The Informant! is a 2009 political dark comedy film directed by Steven Soderbergh.[2] It depicts Mark Whitacre's involvement as a whistle blower in the lysine price-fixing conspiracy of the mid-1990s, as described in the 2000 nonfiction book, The Informant, by journalist Kurt Eichenwald.[3] The script was written by Scott Z. Burns and the film stars Matt Damon, Richard Steven Horvitz, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale andMelanie Lynskey.
Plot:
The Informant! is about 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, only after his wife forced him to.[4][5] Matt Damon portrays the bipolarwhistleblower dubbed "The wacky little brother of Erin Brockovich".[6] In the film, Whitacre displays bizarre behavior including recklessness and grandiosity.
One night in early November 1992, the high-ranking ADM executive confessed to FBI agent Brian Shepard (Bakula), present only to install a wire tap on Whitacre's phone, that ADM executives—including Whitacre himself—had routinely met with competitors to fix the price of lysine, an additive used in the commercial livestock industry. As the highest-ranked executive to ever turn whistleblower in US history, ...
