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THURSDAY
Mike Wallace, the veteran newsman who still can’t kick the reporting habit at the age of 87, is now also a film critic. “For what it’s worth, I thought Russell Crowe was superb in the role of Jeffrey Wigand,” he writes in Between You and Me: A Memoir. “But even though Al Pacino played a very good Al Pacino, I didn’t recognize much of Lowell Bergman in his rendition. As for Christopher Plummer’s performance, let me just say that it’s not the worst thing in the world to see yourself portrayed on the silver screen by a handsome and urbane Canadian who has been hailed as the most gifted classical actor in North America.” Of course, there’s all kinds of beef simmering underneath that statement. The film he’s critiquing is The Insider, the Hollywood take on 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman’s run-in with CBS brass and on-camera talent over the network’s heavy involvement with a piece he and Wallace were working on that would help bust open the nasty world of Big Tobacco. The film isn’t exactly kind to Wallace. In his book, Wallace vigorously defends his conduct in relation to the story and fires away at what he considers to be a too-Bergman-slanted version of events. “Bergman was portrayed as the lone CBS knight in shining armor who was not intimidated by the fire-breathing dragons who ruled the evil corporate empire. As for the rest of us at CBS News who had been involved in the story, we were depicted, for the most part, as venal or craven wretches who had no business calling ourselves journalists,” he writes. Wallace signs copies of his book at 1 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1, at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 364-1919. (Mike Kanin)