Goofs

When Bergman talks to Wigand on the phone outside his beach house, he goes into the sea far enough for water to touch his shorts, but they are dry when he comes back into the house.

The driver's window changes from open to closed to open again when Wigand tells his wife he's been fired and then drives off.

When Bergman and Wigand first meet in the hotel, Bergman places two documents on the table for him to read, the thinner document on top of the thicker one. When Wigand picks them up, the thicker document is on top.

When Lowell Bergman has an argument with Jeffrey Wigand outside his house in the rain, the amount of wetness on the back of Wigand's suit jacket varies from soaked to almost completely dry.

When Lowell Bergman, Mike Wallace, Dr. Wigand, and his wife are at dinner just before the interview, Dr. Wigand's wife holds a menu upright close to her body. The position of her hands on the top of the menu changes directions between the long shots and the close-ups.

In the beginning of the film when Mike Wallace refuses to move his chair away from the Sheik, the translator translates Mike's English into Farsi to the Arabic-speaking Hezbollah. Farsi and Arabic are not the same language and usually Persians and Arabs do not understand each other's languages, unless they studied them.

Wigand mentions that Bergman went to UC La Jolla, when he should have said UC San Diego. While the regents for the University of California originally planned to name the school UC La Jolla, the name was changed early on to UC San Diego, before the campus was even built.

When editing the Wigand interview, Bergman's instructions to the video editor are incomplete and at times nonsensical.

The Wigand interview would been taped using 2 or 3 portable cameras, not studio cameras. Using separate portable cameras provides more flexibility when editing the interview later.

There would not be several people standing around in the control room watching the show. They would simply watch it on a TV set somewhere else.

In the deposition, the attorney for the tobacco companies instructs Wigand not to testify because it would violate the non-disclosure clause of his contract. Testifying in a court proceeding, however, whether criminal or civil, would not violate a non-disclosure agreement.

This fact is already made evident in the film itself; the lawyer for the tobacco company is making this assertion in an attempt to intimidate Wigand, who is not legally trained, into not testifying.

When Dr. Wigand comes home, a van is parked in the driveway. The phone number on the van is 1-800-CLOCK, which doesn't have enough digits to be a real phone number. However, as with Bergman's number (212) 555-0199, this is a deliberately fictitious telephone number.

When Lowell asks his assistant to get Dr. Wigand on the phone, the next cut shows Dr. Wigand on a pay phone in a public area. He could have been paged.

Bergman finds Wigand's residential fax number after leafing through the yellow pages, which lists only business numbers.

Bergman doesn't look for Wigan's fax number in the Yellow Pages, he is looking for the number of a local hotel in Louisville in which to set up a meeting with Wigand; he does this after he has already been corresponding via fax with Wigand.

On three separate occasions, the same Yellow Taxi is occupied by Bergman or greeted by Bergman when he met Charlie from the Wall Street Journal, the numbers on the roof and door are the "1T80". The odds of this happening are slight, since there are over 12,000 Yellow cabs in New York City.

When the car enters the driveway during the opening-credit sequence, the blindfolded man is shown to have a bald spot as he exits the car. It then cuts to a blindfolded Al Pacino, who has a full head of hair, being walked in.

After the alleged intruder incident, when Wigand is questioned about possessing firearms, he mentions a .38 revolver, a .22 target pistol, but not the .357 magnum revolver he is shown removing from his gun safe and taking into his garden to investigate.

When he first calls Jeffrey Wigand, Lowell Bergman leaves a message asking Wigand to call him at (510) 555-0199, a California area code, despite being in New York City. Later, he leaves a similar message, saying (212) 555-0199, this time using the correct area code for New York City. Although he appears to be working from home and could therefore have the same number wired into his home and office, he would still need to live in the same area code's catchment area.

On one occasion when Bergman receives a phone call from Jeffrey Wigand, a crew member's face is reflected in the window behind him.

A microphone can briefly be seen on Al Pacino's neck.

The CBS building in New York is at 51 West 52nd Street (corner of 6th Avenue), When Bergman looks out of the window, Central Park is to the side of the office, making the building on Madison Avenue or even east of that. If he was on 6th Avenue, Central Park would be straight ahead.

Wigand stands in the hallway at his school in Kentucky as he talks on a pay phone to Scruggs, who is in his office in Louisiana. Although Louisiana is west of Kentucky, via the window at Scruggs's office, we see the sun has set, yet the hallway at the school is filled with light, indicating the sun is still shining.

In the scene when Wigand is leaving Louisville to testify in Mississippi, the airport shown is not Louisville International Airport but John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California.

When Wigand is in the Seelbach Hotel on the phone with Bergman, Wigand says that he "can see them (Brown and Williamson) across the street." This would have been impossible since the (now former) B&W Tower is located one block north of the hotel (the building across the street from the Seelbach is the National City building).

When Wigand is returning from Mississippi, his car is shown passing a highway sign saying "Louisville" via Indiana state highway 31, which runs through southern Indiana. Since Louisville's airport is not in Indiana, there would be no reason for Wigand to be southbound in Indiana heading for Kentucky, unless he had flown into Indianapolis.