A drug-delivering business acting like a Mafia
Today, in other industries, the financial stakes might not be as great, but the challenge to conscience for “insiders” could be the same
[Slight edits done 10/3/12.]
This is not to say I have anything as important to reveal, or with as much financial consequence, as did Jeffrey Wigand, but bear with me on a look at a very good portrait of a professional man and his tortured conscience. (Also, this Part 1 looks at general issues, while Part 2 will look more at details.)
The Insider is, roughly speaking, a button-down version of the kind of drug-related-conspiracy story to which adhering to the facts is so crucial. The real-life stakes of what the source story is about show why The Insider could only have benefited from being true to life, while it’s a little unfortunate that the more recent American Gangster (2007; see my August 28 review) could have adhered more closely to the truth (though perhaps its not doing so was not entirely the fault of its producers). Another reason that American Gangster’s makers may have felt less compunction about inserting (rather large) fictional elements and an overall dose of alluring style is that the real-life relevance of the story lay in the heroin-using population within reach of distributors in the New York metropolitan area—a large number of souls, true, but not as large, or accounting for as much of the economy, as the American cigarette-smoking public in about 1995. Since the 2007 film’s story was about an old time and a limited place, a little jazzing up may have been seen as excusable. Also, blame for its fictional side, possibly, lies in difficulties that were unwittingly encountered in pinning down the full, true story on the parts of those producing the initial New York
The Insider isn’t totally exempt from the Hollywood treatment. A few story details (minor, apparently) were fictionalized for the sake of confidentiality or the like, and apparently Wigand did not participate closely in the writing of the story (see the film page of his Web site). The 1999 film has its own way of being slick, while it provides more “grit” in its star Russell Crowe, who portrays a mercurial, “uptight” biochemist, while in the 2007 film, Crowe plays a cop who is professionally disciplined but is personally carefree and slobbish—and both types of roles inadvertently reflect the styles of both movies.
But the story portrayed by The Insider has every responsibility to be correct in its main features. It involves, in the 1990s, biochemist Jeffrey Wigand’s whistleblowing on Big Tobacco’s way of producing cigarettes so they were a more effectively addictive product (from the perspective of his work at Brown & Williamson, or B&W), while tobacco CEOs (including that of B&W) had lied about this fact to Congress.
Wigand’s exposé played a role in lawsuits shepherded by state attorneys general against the tobacco companies (the movie focuses on a suit by the Mississippi A.G.), to recover damages in relation to smoking-related illnesses that caused a drain on federal/state health-insurance funds (as in Medicaid, in which states ordinarily play a key role). Because (if I’m reading this particular matter right) Big Tobacco’s lying to a federal-government body became a component of their being held to defraud health-insurance programs that are government funded and administered, Wigand’s participation in the public holding of these firms to account was a very crucial component indeed.
This story first appeared in Vanity Fair magazine as “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” by Marie Brenner, in 1996. And part of its interest is in the novel way the exposé unfolded—with Wigand first linking up with a TV news organization, then being led to testify in a deposition for the Mississippi suit (partly to justify the TV news broadcast), and this leading to the larger multi-state set of lawsuits that ended in a massive judgment against the tobacco companies.
Numerous factors would comprise a story of corporate malfeasance with tremendous financial, legal, and even social implications: these factors include Wigand’s story of being fired (prior to his even considering exposing B&W’s perfidy); his being pressed to adhere to a corporate confidentiality agreement with B&W—the company seeking to make this requirement even tighter, apparently in light of certain developments; the Mafia-like threats the company appears to have subjected him to; and his torturous, conscience-searching process of deciding to be interviewed by the TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes.
Ironically, Wigand’s ad hoc connection with 60 Minutes—after dogged, circumspect, and conscientious work by the producer behind the story, Lowell Bergman—led at first to 60 Minutes giving the story an editorial butchering at the behest of corporate interests, because one CEO of a fellow Big Tobacco company was the son of none other than Laurence Tisch, the chairman and a controlling shareholder (?) of corporate CBS, who, as it happened, wanted to sell CBS; Tisch didn’t want its value hurt by repercussions from Big Tobacco’s reactions to the story. This situation, centered on compromising the original Wigand story, itself became a nationally distributed news story (at the hands of The New York Times); this print coverage was facilitated (in surreptitious phone calls and the like) by Mr. Bergman, who wanted to break the logjam-of-sorts that held up the full story. (The censored 60 Minutes story ran in November 1995, and the full story eventually ran in February 1996. I remember having paid attention to something about this at the time, but given my very busy personal life at the time, I didn’t follow it nearly as closely or with as much fascination as the movie The Insider justifiably attracts.)
