JEFFREY WIGAND
Jeffrey Wigand was born in New York and raised by parents who showed little outward affection that led Wigand to believe that children were to be tolerated, not loved. He completed his first year of college then joined the Air Force as a sign of rebellion. After running an operating room in Japan and learning Japanese, he returned to the states where he got a Ph.D. in biochemistry and then spent the next 17 years of his life working in the healthcare industry, and ended up as research chief at Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp.
A man like him had never gone public before.
Wigand knew that he had to make the decision to speak against the tobacco company and inform all the world with truth, or stay silent. It was understood in both the film and in reality that exposing the company could threaten his image, safety, and family. Yet, not speaking up on the matter would put millions of people in the way of harm.
Throughout the movie we see his battle and conflict with this decesion, but in the end he goes forward in blowing the whistle.
As the key witness in a legal attempt to seek reimbursement for medical benefits from the tobacco companies to compensate for illnesses caused by the effects of tobacco, he received many death threats. Disney, who produced the movie said that "the film never suggested who was behind the threats." Other sources would say that they never occurred and were framed by Wigand himself. Even the FBI believed Wigand placed some of those threats. Nonetheless, it is hard at this point to distinguish what was truth and what wasn't due to the effectiveness of the smear campaign.
For the most part, the portrayal of Jeffrey Wigand in the movie is mostly accurate. There is no doubt that the film captured the tension and pressure that was placed on him while the events occurred. However, parts of his personality were not present in Crowe's role as Wigand. Though the movie touched on his relationship and abuse with his wife, it was a bigger problem then the movie indicated. Outbursts of anger were also frequent. In the Vanity Fair article we get a good idea of how Wigand truly was.
These differences might be explained because Michael Mann may have wanted to frame Wigand as the "good guy."
For the most part, the portrayal of Jeffrey Wigand in the movie is mostly accurate. There is no doubt that the film captured the tension and pressure that was placed on him while the events occurred. However, parts of his personality were not present in Crowe's role as Wigand. Though the movie touched on his relationship and abuse with his wife, it was a bigger problem then the movie indicated. Outbursts of anger were also frequent. In the Vanity Fair article we get a good idea of how Wigand truly was.
“It has become a dramatic convention to project onto whistle-blowers our need for heroism, when revenge and anger are often what drive them. There is a powerful temptation to see Jeffrey Wigand as a symbol: the little guy against the cartel, a good man caught in a vise. However, Wigand defies easy categorization. As a personality, he is prickly, isolated, and fragile—‘peculiar as hell’ in Mike Wallace’s phrase—but there seems to be little doubt about the quality of his scientific information."
-excerpt from "The Man Who Knew Too Much"
-excerpt from "The Man Who Knew Too Much"
These differences might be explained because Michael Mann may have wanted to frame Wigand as the "good guy."
LOWELL BERGMAN
Lowell Bergman started working in the news industry in the 1960's but later moved into reporting, supervising and producing news. After Bergman left CBS, he spent several years working for The New York Times. In 2008 he started working as a professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in California where he currently remains.
From the start, Bergman knew Wigand had a confidentiality agreement, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try and get him to talk. In an interview with PBS he said that even though there are guidelines in journalism about who you can question and who you can’t, he didn’t really abide by that.
“There was no rule that said that if someone had a confidentiality agreement you shouldn’t try to get them to talk. The rule was that, if what they have to say is newsworthy, then it’s fine. I wrote a memo about a week after the final decision came down to kill the story. The memo said: 'So is this the new rule? That no one in the newsroom is supposed to gather information when somebody has a confidentiality agreement, particularly with a large corporation?' And I never really got a formal answer. They just kept saying it was a 'special case'. How do you know if it’s a special case or not? The reality is that, with the exception of an article in the Wall Street Journal , no publication, either legal journal or anything else I've seen has ever taken the notion seriously. In fact, there have been a series of law journal articles that said this was ridiculous…It was explained at one point that, in fact if Wigand had told us information that was untrue—let’s say he fabricated everything he said on camera—there would have been no tortuous interference. So the truer the story the greater the damages. This was a psychedelic experience, you know?”
-Lowell Bergman
One of the most important things to remember about Bergman is that he chose to leave CBS because of the story. But he made it very clear that before departing, he wanted Jeffrey Wigand's story told. He told Frontline his reasons for not resigning and fighting CBS when they refused to air the story.
"I contemplated resigning...but the problem was that Wigand was still my confidential source. So I could not reveal his name and by doing that, I would probably just get him in more trouble, and not be able to help him. So my compromise position was that I'm going to stick around here as long as I can and use their system to get this story out one way or another. In the back of my mind, in terms of my self-interest, you have to understand that, having been in the business for twenty years, that I know that the producer is expendable, that, if they're going to blame anything on anybody, it's going to be the producer. The correspondent is never wrong."
We felt that the movie accurately portrayed Bergman. In reality, many have described Bergman as a stubborn person with a strong personality. His determination to publish the story as well as the trustworthy friendship with Wigand was something Mann wanted to make sure were portrayed in the film. Al Pacino delievered and offered electric scenes of tension while also appealing to a greater audience range due to the stature of his celebrity status.
No comments:
Post a Comment