broader, more nuanced story," says University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign instructor Robert Baird, an expert on the movies' treatment of the media.

It's worth noting, however, that those print sources -- such as the American Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review -- appeal to niche groups that are tiny slivers of the mass audience that most movies aim for.

When these media observers cite their own choices for the best journalism films, a common theme emerges. The "Front Page" remake "His Girl Friday" (1940), with its near-farcical depiction of cynical and clubby journalists, "had reporters' numbers way back when," Edelstein says. Ness, who has written a book cataloguing almost 2,200 films in "which journalists influence the plot," loves "Ace in the Hole." That dark 1951 drama, in which a sensation-seeking reporter delays the rescue of a man trapped in a cave in order to milk the story, foreshadowed today's tabloid culture. And Katz mentions "Network" and "Broadcast News" (1987), two films that viciously skewered television and "captured the loss of values in the media ... not the inner workings of the media."

In each case, it didn't matter so much whether the journalists were good guys or bad guys just as long as they -- and their profession -- were drawn broadly enough to connect viscerally with the audience.

Ness says movies have traditionally sent "a mixed message about the profession." He cites Kirk Douglas's role as the slimy reporter in "Ace in the Hole," alongside Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of a courageous crusading editor in 1952's "Deadline USA," as examples of how two contemporaneous films could feature such divergent takes on journalism.

Relating to the press

"Whether movies about journalism are successful or not tends to correlate with how people relate to the press," Rosenstiel says. "The height of depicting the press as heroic came in the '70s. By the '80s or '90s, the journalists don't have lines. They're not people ... they're wires and cameras."

This is not one of those times, Rosenstiel adds, when people feel good about the media. Thus it makes sense that in the '70s, "All the President's Men" cast superstars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as heroic Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- while in 1999, the surprise comedy hit "Dick" lampooned Woodward and Bernstein as bickering, egomaniacal bumblers.

The question of how the public will feel about the media after "The Insider" is as complex as the movie itself. In it, CBS corporate types give journalism a bad name, Wallace comes off as a complicated if laughably pompous character, and the self-conscious crowing at "60 Minutes" about its reputation and standards may tarnish some of the program's luster. Other characters -- such as a New York Times reporter who has a Pacino leak fall into his hands, or a Wall Street Journal editor who can't figure out whether to do a hatchet job or puff piece on Wigand -- are likely to trigger ambivalent responses.

Ultimately, the movie has to hope its fate is tied not to those players, but to the viewers' gut reaction to the Pacino and Crowe team and their faceoff with the tobacco industry. If that comes across as the defining story line, "The Insider" could catch fire. If the film plays as a journey to the netherworld of big media machinations, it could be a dim memory by Thanksgiving.

"Big-time coastal media is the most narcissistic culture on earth," Katz says. And the new movie "is essentially about the internal workings of a big TV show. In my mind, that dooms it."

"I can't say what it will do to other people," Wigand says. "For me, it is an intense emotional experience. It keeps you on the edge of your seat for two hours and 31 minutes."

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