Disney Takes a Gamble With Its Film on Tobacco Whistle-Blower

Making issue-oriented movies based on current events has always been risky business in Hollywood.

In an age dominated by media conglomerates, it would seem even more unlikely that such risks would be taken on a movie about the conflicting interests of a corporate giant and the news organization it controls.

Yet Walt Disney Co., one of world’s biggest media corporations and owner of ABC, decided to take a gamble on Michael Mann’s $68-million drama, “The Insider,” hoping its subject matter will be as compelling to mainstream audiences as Alan Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” was 23 years ago.

The film chronicles the real-life relationship between reluctant whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) and “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), who convinces the former Brown & Williamson scientist to expose Big Tobacco’s knowledge of nicotine addiction on network TV.

Just as Wigand showed the courage of his convictions by going up against a corporate giant after he was fired, so Bergman fought the corporate powers at CBS Inc. when the broadcaster refused to air Mike Wallace’s explosive interview with Wigand for fear of being sued.

Based on a script by Mann and Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”), “The Insider” opens nationwide on Nov. 5 and is already being touted in Hollywood as a likely Oscar contender.

Disney Studios chairman Joe Roth, who championed the film, said early on that he alerted Disney’s corporate executives to the project, sensitive to the fact that the movie “does throw some stones at another network.”

“I certainly wasn’t pressured to be careful in any way,” said Roth, noting Disney Chairman Michael Eisner’s only concern was “to make sure the story was accurate.”

Roth readily admits that investing a lot of money in a 2 1/2-hour, issue-packed film is risky. But he believes the film’s creative strengths--”a beautifully shot movie from a great director, a great script and a big star”--will help sell “Insider” to the over-25 crowd--the least available segment of the moviegoing public.

Disney, whose grown-up films generally tend to be less cerebral, has had mixed results with issue-oriented films, including its ill-fated 1994 release “Quiz Show” and last year’s more successful “A Civil Action.” (The John Travolta courtroom drama--a co-venture between Disney and Paramount--grossed $60 million domestically, but didn’t perform overseas and therefore still lost a little money.)

Although Hollywood has a long tradition of putting true stories on celluloid, audiences have historically favored escapist fare. Judging from the kind of youth-driven blockbusters that are topping today’s box office charts--from “Austin Powers” to “Star Wars”--not much has changed.

The most obvious comparison between “Insider” and “All the President’s Men” is that both are dramatizations of news events unearthed by investigative journalists. Warner Bros.’ 1976 release, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the Washington Post’s Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, grossed an estimated $67 million and won screenwriter William Goldman the Oscar.

“The Insider” will have to earn at least that much in the domestic market for Disney to break even. With marketing expenditures, the film will cost about $100 million, though to cover some of its risk, Disney pre-sold foreign rights in four territories for an estimated $20 million.

Mann, interviewed at his Blue Light Productions headquarters in West Los Angeles, said he was grateful that “Joe Roth, and by extension, Disney, had backed my play.”

The director said the movie was driven by “the searing human experience of these two men who couldn’t be more different from each other.”

“These dramatics are universal,” noted Mann, suggesting, “It is self-limiting for studio executives or people who write about media to assume these kind of subjects can’t be of interest to a mass audience.”

The 56-year-old director, whose feverish energy last manifested itself on the big screen with his 1995 crime drama “Heat,” said comparisons of his latest film to “All the President’s Men” are understandable, but “Insider” has a different narrative approach.

“We tried to view this very intimately and extremely subjectively,” explained Mann, who spent 18 months with screenwriter Roth researching and writing the script. “We elected to look at the events from under the skin of our characters and Bill [William] Goldman and Alan Pakula were doing more of an objectively perceived story.”

A native of Chicago, Mann first made his name writing for television and executive producing NBC’s highly influential pop cop series “Miami Vice.” He conceived of the tobacco movie in 1995 not long after meeting Bergman through a mutual friend.

“I became one of 10 or 12 people that Lowell called in the fall of 1995 when everything with Jeffrey Wigand began falling apart,” recalls Mann, referring to the period at “60 Minutes” when Bergman found himself standing alone against CBS’ decision to air a watered-down version of Wallace’s Big Tobacco story without identifying Wigand.

“He was bouncing this off of a large number of people,” he added, one of whom was his old friend Susan Lyne, an executive vice president at ABC Entertainment who is married to “60 Minutes” producer George Crile. Lyne also became interested in pursuing a film on the Wigand affair.

Mann said the idea took off between the time “60 Minutes” aired its Wigand-less interview in early November 1995 and three months later when the segment aired in its entirety only after Bergman leaked the story to New York papers.

In May 1996, Marie Brenner wrote an article about the Wigand affair in Vanity Fair titled “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” on which the movie was ultimately based.

Mann tried to convince Eric Roth--who also had an overall deal at Disney--to collaborate with him on “Insider.” Over breakfast at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica, “I said, ‘Come on, you’ve got to do this,’ ” recalls Mann.

Roth said his reluctance to write the project was twofold: He wasn’t used to collaborating and he viewed himself more as a fanciful writer, whose other credits include adaptations of “The Horse Whisperer” and “The Postman.”

Mann’s persuasive powers won out and the two spent a year and a half at the Broadway Deli bar, several mornings a week, pounding out the script.

Much has been written about the fact that Roth and Mann took some creative license with the story, mostly, they say, by collapsing time lines, compressing information, and in some cases embellishing or fictionalizing events and conversations to emphasize a character’s psychological state-of-mind.

“The big simple truths we did not want to deviate from,” Mann said.

Both he and Roth underscored the fact that their movie is a drama, not a documentary.

Roth said some scenes, including one where a man at a golf course at night appears to be tailing Wigand, were invented to “get into the psychology of terror” and paranoia the former tobacco executive was experiencing.

The scene is one of several that Brown & Williamson is objecting to on the grounds that it creates the impression that it was responsible for threats against Wigand. Disney has received several letters from Brown & Williamson’s lawyers asking that the tobacco company’s name be removed from the film as well as those scenes it finds objectionable.

A Disney official would only say, “It’s not our policy to discuss private correspondence.”

Brown & Williamson isn’t the only one up in arms over its portrayal. The most vocal has been Wallace, who’s been widely quoted as calling the film a betrayal, based on having read the script.

Roth says he’s certain that if he had written “Insider” as a spec script, “it never would have gotten made.” Both he and Mann credit Disney’s Joe Roth (no relation) for being what the writer called “the real hero in this because he backed a film that is not your most obvious vehicle.”

Bergman, who left CBS over the Wigand incident and lives in Berkeley, working for PBS’ “Frontline” series and writing for the New York Times, remarked, “It’s ironic that it took Hollywood to do the story about censorship and self-censorship in network news. And, they didn’t fold their cards.”