Most people would probably look at the story of Mark Whitacre, the Archer Daniels Midland executive who donned a wire for the FBI in the early '90s and became the most famous (and highest ranking) corporate whistleblower in history, and see it as a tragedy. Between what it has to say about willful corporate corruption as well as about the ravages of mental illness, a film treatment of Whitacre's story could have easily been a dark and sobering look into international conspiracy and one man's precipitous downfall. But Director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns looked at the story, as told in Kurt Eichenwald's bestselling book, and decided it was a laugh-out-loud comedy. Though they did keep the "dark" intact.
