Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant | Trailer
Posted by Greg Weinstein | Filed under Uncategorized
Warner Brothers just showcased the first trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant starring Matt Damon as FBI informant Mark Whitacre. The movie will hit theaters on October 9th this fall.
Check out the Plot Summary on the flip.
The Informant is about Ivy League Ph.D. Mark Whitacre (Damon), a rising star at Decatur, Illinois based Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the early 1990s who wound up blowing the whistle on the company’s price-fixing tactics.
One night in early November 1992, the high-ranking ADM executive confessed to FBI agent Brian Shepard (Bakula) that ADM executives — including Whitacre himself — had routinely met with competitors to fix the price of lysine, a food additive. As the highest-ranked executive to ever turn whistleblower in US history, Whitacre secretly gathered hundreds of hours of video and audio over several years to present to the FBI. He assisted in gathering evidence by clandestinely taping the cartel’s activity in business meetings at various locations around the globe such as Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, and Hong Kong. During Whitacre’s undercover work that spanned almost three years, the FBI collected hundreds of hours of video and audio tapes that documented crimes committed by high-level executives from around the world fixing the prices of food additives in the largest price-fixing case in history at the time.
In the upcoming film — a dark comedy/thriller in director Steven Soderbergh’s hands — Whitacre’s good deed dovetails with his own major infractions and struggle with bipolar disorder. The film focuses on Whitacre’s meltdown and bizarre behavior resulting from the pressures of wearing a wire for three years. In a stunning turn of events immediately following the covert portion of the case, headlines around the world reported that the whistleblower defrauded $9 million from his own company at the same period of time he was secretly working for the FBI and taping his co-workers. Because of this major infraction and Whitacre’s bizarre behavior that was laced with bipolar disorder, he was sentenced to prison three times longer than the white-collar criminals he helped to nab. However, ten years later (2008), the former FBI supervisor of the price fixing case, Dean Paisley (played by Allan Havey), with backing from the two other FBI agents and a former prosecutor, went public with praise about Whitacre. “Had it not been for the fraud conviction, he would be a national hero”, Paisley stated. “Well, he is a national hero”, he further stated.
