Truth & Consequences

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It was during all this that Mann, who had met Bergman two years earlier and had been discussing story ideas with him, realized that the embattled producer was himself at the center of a terrific story. Bergman, he recalls, "would say stuff like, 'You'll never guess in a million years what Don Hewitt said to me today.'" Eventually Mann acquired the rights to a piece about Wigand by Marie Brenner that appeared in Vanity Fair in May 1996.

Screenwriter Roth (Forrest Gump) says that at first he thought it might be no more than a TV movie. "Then I found it was character driven as much as story driven, exploring the unlikely nature of two men who wouldn't normally have been friendly." He spoke frequently with Bergman, but his contacts with Wigand were limited by the same confidentiality agreement that had complicated matters for 60 Minutes.

All the same, Wigand, who now runs a one-man antismoking foundation, Smoke Free Kids, is happy with the film. He got Roth and Mann to obscure details about his children and to avoid showing any of the characters smoking cigarettes; but Roth says Wigand didn't try to intervene at all in the way he was depicted. "When Jeffrey read the portrayal, warts and all, he didn't ask us to change anything." That includes an invented scene in which Wigand appears to be on the brink of suicide. Wigand says he "never got that despondent" but is "very comfortable with the way Michael Mann and Eric Roth created the same mood, the same menace, the same atmosphere."

Bergman is pleased with the film too. "It's not a documentary," he says. "It's more of a historical novel." But he's angry with his former colleagues at CBS, who are claiming that he was negotiating with Mann to make a film about the Wigand blowup even while it was going on. "It was apparent to anybody in the editing room," says Wallace, "that he was frequently on the telephone [to Mann] with a play-by-play while he was producing the piece for us." Bergman insists he didn't start thinking about making the story into a film until after Wallace told him he was about to be fired by Hewitt for having brought Wigand--then the subject of a false smear campaign--to the show in the first place.

In the end, as audience members we're all outsiders on this story, at least about whether Wallace betrayed Bergman, to say nothing of his own ideals. Much of what we may ultimately believe could be based on what we intuit from the performances. Because Pacino plays him, Bergman is guaranteed a certain moral passion. (Think Hurricane Andrew as Carl Bernstein.) Meanwhile, Christopher Plummer plays Wallace as a man possessing not only a worldliness that might incline him to compromise with his corporate bosses but also an ample self-regard that would keep him mindful of his reputation--and one whose careful intelligence could well point him in either direction.

For now, Hewitt is professing comfort at the thought that movies don't last at the multiplex forever. 60 Minutes, he says, "has been around for, like, 30 years. A movie, if it's lucky, is around for maybe a week." Or is it? There's already talk of possible Oscar nominations for Russell Crowe, Pacino or Plummer. That would keep the film alive well into next year. And then there's the video release. All that could mean a long stretch ahead for 60 Minutes. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick...