A Filtered Look at a Tobacco Row

When actor Russell Crowe, made into a dead ringer for tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, enters the courtroom, think of the air going out of a balloon. Paper airplanes are grounded and punch lines are left dangling as a hush falls over the crowd of make-believe tobacco lawyers. “You’ve all got to look at the door,” instructs director Michael Mann, “because bad news just walked in.”

Hollywood had come to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast to re-create Wigand’s explosive testimony in 1995 that unleashed a media tsunami and built momentum for the immense legal assault on Big Tobacco.

The film, known for now as “The Untitled Tobacco Project” for Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, recounts the exploits of Wigand and CBS News producer Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino), and the fiasco at “60 Minutes” when CBS lawyers, fearing a major lawsuit, had a Wigand interview pulled from the broadcast. Other film locations included New York; Louisville, Ky.; Berkeley; Israel; and the Bahamas.

Fittingly, the film will arrive in theaters in 1999, the end of the cigarette century--a period marked by astounding medical advances and, paradoxically, the growth of a virtually unknown disease, lung cancer, on an epidemic scale. However, America’s tobacco wars serve mainly as backdrop for a story of the volatile alliance of two men doing battle against corporate power.

Although still a work-in-progress, the script and selected scenes suggest what audiences can probably expect: a highly charged psychological drama that packs a powerful punch. At moments, the brooding atmospherics reach an almost operatic, even melodramatic, intensity.

The script seeks authenticity in many details, and in the broad strokes appears faithful to the Wigand saga. But it alters the true sequence of some events and embellishes or fictionalizes other scenes and conversations. And long before release, the old debate over dramatic license with real historical characters and events has been resurrected by “60 Minutes” star Mike Wallace (played by Christopher Plummer), who is not thrilled about the way he is portrayed.

The film picks up the story in 1993, when Wigand, a $300,000-a-year vice president for research and development at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., was fired--ostensibly for being hard for colleagues to work with. Threatened with the loss of a generous severance package--including insurance coverage for an ailing daughter--Wigand pledged in a pair of confidentiality agreements not to disclose any aspect of his work at B&W.;

About a year later, he was contacted by Bergman, the veteran “60 Minutes” producer. On and off over the next 18 months, they ruminated over how to bring Wigand’s story to “60 Minutes”--including Wigand’s claim that B&W;’s chief executive, the late Thomas Sandefur, had lied in testimony before Congress about the addictiveness of nicotine.

The secrecy agreement was not the only complication. A tangle of huge business deals also lurked in the shadows in the fall of ’95 as Bergman prepared the Wigand piece. As CBS was grimly aware, rival ABC had just eaten crow in a fight with Big Tobacco--issuing an apology and paying Philip Morris $16 million in legal fees to settle a suit over an investigative report on the manipulation of nicotine in cigarettes. Many observers thought it was a fight over semantics, and that ABC only surrendered because of its pending mega-merger with Disney.

CBS, too, was in the throes of a multibillion-dollar merger with Westinghouse, which also had no interest in buying a messy lawsuit. Moreover, Lorillard Inc.--the tobacco firm run by Lawrence Tisch and family, who also controlled CBS--at the same time was negotiating with B&W; to purchase several cigarette brands.

Against this backdrop of conflicting interests, CBS lawyers succeeded in putting the clamps on the Wigand interview, warning of a possible lawsuit for “tortious interference” with Wigand’s contractual obligations, a suit that would be tried in B&W;’s hometown of Louisville.

The highly publicized cave-in, a major embarrassment for CBS, was a personal disaster for Wigand. Basically, he had been “outed” as a foe of Big Tobacco without the protection or vindication that going public might have brought. Indeed, B&W; went after Wigand hammer and tongs, suing him for fraud and breach of contract, and hiring detectives and a public relations firm to expose his marital problems and a minor scrape with the law.

Weeks later, a transcript of Wigand’s sealed testimony in Mississippi found its way to the Wall Street Journal, which published a major story. It also ran a lengthy piece on the Wigand smear campaign, including a dossier on Wigand that it largely debunked. Once the Journal had made it safe, or safer, to run the Wigand interview, CBS finally aired it in February 1996.

Defiant Defector

Pascagoula is a gritty, blue-collar town where spindly shipyard cranes and towering thunderheads often etch the skyline. At night, the sulfurous tang from a paper mill fills the muggy air.