Not only was this a remarkable story of super-heavy-duty “office politics” (about as bad as corporate manipulations might go in the U.S.
The story seems—both in terms of plot description and in how it appears on screen—like almost a spy story that involves high-tension-inducing issues of national security. And yet this story still has relevance, because today, it is amazing how the entity of Big Pharma can be substituted for Big Tobacco in this scenario, and you would have a corporate-arrogance story that would be amazingly the same—in the case of Big Pharma, involving such things as improperly marketing drugs to the wrong patients, with implications for billions of dollars in sales and roughly equivalent billings to the Medicare program. See, for example, this story (beware of a pop-up).
A corporate-intrigue story gets the thriller touch, despite what may seem dry premises
Michael Mann directed this film, which was produced by Spyglass Entertainment and distributed by Touchstone Pictures. Mann was a creative force (director, writer, producer) behind TV’s Miami Vice in the 1980s, and he has directed such sleek thrillers as Collateral (2003?), starring Tom Cruise playing against type and Jamie Foxx. Mann’s “smooth” style seems to give The Insider a trademark “surface-style” quality—in keeping with its mildly noir/intrigue flavor, it includes a lot of dim lighting that suits privacy-providing interiors, nighttime scenes, and occasional circumstances of mystery—but this suggestively atmospheric side seems both to make this film “go down” more easily, and to be excusable (for its shallowness) in this case.
As may amuse you, I was given an extra hurdle in viewing this film (though many of my reviews on this blog devolve out of tricky viewing experiences, which usually help me concentrate on the films): a problem with a library’s film-viewing capacity on a computer led me to watch the visuals (of the first hour and a half of this long movie, two times, on different days!) with hearing-impaired subtitles because there was no sound, and this affirmed an interesting thing: this is very much a verbal picture, one whose main meaning comes across in all the dialogue as you might seen written, with only occasional need for help in seeing how faces are helping convey the story (while I would usually assert that movies importantly represent an alchemy that gets a story across by combining, as if each were key, all the media of words, visuals, and often music).
In this film, the words are such as you might see in court transcripts—and in a sense the whole story is this sort of thing. What it has to convey could almost entirely be a bunch of “bloodless” accounts of conversation as you might see in court discovery documents, with little quirky-behavior touches added for realism. And when I first watched the last hour or so of the film with sound (thanks to a resourceful library worker) and with the film’s music, I was surprised at how “slick” and overly sugaring the music was—approximately on a par with, I don’t know, Duran Duran’s “Come Undone,” fairly inconsequential “cream” for the roughage. (The second time I watched the last hour, it was again with subtitles, and this seemed helpful for cutting out the extraneous.)
The Insider gets described as an “adult” film (as in Leonard Maltin’s compendium), and with its usually deliberate pace, and its spelling out of adult-like interpersonal processes (discussions about a confidentiality agreement, anxiety-tinged family discussions about the implications of loss of health-care benefits, a court deposition), today it seems to be overly obvious about what have become, to some of us, fairly familiar lonely “footprints” to walk in, given all the corporate messes and loss of jobs that have spilled across out lives in recent years. (Better than a “perp walk,” but not much.) For those who are too young, or lucky, to have experienced this yet, the film may serve as a sort of public-education “video,” or an equivalent to the type of videos an H.R. department might have you sit through when newly hired, so you understand what to do when someone engages in sexual harassment, or stealing from the office, or such. But in the case of The Insider, it teaches lessons that I think a lot of companies would just as soon have you miss: how to be a whistleblower (and that this is by no means easy). To my mind, in this day and age, this isn’t a bad lesson to have.
The film stars Russell Crowe, relatively early in the successful part of his career, as Jeffrey Wigand, a technician conscientious enough in his work, with a few shadowy things in his past, and his family very much to heart; Al Pacino as Bergman, a sort of gravel-voiced, earthy-and-edgy mensch who loves nothing more than a big story that brings to account some high-power malefactor; and British actor Christopher Plummer in an amusingly imitative portrayal of 60 Minutes senior correspondent Mike Wallace.
The story flows on with craft typical of late-’90s films, with no one of the film’s technicians trying to be especially clever in terms of story clarity (or, on the other hand, obscurantism) and careful editing. And though it may not catch the fancy of many young viewers today, I think it is accessible enough on a passing-technical-matter level, in how it both unfolds the abstract issues (medical and legal) and lays out the ways encounters and decisions unfolded, over what seems in real life to have been an laboriously long (or anguished) process.
