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I called Lowell and I said, ‘Forget Sarkis, man. “Every line of description in the script was subject to the most rigorous kind of fact-checking.” It just hit me like a bolt of lightning. (If you read the Vanity Fair article on which The Insider is based, Marie Brenner’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” you might come away surprised at how much of the story made it into the finished film.) “Our writing was held to the same kind of standard that Lowell Bergman uses in journalism, which is that it wasn’t authentic unless it could be corroborated at least a couple of times,” Mann says.

#COBALT 60 PROPHECY MOVIE#

To avoid any potential lawsuits, the movie had to be rock solid when it came to accuracy. You see, The Insider was produced by Touchstone Pictures, a Disney subsidiary, and it dramatized recent events involving several other huge, rather litigious corporations, including CBS, which after all was a competitor to Disney-owned ABC. Unlike with other films ostensibly based on real events, Mann and Roth didn’t have the option of embellishing the tale with Hollywoodized fake history. What you’re going through - that’s a movie.’ Then I called my good friend Eric Roth and said, ‘Let’s write this thing.’”

“It just hit me like a bolt of lightning. “My wife and I watched it, and I remember it vividly,” Mann says. After seeing the abridged version of the 60 Minutes piece about Wigand that aired in late 1995, Mann had a revelation. I walked down the hall and passed Don Hewitt and he looked at me as if I didn’t exist,’ that sort of thing,” Mann says. “I was one of maybe 20 people Lowell would call up and say, ‘You’ll never guess what happened today. It was around the time Bergman and Mann were working on another film project together - “about a fascinatingly duplicitous, Sydney Greenstreet–esque, 350-pound Armenian arms merchant” named Sarkis Soghanalian, Mann says - that Bergman began sharing with the director his concerns about CBS management’s refusal to air a potentially incendiary 60 Minutes segment with Wigand. “‘We’re going to call this movie The Phone.’”Ĭrowe - who was only in his mid-30s at the time, and would in just a few months show up ripped and glistening in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator - plays the heavy-set, 50-something Jeffrey Wigand. “They called me once from the set and asked, ‘Do you do anything other than get on the phone?’” Bergman recalls. And yes, it does involve a lot of talking. It was a ripped-from-the-headlines story at the time - the events in question had occurred just several years earlier, and the emotions among the key figures were still so raw that they’d sometimes call the filmmakers and bitch them out - but it also captured unsettling truths about journalism that today seem chillingly prescient. The Insider starts off as a movie about the lies of Big Tobacco, but then transforms, halfway through, into a whole other movie about the corporate control of media.

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Bergman goes on the warpath, using his connections elsewhere in the media to force CBS to air the full segment. After some machination, much of it involving an anti-tobacco lawsuit being brought about by the attorney general of Mississippi, Bergman finally gets the whistle-blower to sit for a 60 Minutes interview with legendary newsman Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) - but then has to fight his CBS colleagues, including both Wallace and 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall), when the company, fearing a lawsuit that could derail their impending sale to Westinghouse Corporation, declines to air the segment and instead runs a toothless, abridged version of the story. In order to do so, Wigand must break an ironclad nondisclosure agreement he signed with the company.

Based on real events that transpired in the mid-1990s, The Insider follows 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino) as he tries to convince ex-tobacco industry scientist Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) to reveal that his former employer, Brown & Williamson, suppressed research about the addictive powers of nicotine. The story does not, at first glance, seem like the stuff of high cinema. But maybe that too, curiously, speaks to its power: It’s about drab boardrooms and mundane offices - spaces filled with corporate doublespeak and legal minutiae - where people’s lives are destroyed. Michael Mann’s The Insider, which celebrates its 20th anniversary on November 5, is one of the most absorbing films I’ve ever seen - a tale of volatile passions and real, stomach-gnawing menace - and yet, whenever I attempt to describe it, people look like they’re ready to fall asleep. It’s a movie about people sitting in rooms and talking, and its climax involves everyone calmly watching a television program.

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For all its foresight, the 1999 movie is also a time capsule, from a period when TV or newspaper reports could actually change things.

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