Legal history often has been made in such out-of-the-way places. It was here that Wigand, the highest-ranking defector in the history of the tobacco industry, defied a Kentucky court order and gave damning testimony against B&W.;

In so doing, he energized the shaky legal crusade of two prominent Pascagoulans--Mississippi Atty. Gen. Mike Moore and his old law school chum and top strategist Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, who had filed the first state lawsuit to recover smoking-related health-care costs. Dozens of other states would join in, ultimately leading to the $206-billion settlement between the industry and the states that was announced just two weeks ago.

Filming in Pascagoula took about two weeks in August, and for many people in this town of 27,000, the invasion force of actors, cameramen, caterers, electricians and sound technicians was a cure for the summer doldrums. The movie people blocked off Krebs Avenue and took over the courtroom where Wigand lobbed his grenade at Big Tobacco.

Scruggs, who will appear in the court scene as an extra, had hoped to play himself but admitted with evident good humor that he had flunked the audition. He said Mann told him, “ ‘Dick, that was a really good job, but I think we’re going to get a professional actor to play your role.’ ” Colm Feore will play Scruggs.

Moore, a trim man with an actor’s good looks, will play himself but seemed ambivalent about the hullabaloo. It was “fun to step out of reality and look at how Hollywood is portraying this, because it’s not exactly how things happened,” he said. (As Moore told a local paper: “I’m pretty busy making the story rather than worrying about starring in it.”)

Oscillating between authenticity and invention, the filmmakers ordered a make-over on the lot two doors from the courthouse where local businessman Thomas “Peck” Stout sells metal storage buildings. They paid Stout to liquidate his stock of buildings and fill his lot with leased boats instead. “Since Pascagoula is a seaport town, they felt like the nautical theme would tie in better . . . than portable buildings,” Stout explained.

Painting an awning here, renaming a business there, the movie people dropped a pile of money. Scores of locals, many of them friends of Moore and Scruggs, were cast as extras.

So Pascagoula will jam the turnstiles. But will anybody else? Despite bankable stars, a high-octane director and a script by Oscar winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”), the movie lacks the blatant commercial possibilities of most Hollywood films. Tackling serious issues without the safety net of gag lines, cleavage or things that explode is something of a gamble (a $60-million gamble, according to estimates).

It’s also a different kind of project for Mann, who directed “Last of the Mohicans” (1992) but is probably best known for macho, guns-blazing crime dramas, including “Heat” (1995) and the TV shows “Miami Vice” and “Crime Story.” Yet it’s not a 180-degree turn. The favored Mann theme of men on a mission carries over.

Mann is a graying man of about average height who looks younger than his 55 years. He is demanding and intense--”a force of nature,” as one of his colleagues put it.

The Bergman-Mann Link

Back from Mississippi, and in the Westside office of his Blue Light Productions, Mann seeks the appropriate phrase. “It is anti-corporate, in a sense,” he says of the upcoming film. “It is anti-corporate malfeasance.”

But this is not, he insists, an anti-smoking film. “It doesn’t presume to preach to you, ‘You should not smoke,’ ” Mann said. “It’s not about being cultural police.”

Mann himself smoked prodigiously during marathon sessions working with Roth on the script. At the moment, he’s doing without; in a telltale sign, his jaws work like pile drivers, taking it out on a wad of gum.

Although Disney bought the rights to “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Marie Brenner’s Wigand profile in Vanity Fair magazine, Mann said conversations with Lowell Bergman had really planted the seed.

Mann and Bergman, both University of Wisconsin grads, were introduced by a mutual friend a few years ago and began to brainstorm about making a film based on Bergman’s reporting experiences. Mann said that during these talks, Bergman described the uproar at CBS, venting his anger and frustration at the apparent demise of his journalistic coup.

“You know, Lowell,” Mann recalled saying, “what you’re living through right now--that’s the . . . motion picture.”

Not surprisingly, Bergman, of all characters in the film, comes closest to a full-dress hero. He left “60 Minutes” after the Wigand debacle but remains a senior investigative producer with CBS News. Bergman was paid an undisclosed sum for the rights to his story, and a fee to consult on the script. The total take, he said, “is much less than I make in a year at CBS.”