A basically sympathetic aside about Wallace: Plummer’s portrayal comes complete with slightly simpering/mincing smile in off-moments; mannered wrinkled forehead when more serious; a pompously direct way of broaching ordinarily-rude questions in interviews; and occasional back-office grand pronouncements, such as citing with embarrassment The New York Times’ invoking Edward R. Murrow’s golden standards of the old CBS, or avuncularly delivering more personally-interested asides such as what he should get mixed up in in the late afternoon of his career. The real-life Wallace complained about how he was portrayed in this film, according to its Wikipedia article; indeed, the film makes him out to be a shallow, self-absorbed type, even adaptable to the rather broad comedy of being hypocritical in remarking to Don Hewitt, the storied producer of 60 Minutes, that he “f**ked up” in editing the first broadcast version (in November 1995) of the Wigand report, after the Times’ coverage of the mess led to 60 Minutes’ being obliged to run the full report (in February 1996). Wallace’s character in the movie has most of the melodramatic lines, memorable enough to be easy to transcribe.
In real life, Wallace was indeed, as fellow 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer remarked when Wallace died this year, as the single correspondent most responsible for the success of the program. Wallace had started working on the show when he was all of 50, an age at which many people today would start to think of retirement (50 is old enough to allow the AARP to try getting you to subscribe to its magazine), and in 1968 indeed old for starting a career. Even those who didn’t like Wallace’s brute way of handling some interviewees, i.e., those critics who thought he was arrogant and a grandstander, should still admit that Wallace gave the most pointed “spin”—the bluntest quintessence—of what could be done with a 60 Minutes interview, the prime-time, in-depth, different-sides-acknowledging news profile (when it was at its best) that the program generally made into a trademarked product; such a profile was capable of being “hard” in terms of bringing people to account or of being “nice” for facilitating simple candid revelations by the famous. And of course, in this form of journalism, Wallace did at least as much as the other correspondents on the show to keep its ratings so high for many years, to the point that now, even as a reduced form of what it was, it is starting a 45th season, unheard-of for a prime-time, non–soap opera program. However, if the Wallace of The Insider seemed awfully concerned about his memory after he was gone, the real-life Wallace could have done so too, with a point; his obituaries (see this one) duly mentioned the Wigand story as an unfortunate episode in his long, remarkable career when he, as the press likes to say, stumbled.
I would also like to say it’s regrettable the film makes producer Don Hewitt look like something of a mere suit (with old-man face) who falls stooge-like under the sway of the corporate heads who want to evade the highest news standards. Rather like George Martin, the producer of The Beatles, whose large contribution to the band’s work only became more obvious late in his life, Hewitt was the one other single person who was an important force behind 60 Minutes, equal to if not surpassing Wallace in influence, though this seemed only to be recognized late in his life and in the show’s history.
Wigand starts as a potential hero circumstance-wise, but a rather unlikely hero in personality
Not hearing sound for the first 60 percent of the film, I wasn’t sure if Crowe was a little awkward in handling the role, or if Wigand really was as much of a defensive noodge as Crowe makes him seem. But Wigand, with a Ph.D. in biochemistry (his bachelor’s and master’s were in the same field), worked for several large companies, Union Carbide, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer among them, in health-related capacities. Then he ended up at B&W, where on a health-related level he seems to have been faced with an unavoidable requirement to prostitute himself (“Tobacco is a sales culture,” he points out to Bergman at one point; yes, those sales types will kill the scientific/idealistic man every time). (In Part 2 I will try to comment more on my understanding, speculative of course, on Wigand’s personality as conditioning his difficult role in the overall story.)
Wigand (according to the film) was fired in light of, as is explained well into the film’s story, his discovering that bosses were considering replacing coumarin, an additive to cigarettes meant to make nicotine better absorbed by the body and hence more addictive, with another, chemically similar substance that happened to be carcinogenic. He was required to sign a confidentiality agreement—there’s nothing so strange about this in general—as he received a severance package that included medical benefits that were essential at least to the extent that one of his two daughters needed regular treatment for severe asthma (the film page of Wigand’s Web site notes that the real-life daughter’s health issue is disguised in the film). He was now in a bit of a pickle: having left B&W under something of a cloud, he seemingly could no longer work for big corporations as a sort of biochemical engineer; he would seek work as a teacher in public schools. As long as his family was provided for, he seemed relatively satisfied. But of course his conscience, one would surmise, was bothered by what his confidentiality agreement helped keep under wraps: B&W’s being willing to add a carcinogenic chemical to cigarettes to assure their sales (via addictive properties).
