Allie's Contribution

I really enjoyed this project and had a good time researching about this topic. For this project I was responsible for researching the dominant ideologies during the time and portrayed in the movie, the media effects that were present in the movie, the making of our own trailer, and the team meeting reports, and then presenting on the information that I found. I found it somewhat difficult to find what the dominant ideologies were and this was where I spent most of my time, but by watching and re-watching the movie I was able to pick up some of the ideologies portrayed and decided to focus on two main ideologies that I thought were most important to the movie: Capitalism and the popularity of tobacco. With the media effects   research, I focused mostly on framing and gatekeeping because I thought that those were the two effects to most adequately evaluate a film with. It was interesting with looking at framing and making my own trailer to kind of be in the directors spot and see how certain shots are used to influence the viewer. It gave me a new perspective and I learned quite a bit from it.

Project!

My major role for the blog was basically the "Actual story" page. I focused on what really happened and how it happened making sure that I checked multiple sources and that they all said the same things. I focused on Wigand, Wallace, and Bergman and basically what they had to deal with they went through this whole tobacco ordeal. Just wanted to see if it wasn't just Wigand whose life was turned upside. Even the relationship between Wallace and Bergman were severed. I also tried to find information on the CEO of Brown and Williamson at the time and came to find nothing. For some reason I could find anything other than the fact that Thomas Sandefur was the CEO. There is no real information about him and I have only seen one picture of him. So i decided to not put that up on the blog, since i didn't find anything on him. There was a lot on Wigand but the original 60 minutes interview was nowhere to be found until Travis came across it. It took forever looking for that video and I was not able to find anything at all.
Overall, I basically had to make sure that the information I found was not on the movie but on the real story and that was a challenge for me. It was hard to distinguish between those two and I found that some things were not accurate with the information I received when I fact checked. I am so very thankful for the Jeffrey Wigand website because that directed me to many different websites and enabled me to find a lot of information.

Spencer Wright's Contributions

This project was awesome, and I enjoyed learning so much about Jeffrey Wigand and the fight against big tobacco.

For this project I did all the research on the News Coverage of the events that were portrayed and not portrayed in The Insider. I used the New York Times as my main source. Unfortunately some of the articles I found I wasn't able to use because I wasn't a paid subscriber to the NYT, but I was still able to find some really good stuff. I looked at all the articles I could that had Dr. Wigand or stuff from Brown and Williamson. I also looked for newspapers from Kentucky during this time, but I wasn't able to find very much about the subject. Besides the NYT there was also an article from the Wall Street Journal that I looked at and used on the blog. I wasn't able to get it on the Wall Street Journal website because of restrictions there too, but fortunately it was posted on Dr. Wigand's own website. I also looked into the publication from Vanity about the man who knew too much, which is actually where the movie came from.

As such, I did everything on the News Coverage page and the subsequent people and specific events page. I also did everything on the intro page, besides the posting of the trailer.

I have finished writing and find information on the movie and how it is portrayed.  It was my responsibility to look at movie portrayal and how it compared to real-life.  I originally wanted to find out why the director decided to do what he did in the movie, but his comments are in short supply on the subject.

I did however, find opinions of Jeff Wigand, and the 60 minutes clips and found somethings that I found quite interesting.  The such research took me days to find.  I have worked most of last night with only couple hours of sleep trying to write and get the research to back my writing up.

There is quite a bit of information that I could not cover in time to check my writing so it is left out, but can be found by the link to the sources to my page and I would encourage everybody to read what is in those links.

I looked up how to site Chicago style in a handbook that I have from my English classes I had taken at Weber State.  I also ran my pages through WhiteSmoke, a grammar checking software program, to try and get my grammar as accurate as possible.  I am going to go over the spelling and stuff of Jeffrey on my pages and make sure that I have not missed those, after I insert pictures of the cast members, because Ami couldn't do it even though she wanted to.

Bradley Wells' Group Project Happenings!

So, for the 3rd and final project we decided to do it on the movie "The Insider" with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino. It was about a big tobacco company whistle blower named Jeffrey Wigand. It was a very well done movie and I enjoyed watching it and researching it thoroughly. I learned a lot that i never knew before. I spent a great deal of time on this, watching the movie 5 different times to get a firm understand of how the movie portrays the events. Then I spent hours upon hours going over websites looking for information that was relevant to my portion of the project, which was specific events in terms of actual history and how the movie portrayed them. In total, I easily spent over 40 hours working on this project, I lost track of the exact number. I did spend from 11:00 P.M. last night until 10:00 A.M. working on the project, with only maybe 1 hour of break time in there to be sure that I had everything finalized and in working order. This was probably the most fun I had with a project, mainly because the movie was very intriguing and intense. My pages are done, and everything is looking good.

Wigand on 60 Minutes

Hey Everybody,

I know that Brad was looking for 60 Minutes with Wigand.  I finally found it.  The link to it is here: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-20094836-10391709.html

site

Sorry this took so long to get out, I had a few things to attend to when I got home, and then I forgot about it, and just remembered :)! Here it is though:

http://www.salon.com/1999/11/04/mann_2/