Wigand was not a consultant on the film and did not directly get money from Disney, reflecting his concern about appearing to profit from talking about B&W.; However, Disney has supported a foundation, Smoke Free Kids Inc., from which Wigand said he draws “a very modest amount of money” to work against youth smoking.

The 55-year-old Wigand, who now lives in South Carolina, admitted to surprise and disappointment at the script’s departure from actual events. “I don’t know how Hollywood works,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I think I’m portrayed . . . fairly.”

Naturally, people closest to a story--particularly one so transforming--are sensitive to fudging of the literal course of events. (B&W; officials declined to comment on the film.) Audiences, on the other hand, want to be entertained and might assume that even in a “true” story the filmmaker monkeyed with the plot. And certainly, a complex, factually dense story spanning three years could not be told in two hours of film without skipping and compressing events.

But there are also many additions and alterations, large and small, of which audiences will be unaware. For example:

* While Wigand did report being followed and receiving threats, he did not brandish a golf club at a man tailing him, as depicted in the script; nor was his wife driven to hysterics by the e-mail message: “We will kill all of you.”

* While actor Michael Gambon is spectacularly malicious as Thomas Sandefur in a confrontation with Crowe as Wigand, the meeting depicted in the scene never took place.

* Contrary to the script, Wigand’s testimony in Mississippi was not part of a tactical maneuver by Bergman to get his story on the air.

“How do you try to stay with the facts of what happened and dramatize” the story as well? Roth asked. “Hopefully, you’ll really get inside the heads of these people and inside their souls.”

By this measure, the “truth” of the film depends on faithfully treating the human dimension: the extreme pressures on Wigand and Bergman and the volcanic emotions they felt. Yet most of what people will know about the Wigand affair they will take from the film. The use of the protagonists’ real names--when fictional names would signal the picture was “based on” the truth--makes that especially true.

Mike Wallace’s Reaction

No one has hollered louder about perceived distortions than Mike Wallace--now 80 years old, and concerned about his legacy as the icon of broadcast investigative reporting. With the same bulldog intensity he turns on his luckless targets, Wallace last spring began peppering Mann with complaints about an early version of the script, since revised, that Wallace claimed unfairly portrayed him as absorbed with creature comforts and content to leave Bergman twisting in the wind when journalistic integrity was at stake.

Sure, it’s just a movie, Wallace recently told the Los Angeles Times, but “I’m an old man, and I have no desire to go into the sunset as a guy who lost his way in one of the most important pieces in the 30 years that he worked on ’60 Minutes.’ It’s important to me,” he said.

Wallace isn’t much happier when portrayed as an angry hard-ass--as in a scene in which he calls a CBS executive a “lackey.” Although misguided, Wallace said, the executive was a friend, and “I wouldn’t [call him a lackey] in a million years.” The scene is “lamentably inauthentic,” he says.

It could be argued that Wallace has been spoiled by always being perfect on “60 Minutes,” which is itself a brilliant example of image-building power. Whatever else takes place on the reporting trail, by the time “60 Minutes” reaches its audience of millions, Wallace’s targets are apt to appear venal or evasive, while he is heroically indignant but always in control, never stumbling on a question or mispronouncing a name.

As it happens, based on the revised script, Wallace would seem to have little to worry about, appearing in the main as a lion of journalism. A line in which he requested a hotel with a Jacuzzi in a war zone of Lebanon has been snipped away. And while shown briefly waffling on the spiking of the Wigand piece (indeed, Wallace at one point told the New York Times he was satisfied with the lawyers’ decision to pull the interview), he resumes the good fight well before the credits roll.

Journalists with no personal stake in any of this may still be troubled by the presentation of Bergman as a journalist-impresario who pulls strings and orchestrates events to salvage his expose. Journalists are often accused of being more interested in political results than in following facts and letting the chips fall. Under the extraordinary circumstances depicted in the film, Bergman’s exaggerated exploits will strike audiences as justifiable and even heroic--with the ironic effect of confirming what, in other contexts, is an unflattering view of how journalists conduct themselves.

Wigand’s War

On the other hand, the temptation to canonize Wigand, and whistle-blowers generally, as pure altruists is admirably avoided. In fact, the three-dimensional portrait of Wigand--respectful, but not sugar-coated--may prove to be one of the movie’s greatest strengths.

