Al Pacino credited as playing...
Lowell Bergman
- Mike Wallace: Who are these people?
- Lowell Bergman: Ordinary people under extraordinary pressure, Mike. What the hell do you expect? Grace and consistency?
- Lowell Bergman: I fought for you and I still fight for you!
- Jeffrey Wigand: You fought for me? You manipulated me! Into where I am now - staring at the Brown & Williamson building, it's all dark except for the tenth floor. That's the legal department, that's where they fuck with my life!
- Lowell Bergman: Jeffrey, where are you going with this? Where are you going? (Pause) You are important to a lot of people, Jeffrey. You think about that, and you think about them. (Pause) I'm all out of heroes, man. Guys like you are in short supply.
- Jeffrey Wigand: Yeah, guys like you, too.
- Lowell Bergman: You pay me to go get guys like Wigand, to draw him out. To get him to trust us, to get him to go on television. I do. I deliver him. He sits. He talks. He violates his own fucking confidentiality agreement. And he's only the key witness in the biggest public health reform issue, maybe the biggest, most-expensive corporate-malfeasance case in U.S. history. And Jeffrey Wigand, who's out on a limb, does he go on television and tell the truth? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Yes. Are we gonna air it? Of course not. Why? Because he's not telling the truth? No. Because he is telling the truth. That's why we're not going to air it. And the more truth he tells, the worse it gets!
- [Jeffrey won't answer the phone, Lowell is on the phone to the manager of the hotel he is at]
- Lowell Bergman: I want you to tell him, in this - in these words: "Get on the fucking phone!"
- Seelbach Hotel Manager: I can't say that.
- Lowell Bergman: No, you can. Tell him to get on the fucking phone!
- Seelbach Hotel Manager: He told me to tell you to "Get on the... fucking phone!"
- Lowell Bergman: This news division has been *villified* by the New York Times! In print, on television, for *caving* to corporate interests!
- Don Hewitt: New York Times ran a blow by blow of what we talked about behind closed doors! You fucked us!
- Lowell Bergman: No, you fucked you! Don't invert stuff! Big Tobacco tried to smear Wigand, you bought it. The Wall Street Journal, here: not exactly a bastion of anti-capitalist sentiment, refutes Big Tobacco's smear campaign as the lowest form of character assassination! And now, even now, when every word of what Wigand has said on our show is printed, the entire deposition of his testimony in a court of law in the State of Mississippi, the cat *totally* out of the bag, you're still standing here debating! Don, what the hell else do you need?
- Don Hewitt: Mike, you tell him.
- Mike Wallace: You fucked up, Don.
- Lowell Bergman: You'd better take a *good* look, because I'm getting two things: pissed off and curious.
- Mike Wallace: In the real world, when you get to where I am, there are other considerations.
- Lowell Bergman: Like what? Corporate responsibility? What, are we talking celebrity here?
- Mike Wallace: I'm not talking celebrity, vanity, CBS. I'm talking about when you're nearer the end of your life than the beginning. Now, what do you think you think about then? The future? In the future I'm going to do this? Become that? What future? No. What you think is "How will I be regarded in the end?" After I'm gone. Now, along the way I suppose I made some minor impact. I did Iran-Gate and the Ayatollah, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Saddam, Sadat, etcetera, etcetera. I showed them thieves in suits. I've spent a lifetime building all that. But history only remembers most what you did last. And should that be fronting a segment that allowed a tobacco giant to crash this network? Does it give someone at my time of life pause? Yeah.
- Jeffrey Wigand: I can't seem to find the criteria to decide. It's too big a decision to make without being resolved in my own mind.
- Lowell Bergman: Maybe things have changed.
- Jeffrey Wigand: What's changed?
- Lowell Bergman: You mean since this morning?
- Jeffrey Wigand: No, I mean since whenever.
- Don Hewitt: Are you suggesting that she and Eric are influenced by money?
