This week on MovieJawn, we are celebrating our favorite movies that turned 25 this year. All week long we are going to Party Like It’s 1999!

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Anyone born in the last 30 years may find it impossible to wrap their heads around how visible cigarettes (and tobacco at large) were in American culture before 2010. Cigarette advertising was banned on television and radio in 1971, surgeon general’s warnings were added to packs of cigarettes and advertisements in 1984, company mascots–like the once ubiquitous Marlboro Man and Joe Camel–and outdoor advertisements were banned in 46 states in 1997, and more restrictions have been put in place since then. All of this has not stopped the industry from spending over $8 billion annually on advertising. This can make recommending stories about the legal challenges to the tobacco industry a bit hard to access for younger audiences, but The Insider uses the tobacco industry as a hook, while the film’s actual focus is on the way large corporations lie to the public and manipulate the legal system and the media to be complicit in their obfuscation of the facts. 

Michael Mann’s 1999 film tells the story of 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) as he fights to air an interview with tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe). Formerly a scientist at Brown & Williamson (the company behind the brands Lucky Strike and Pall Mall, among others), Wigand has knowledge and evidence that the tobacco companies purposely added chemicals to cigarettes to make them more addicting and colluded to hide the information from the public. Wigand is barred from sharing this publicly due to his confidentiality agreements and violating them will cost him his severance, including medical coverage for himself and his children. While Bergman and others try to find workarounds, pressure begins to mount against Wigand and the 60 Minutes team as Brown & Williamson use their vast resources to pressure everyone into killing the story.

Mann–who co-wrote the script with Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich, Dune, Killers of the Flower Moon)–slyly opens this story depicting Bergman organizing an interview with the founder of Hezbollah, Sheikh Fadlallah (Cliff Curtis), which signals two things to the audience: this is a story about journalism, not tobacco, and Bergman and Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) are seemingly fearless. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that a militant religious group–Fadlallah’s handlers are all brandishing automatic rifles while the interview is being set up and conducted–are less intimidating than the American tobacco industry. 

Watching the film reveals that it might be Mann’s best–I go back and forth between it and Collateral (2004)–perfectly balanced between the director’s preoccupations about men and the home lives they will give up or ruin in order to pursue their obsession and a procedural like All the President’s Men (1976). Both Pacino and Crowe give performances that are among their career bests, and the rest of the cast is stacked full of character actors like Christopher Plummer, Philip Baker Hall, Stephen Tobolowski, Bruce McGill, and Rip Torn. Using the cast as anchor points allows Mann to bounce around between locations and different parts of the story at will, building thematic resonance like a bravura courtroom presentation. 

A lot of fuss was made over the film’s accuracy at the time of release. For example, Roger Ebert dedicated about half of his review to discussing the ways that the film may have embellished some of the details around Bergman’s actions and Brown & Williamson’s intimidation tactics, like the bullet in the mailbox. By the end of his review, Ebert comes down on the film’s side:

There is, I admit, a contradiction in a film about journalism that itself manipulates the facts. My notion has always been that movies are not the first place you look for facts, anyway. You attend a movie for psychological truth, for emotion, for the heart of a story and not its footnotes. In its broad strokes, The Insider is perfectly accurate: Big tobacco lied, one man had damning information, skilled journalism developed the story, intrigue helped blast it free. The Insider had a greater impact on me than All the President's Men, because you know what? Watergate didn't kill my parents. Cigarettes did. 

Other critics were not so perceptive. Owen Gleiberman, in Entertainment Weekly, summarized his review by writing, “The Insider is a good but far from great movie because it portrays truth telling in America as far more imperiled than it is.”  The success of The Insider gave us a wave of corporate whistleblower movies, like Erin Brokovich (2000), The Constant Gardener (2005), Michael Clayton (2007), and The Informant! (2009), while the late teens gave us government-centric versions focused on how the War on Terror had been conducted in the decade prior, like Snowden (2016), Official Secrets (2016) and The Report (2019). 

While, officially, whistleblowers have a protected status, The Insider shows how this is undermined by confidentiality agreements, lawsuits, and corporate misdeeds. As 60 Minutes prepares to air Mike Wallace’s interview with Wigand, they face pressure from CBS corporate to kill the story. Their motivation? In part, a pending sale of CBS to Westinghouse, the profitability of which could be jeopardized by a legal action by the tobacco industry. Tellingly, both the president of CBS News and their chief legal counsel stand to become wealthy from the sale and are motivated not to put it at risk. 

Nor is The Insider a movie where the good guys win. While Wigard’s actions–and additional reporting by The Wall Street Journal and litigation by many states Attorneys General–did result in a massive settlement against the tobacco industry, CBS lost. Bergman felt that 60 Minutes had been forever tarnished by the experience (he would go on to create an alliance between  The New York Times and PBS’ Frontline), and 25 years later the reputation and impact of network news has declined sharply. Network television isn’t the megaphone it used to be. Investigative journalism is in peril due to media consolidation under large corporations and that audiences are more fractured than ever before. And that is before factoring in the way social media algorithms and 24 hour news channels choose what stories to surface. 

In 1996, when The Insider takes place, corporations and other political actors had less levers to pull for controlling information, often using physical and legal intimidation. Brown & Williamson also fed a 500 page take down dossier on Wigard to The Wall Street Journal in order to attempt to discredit him. While the newspaper recognized the dossier as a smear campaign, disinformation campaigns are cheaper and more effective thanks to the Internet. In 2022, Eileen Donahoe, executive director of Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council said in an online commentary published by the Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, “Democratic governments are now seized with the fact that digital information platforms have been exploited by malign actors to spread propaganda and disinformation, wreaking havoc on democratic elections and eroding trust in the digital information realm.” It extends beyond QAnon and Pizzagate and into things like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. The truth has never been more valuable, and in a time where two Boeing whistleblowers have died in close proximity to them speaking out about the neglect by the corporation and Jeff Bezos interfering in the day-to-day operations of The Washington Post, it makes me angry that The Insider remains as relevant as ever.