A news-story producer becomes a key catalyst
Enter Bergman and his employer 60 Minutes (and we go to the present tense and dramatic vitality). In a detail I had to work to get surer about, given my no-sound viewing, Bergman is put in touch with Wigand (by a third party) in order to have interpretive help with some anonymously dropped-off sheaf of papers relevant to a story on another issue, fire-safety liability in relation to products of another Big Tobacco player, Phillip Morris. When Bergman meets Wigand, Wigand lets drop that he can say only so much, due to his confidentiality agreement, though he gives a portentous hint in remarking that fire safety is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cigarette liability. He seems, to judge from Crowe’s performance and/or as implied by the way the larger story is unfolded, to be a compelling mix (maybe unsurprising in the circumstances) of two interesting traits: a conformist noodge who never really wanted to do anything but be a good professional in his technical field, while supporting a loving family; and someone whose sense of professional pride and conscience makes him a borderline beans-spiller who is on the cusp of saying “f**k the confidentiality agreement,” but would take some hugely uneasy work to really get there. (As I said, I’ll say more in Part 2.)
(In a later scene, when Wigand is finally talking quite forthcomingly to Bergman for the first time, Bergman in one casual moment, and showing his more general down-to-earth personality, gives Wigand the typical “litmus test to an apparently uninviting nerd”—which I’ve been subjected to in some form also—of being asked a sports-related question, as if to see if Wigand follows this sort of thing like a good American. [This is a sort of folk-cultural test to see, roughly speaking, if someone is “oriented X 3”—to person, place, and time.] Wigand—no pun intended—drops the ball in a way. This is generally as I myself would, though I have a little “competence” in sports trivia because picking this up from ambient noise from the radio and other media—like being an information “grease trap”—is like knowing even what Lady Gaga is up to even if you’re by no means a fan.)
Bergman and his at-first rather-chance exchanges are interesting in showing how such a story can have very “random,” almost unpromising beginnings, not least due to the characters involved (Bergman has his own pride that seems apt at one point to threaten the apple cart of what he’s trying to set up with Wigand). While Bergman tries to encourage, with a fair amount of patience, Wigand to reveal what he knows, spelling out the public interest in such a story without being downright prostitute-ish in his entreaties, Wigand shows it is not easy to break his agreement, especially with his family’s well-being at stake.
But a few things tip the balance in favor of his spilling the beans: first B&W, especially in the form of CEO Thomas Sandefur, a smarmy sort, tries to beef up Wigand’s confidentiality agreement, with none-too-subtle hints of the consequences of Wigand’s doing otherwise that, in a shadowy office, seem in the league of Mafia machinations. As sometimes happens with employers trying to strong-arm a former associate, this backfires on them, when Wigand shows that even a conformist like himself reaches a point where his sense of pride, not least tied to his protectiveness for his family, has an absolute limit for being offended. (As I needed help from the Wikipedia article on the film to understand, Wigand at first hypothesizes that Bergman, with some sort of tipoff to B&W, has triggered B&W into threatening him, and thus he confronts Bergman harshly on the phone on the assumption this hypothesis is correct.)
Later as the story unwinds, Wigand is at first shocked, then emboldened, by such truly crude moves as a grossly threatening e-mail being sent (which his wife sees) and a bullet being left in his mailbox. Still later, at night, footprints in Wigand’s garden—after one of his daughters has alerted him to a man lurking outdoors—with Wigand finding that his newly planted tomato plants (symbols of hopes for the future) are damaged, further galvanize him to turn on his former employer.
In stages, Wigand gets to a point where he is ready for his interview with Mike Wallace, he of the face as pretty as a rusty ship hull. People today, given more egregious corporate situations, would have probably reached that point sooner, and with less moral torture. But this whole process is fascinatingly depicted in the movie, maybe even a little too deliberately so.
The film’s value as something to “empathize with,” or “have catharsis with”
And on first viewing it, I was creeped out enough (and on the other hand touched) by the film in this way: I could understand so much of Wigand’s crisis of conscience and trouble in deciding to publicize his story, and the related creative, painstaking strategizing by Bergman on how to create a legal foundation for justifying Wigand’s breaching his former employer’s confidentiality agreement by testifying in a state lawsuit, where a court could be said to have compelled his revealing a company secret. I am different from the Wigand of the film, but I understand him to a large degree and salute him; and in some ways I suppose he’s bigger than I am, not simply because of the many billions of dollars in liabilities the total tobacco industry would eventually face, in good part based on his testimony, which dwarfs by a lot the liability faced by any other large industry in product-harm lawsuits or criminal investigations in recent times.
This is a story that couldn’t be more relevant now, as we hear news of white-collar breakdown all the time: giant banks failing (in 2008), mortgage-based security mishaps (with consequences insidiously spread over years and across millions of U.S. citizens), Ponzi schemes (big and small) uncovered left and right, and Big Pharma fined and penalized to the tune of, sometimes, billions for defrauding federal and state (Medicaid-related) government health-care programs.
