NEW YORK -- American Gangster dodged more than one bullet on its way to the big screen.
Despite a fact-based script rife with grit, guts, glamour and guns -- all highly commercial ingredients, you'd think -- the film received a near-fatal blow four years ago when Universal scuttled the project shortly before filming was to commence.
Back then, Denzel Washington was set to star as Frank Lucas, opposite Benicio Del Toro as straight-arrow detective Richie Roberts, with Washington's Training Day director Antoine Fuqua behind the camera.
But when studio executives balked at the ballooning budget (north of $80 million and climbing), Washington, Del Toro and Fuqua all bailed. Shortly thereafter, director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) was hired to rewrite the script -- making it leaner and cheaper -- with Don Cheadle circling to replace Washington. Eventually that incarnation fell apart as well. Finally, producer Brian Grazer lured veteran director Ridley Scott to the production, along with his Gladiator star Russell Crowe. With Scott and Crowe interested, Washington agreed to play Lucas -- while Scott returned to Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian's original, dense sprawling script (albeit with a rewrite that beefed up Roberts' characterization). "It's been a crooked road," Zaillian says of the process. "But it's been a happy ending as far as I'm concerned."
Grazer, without mentioning any other director by name, explains, "What ended up is we found the perfect director (in Scott) ... Because he has such a strong visual sense and such a strong ability to create a world, he was able to capture everything Steve wrote -- whereas other directors could not ... (Scott) was able to do the entire script, but in a more compressed fashion."