- Lowell Bergman: No, no, of course they're not influenced by money. They work for free. And you are a volunteer executive producer.
- Lowell Bergman: In all that time, Mike, did you ever get out a plane, walk into a room and find that a source for a story changed his mind? Lost his heart? Walked out on us? Not one fucking time. You want to know why?
- Mike Wallace: I see a rhetorical question on the horizon.
- Lowell Bergman: I'm gonna tell you why: because when I tell someone I'm gonna do something, I deliver.
- [last lines]
- Lowell Bergman: What do I tell the my source for the next tough story, huh? 'Hang in with us, you'll be ok maybe'? No. What got broken here doesn't go back together.
- Lowell Bergman: I never left a source hang out to dry, ever! Abandoned! Not 'til right fucking now. When I came on this job, I came with my word intact. I'm gonna leave with my word intact. Fuck the rules of the game!
- Lowell Bergman: I did not burn you. I did not give you up to anyone!
- Jeffrey Wigand: This is my house... In front of my wife, my kids? What business do we have?
- Lowell Bergman: To straighten something out with you. Right here. Right now.
- Jeffrey Wigand: So, you didn't mention my name? You haven't talked to anybody about me?
- Lowell Bergman: Why am I gonna mention your name?
- Jeffrey Wigand: How did Brown & Williamson know I spoke to you...?
- Lowell Bergman: How the hell do I know about Brown & Williamson?
- Jeffrey Wigand: It happened after I talked to you. I do not like coincidences!
- Lowell Bergman: And I don't like paranoid accusations! I'm a journalist. Think. Use your head. How do I operate as a journalist by screwing the people who could provide me with information before they provided me with it?
- Jeffrey Wigand: [pauses] ... You came all the way down here to tell me that?
- Lowell Bergman: [Kluster demands that Wigand's interview be censored into an alternate version] I'm not touching my film.
- Eric Kluster: I'm afraid you are.
- Lowell Bergman: No, I'm not.
- Eric Kluster: We're doing this with or without you, Lowell. If you like, I can sign another producer to edit your show.
- Lowell Bergman: Uh, since when has the paragon of investigative journalism allowed LAWYERS to determine the news content on 60 Minutes?
- Lowell Bergman: Alright... ABC Telemarketing Company?
- Jeffrey Wigand: ABC...?
- Lowell Bergman: ABC Telemarketing Company.
- Jeffrey Wigand: A can opener! A $39.95 can opener. I cancelled payment... it was junk. You ever bounce a check, Lowell? You ever look at another woman's tits? You ever cheat a little on your taxes? Whose life, if you look at it under a microscope, doesn't have any flaws...?
- Lowell Bergman: Well that's the whole point, Jeffrey. That's the whole point. Anyone's. Everyone's. They are gonna look under every rock, dig up every flaw, every mistake you've ever made. They are going to distort and exaggerate everything you've ever done, man. Don't you understand?
- Jeffrey Wigand: What does this have to do with my testimony?
- Lowell Bergman: That's not the point.
- Jeffrey Wigand: What does this have to do with my testimony? I told the truth! It's valid and true and provable...!
- Lowell Bergman: That's not the fucking point, whether you told the truth or not!... Hello?
- Jeffrey Wigand: I told the truth... I told the truth... I've got to teach class. I've got to go. I've got to teach class.
- Lowell Bergman: And I've got to refute every fucking accusation made in this report before The Wall Street Journal runs... I am trying to protect you, man.
- Jeffrey Wigand: Well, I hope you improve your batting average.
- Jeffrey Wigand: I'm just a commodity to you, aren't I? I could be anything. Right? Anything worth putting on between commercials.
- Lowell Bergman: To a network, probably, we're all commodities. To me? You are not a commodity. What you are is important.
- Lowell Bergman: I'm Lowell Bergman, I'm from 60 Minutes. You know, you take the 60 Minutes out of that sentence, nobody returns your phone call.