ADM's price fixing movie opens in firm's hometown

[September 21, 2009]  DECATUR (AP) -- In Decatur, soybeans and corn are big business, and nobody is bigger than Archer Daniels Midland Company.

People in the central Illinois city listen to the radio station WSOY, borrow money from Soy Capital Bank and Trust and stay at the Soy City Motel -- all a testament to just how much ADM means to Decatur.

When the movie "The Informant!" starring Matt Damon debuted at local theaters Friday, Decatur got the chance to see itself and one of ADM's worst hours played out on film -- and as dark comedy, at that.

Almost 15 years after the price-fixing scandal at the heart of the film, some residents don't appear eager to relive it on the silver screen. But others can't wait to see their city of 76,000 on film -- especially after Damon and the rest of the crew spent several weeks filming here.

"It's done, it's over with," said pool store manager Don Stolz, 52. "I think the excitement of the movie being done in Decatur overrides all of that."

When the scandal broke in 1995, there was fear in Decatur over what it all might eventually mean to ADM and the several thousand jobs it provides.

The company was fined $100 million for working with competitors to fix the prices of food additives lysine and citric acid. Three of its executives -- among them Mark Whitacre, the man played in the movie by a mustachioed, pear-shaped Damon -- went to prison. Kurt Eichenwald wrote a best-seller about the scheme that led to the movie.

For some here, the scandal was the moment they really got to know what their most prominent neighbor did with the countless bushels of corn and soybeans it buys.

"This thing made me understand lysine and glutamate," said Skip Huston, who owns the downtown Avon Theater, the site of the movie's Decatur debut. His 700-seat theater sold about 250 tickets for the 12:01 a.m. Friday premiere and was sold out for Friday night's show.

ADM employees are not hard to spot in Decatur. Walk through the park at the center of downtown at lunchtime and it's easy to find them -- identifiable by their security badges -- among those eating, talking and reading. At least one said he'll see the movie, but none would talk further to a reporter.

Other residents at the park appeared protective of the company, brusquely turning away questions. One said talking about the movie means having to take sides between Whitacre and the Andreas family, which long ran the company.

ADM spokeswoman Victoria Podesta said when the movie production was in Decatur some people who don't work for the company checked with ADM to see if the company minded before renting property to the film crew or working as extras.

But there are plenty of people here, like Stolz, who don't mind having Decatur and ADM back in the spotlight.

Sitting in the park, Macon County Clerks' Office employee Jacalyn Robinson points out nearby spots where the movie was shot last year.

"You could kind of stand around on your lunch hour and watch," said Robinson, 59.

During his time in Decatur, Damon spent hours by many accounts signing autographs. The local paper posted reader-submitted photos to its Web site of a mostly smiling Damon with residents.

"How often do you see a guy whose last film made a quarter of a billion dollars walking around downtown Decatur, even if he did have a toupee and a bad mustache?" asked Tim Cain, entertainment editor at the Decatur Herald & Review. He plays a reporter at a news conference in the film.

The time Damon, director Steven Soderbergh and others spent here, and the assurances they made that ADM and Decatur wouldn't become caricatures, softened up some folks to the idea of a movie about one of the darker hours in local history.

"I think they did a good job of kind of assuring people that they had no animus against the town and had no desire to paint any kind of negative picture of the town; that's' what they also told us about the company," said ADM's Podesta, who saw the script early on and the movie before it's release, though she says the company didn't have a say in the content of either.

So if the promised laughs of the dark comedy don't come at the expense of Decatur or ADM, that mostly leaves Whitacre, the man at the heart of the film who -- in real life but not the movie -- found himself blowing leaves off his driveway at 3 o'clock on a November morning as his life melted down.

The movie, Whitacre said, isn't entirely a comedy, certainly not for him. It deals head on, he said, with the bipolar disorder he now blames for much of what he did.

It also makes clear that he and the other ADM executives, and the company, paid a steep price, he said.

"I don't think we could have, 10 years ago, lived through this whole story again," said Whitacre, 52, who now lives in Florida and heads a California biotech company. "Time heals, and it's a lot easier to sit back and even laugh at parts of it that I couldn't have a long time ago.

[Associated Press; By DAVID MERCER]

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