There are exceptions, it is true, but generally a whistle-blower must have been willing to get close to some serious mischief to have secrets worth exposing. And so it was with Wigand--a sophisticated man with a doctorate in biochemistry and extensive business experience, who could not have thought, when he joined the tobacco industry in 1989, that its products were anything but harmful.

Wigand said he was drawn by the prospect of helping to develop a safer cigarette, but by his own account all illusions about this quickly dissolved. In a handwritten diary that surfaced in B&W;’s lawsuit against him, Wigand wrote: “I have come to the feeling and knowledge that we are nothing but merchants of death and will not make the effort, while totally feasible, to reduce the risks associated with an addictive habit.”

That was 1991. He stuck around until 1993--leaving then because he was fired.

In the recent PBS “Frontline” documentary “Inside the Tobacco Deal,” Wigand hinted that if B&W; had continued its financial support (his severance pay ran out in ‘95), he might have gone quietly away. But the company didn’t, and there he was--a tough cookie, resentful of being pushed around, and eager to make something good of a situation he never should have got into.

By the time Wigand went public, B&W;’s most embarrassing secrets were already out--thanks to Merrell Williams, an obscure paralegal who had stolen and leaked thousands of pages of documents, which found their way to lawmakers, journalists and anti-tobacco lawyers. But Wigand’s defection was powerfully symbolic--a sign that a fortress industry that, through loyalty or fear, had always kept its minions in line, now was losing its grip.

Last year, when state attorneys general reached the initial $368.5-billion settlement with tobacco companies that Congress ultimately refused to ratify (setting the stage for the narrower $206-billion agreement that was just approved), the attorneys general refused to sign until B&W; agreed to abandon its suit against Wigand. As one of the attorneys general said: “We don’t leave our wounded on the field of battle”--a bit of high drama that did not make it into the script.

“Wigand is not like Jimmy Stewart in a great Capra movie,” Mann said. “He’s not this wonderful guy who comes from behind and wins.”

What makes it a fascinating story is that Wigand “is as flawed as anybody else” and yet performed “a consummate act of courage,” Mann said.

That’s also what attracted Pieter Jan Brugge, Mann’s co-producer. Brugge, who co-produced “Bulworth” and “Glory,” and is drawn to films that, as he put it, “say something relevant about contemporary issues,” said the Wigand story is all about the alarming growth of corporate power.

Wigand was “an ordinary man waging war against a very powerful representative of corporate business,” Brugge said. “And that took tremendous courage and personal sacrifice.”

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The Players: Fact and Fiction

The Whistle-Blower

Jeffrey Wigand, vice president for research and development at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. until 1993, became the highest-ranking defector in the history of the tobacco industry. Wigand, 55, now lives in Charleston, S.C., and works for a nonprofit anti-smoking foundation. . . . Actor Russell Crowe plays Wigand in the film.

The TV Producer

Lowell Bergman, veteran producer for “60 Minutes” for more than 10 years, met Wigand in 1994 and later fought to get his story on the air. Bergman left the program in the incident’s wake and now produces investigative reports for CBS News. . . . Al Pacino, who also starred in Michael Mann’s “Heat,” plays Bergman.

The Correspondent

Mike Wallace, the 80-year-old “60 Minutes” star shown as initially waffling in the battle to air the Wigand interview, peppered director Michael Mann with complaints about his portrayal, prompting some changes in the script. . . . He will be played by Christopher Plummer.

The Executive

Thomas Sandefur, Brown & Williamson’s late chief executive, clashed with Wigand and later was publicly accused by Wigand of lying to Congress about the addictiveness of nicotine. A tobacco industry veteran, Sandefur had worked for R.J. Reynolds before B&W.; Sandefur retired from the company in 1995 and died the next year. . . . Sandefur is played by British actor Michael Gambon.

The Prosecutor

Mike Moore, attorney general of Mississippi, in May 1994 filed the first lawsuit against the tobacco industry to recover billions of dollars in Medicaid funds spent treating sick smokers. His improbable lawsuit became a mass movement of more than 40 states. . . . Moore plays himself.

The Lawyer

Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, a Pascagoula, Miss., lawyer and key Moore ally, was retained by Moore and attorneys general in many other states to bring Medicaid lawsuits. He wanted to play himself, but Colm Feore got the part.