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"The Bachelor"
Chris O'Donnell and Renée Zellweger face off in a tale that sets love against lucre.
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[11/05/99]

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Helena Bonham Carter dazzles in a lilting French relationship comedy.
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[11/05/99]

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"The Bone Collector"
With a knick-knack, paddy-wack, Phillip Noyce makes this "Bone" a dog.
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[11/05/99]

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Sharps & Flats
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By Mac Montandon
[11/05/99]

Stayin' alive -- barely
Broadway reduces the complex, ambivalent "Saturday Night Fever" movie to campy clothes and blockbuster dance numbers.
By Gavin McNett
[11/04/99]

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Invested? I was in a situation where -- if I had, for instance, gone public and denounced what was going on, I endangered revealing my source. So I was caught in a situation where even if I did go public, I realized -- being, as Morley Safer liked to point out to me, "just a producer" -- I could easily be damaged from behind by my colleagues saying, "Well, he's off the reservation, and there are all kinds of other factors here that he doesn't even know about."

And what would that have done? It wouldn't have helped Wigand's credibility. That's for sure. So, it was a difficult balancing act at that point. But there's no question that Mike and Don, from the period of these first meetings until the middle of October, which would be two weeks after quote "the final decision," had no intention of ever making any of this public, had no intention of lifting a finger to help Wigand. Just the opposite. The company had said, "Don't go near him, don't help him."

It's only when they realized that if they cut Wigand loose -- which is what they had done -- that the story itself, that is, the substance of what he had to say about Brown & Williamson, was going to come out anyway.

So they were going to lose the story -- part of which appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal -- and eventually the story would come out that they killed the story. So that's when they began maneuvering. Don began maneuvering to figure out a way to do "a censored version." Which is not accurately portrayed in the movie. But it's a complication that's very difficult to explicate.

It sounds like when it became clear that others were going to get the story and he was going to lose the story, Don's journalistic chops kicked in.

To a certain extent. But there was the problem of how to spin it. At that point, assuming that more of the story came out, and my reporting back to them that Wigand was now talking to the Wall Street Journal, it would come out eventually that they had killed the story.

And why did Wigand start talking to the Wall Street Journal?

Well, because he was no longer obligated just to talk to us. And because, in the middle of August, he had put his name on the witness list for ABC and their libel suit. And then ABC folded. So he was hanging out there to dry anyway by ABC already, and their lawyers. And so reporters were calling him. Byron Levin of the L.A. Times was calling him, Alex Friedman was calling him. And he would say to me, "Should I talk to these people?" And I said, "No, no. We're going to do the story. Don't talk to them." And then when we're not doing the story, he calls me and says, "Should I talk to this woman?" And I said, "I guess you should, because we're not doing the story."

It seems you had to go through this difficult personal transformation from the journalist who has managed whistle-blowers all your career to being one yourself.

In a manner of speaking, my final act as a whistle-blower in this is the movie. Because, in the movie, it's clear I leaked the story to the New York Times that made it all public. You know, so that is true. The other thing that's happened is that -- and this is a matter of luck and the fact that a lot of people stood up and did the right thing -- is that the movie undermines any attempt to simply spin this as an anomaly.

The reality is, inside the business -- especially the network television news business -- it's self-censored, mostly. And when push comes to shove, it's censored. And that's when it has to deal particularly with stories that involved institutions that are the same size or larger -- private institutions, public institutions, governments, spy agencies -- they're all fair game. But in the world where multinational megacorporations are the new and growing power center, don't expect to see much critical coverage on network television.

The fictional treatment reveals that structural reality. Is that really what you're proudest of in this film?

I'm proudest for Michael Mann and Eric Roth, and the people involved in making the film, that they were actually able to get this film not only made, but distributed.

In Hollywood film history, it's hard to think of another political-economic critique of a major industry like the media.

Yeah. I don't think that this is what I would call an in-depth political critique. It's not a documentary or a polemic. But through the structure that Michael Mann has chosen to tell the story -- which is really about two people -- those concepts are the overarching theme.

Michael wasn't trying to make a pseudo-documentary. So he's not looking for complex pieces of information that he's going to throw into one fact. There was some criticism in the New Yorker, for instance, and arguments that I had with him, you know -- "What about the criminal investigation? What about the Tisch family? That's not explained in the movie."

But it's a story, it's a movie. I think everyone will agree who sees it, no matter whether you like the movie or not, the movie makes you uncomfortable. It makes you psychologically, emotionally uncomfortable because of the level of tension that's maintained for so long.

More like a play.

And the acting of Russell Crowe is just phenomenal. You get the sense of Wigand, of an average American with various neuroses, trying to make it and being confronted with these objective realities.

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