cover story - CROWE & WASHINGTON

Opposites Attract

One was a cop, the other a drug dealer, and yet Richie Roberts and Frank Lucas developed a grudging respect for one another on the streets of 1970s Harlem. Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington do their best to capture that complicated relationship in the true story of American Gangster

Acting teachers should pay close attention to Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe’s new crime drama American Gangster.

Based on the true story of notorious 1970s Harlem-based drug kingpin Frank Lucas (Washington) and the conflicted detective, Richie Roberts (Crowe), trying to catch him, the film stars two Oscar-winning actors whose approaches to capturing their real-life subjects could not be more different.

When director Ridley Scott hired the real Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts as consultants on the film, Washington and Crowe were afforded unlimited access to the men they were portraying.

While Washington spent a great deal of time getting to know Lucas (reportedly buying the one-time multimillionaire a Rolls-Royce as a thank you for his time), after his initial meeting with Roberts, Crowe largely avoided the former cop, simply asking for voice recordings in order to study his accent and vocal mannerisms.

“It’s not acting when all you do is mimic someone, whether real or not,” warns Crowe in an L.A. interview this past summer. “There’s a danger when you get to meet and spend a lot of time with the real person that you are going to play. In your mind, you try too hard to act like them or to move like them.”

Bringing the very real Frank Lucas to the big screen has been a dream of Washington’s for some time.

“Frank Lucas was one of the biggest drug dealers in the history of America, a black man in 1973 that was worth about half a billion dollars, and no one knew it,” says Washington. “There’s a lot of talk about there being bigger kingpins, like Nicky Barnes and other guys, but Frank was the biggest of them all. He thought he was living his own version of the American Dream.”

There was a time, however, that it appeared the movie would never be made. After wrapping the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Washington was all set to play Lucas in a movie penned by Steve Zaillian (Gangs of New York). Then titled Tru Blu, the script was based on Marc Jacobson’s 2000 New York Magazine article “The Return of Superfly.” 

Antoine Fuqua, who directed Denzel in Training Day, the film that earned the actor his second Academy Award after a Supporting Actor statuette for 1989’s Glory, was to helm the movie and Benicio Del Toro was to play Detective Roberts.

But just a month before cameras were scheduled to roll, the studio pulled the plug citing “creative differences” with Fuqua. Washington was reportedly offered the chance to direct, but passed due to his friendship with Fuqua. Still, he took home a $20-million dollar salary, as both he and Del Toro had signed “pay-or-play” deals.

In an effort to revive the project, now called American Gangster, Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) was hired to direct, rewrite Zaillian’s script and downsize the budget with Don Cheadle playing Lucas and Ray Liotta as Roberts.

When George’s script was rejected by the producers, talks began with Scott (Kingdom of Heaven) to direct Zaillian’s script with Washington back on board as Lucas (complete with another $20-million dollar payday) and Crowe as Roberts.

After Zaillian tweaked the screenplay, filming began on the streets of Harlem — Ground Zero for Lucas’ illegal activities — in July 2006, a particularly scorching summer for the Big Apple. “I’ve made films in the desert, but they seemed cool compared to working on the streets of New York that summer,” says Crowe.

Washington agrees. “All of the scenes we filmed outside, on the street, were hot. Even the garbage got pretty ripe. We were working in this really tight little area, and it was noisy and there was construction going on every day to make the streets resemble the way they looked in the ’70s. But the heat seemed to add a sense of urgency to what we were doing, and it really helped to make us feel like we were in Harlem back in the day.”

American Gangster begins in the late ’60s, when Lucas was a seemingly loyal driver for one of the most powerful black crime bosses in the inner city. When his employer dies, Lucas quickly seizes the opportunity to take over the business. Possessing an amazing business ethic, marketing ingenuity and limitless street smarts, Lucas uses the war in Vietnam to build a far-reaching drug empire.

With a staggering number of American soldiers returning from Southeast Asia with nasty heroin habits, Lucas develops a system that allows him to flood inner-city streets with virtually pure, uncut smack at lower prices than even the Mafia can offer.

“Frank was a smart, natural-born businessman, but instead of using his talents to get rich selling electronics, he supplies addicts with drugs,” explains Washington. “Right after the French Connection heroin dried up, he had the idea to go to Vietnam to hook up with the soldiers there to bring the heroin back without it being confiscated.”

Instead of importing the drugs by ship across the Pacific (those channels were risky and overused), Lucas sets up a morbid system with Vietnamese suppliers and corrupt American military officials to smuggle his heroin in the caskets of dead American soldiers being shipped back to the United States.

But Frank Lucas wasn’t all bad. He was also considered to be a modern-day Robin Hood because he used his millions in profits to help the homeless and needy, and to restore the downtrodden community of Harlem to its former glory.

In short time, Lucas transformed himself into a legit, highly respected civic leader. But his dominance of the criminal underworld attracted the attention of many in law enforcement, particularly NYC undercover cop Richie Roberts. An intensely honest police officer, but a notorious womanizer in his private life, Roberts soon discovered Lucas’ dark alter ego.

Crowe says this movie is so interesting to him because both the cop and the drug lord are such complicated characters. “It’s one of those human stories where the lines between right and wrong are blurred, and things are not always black and white, there’s a lot of gray areas — both lead characters are morally questionable,” he says.

American Gangster marks Crowe and Scott’s third collaboration after Crowe’s Oscar-winning performance in Gladiator and 2006’s A Good Year.

“We are very fluid together,” says Crowe. “We just sat down one day and we talked, and we just came to the conclusion that we liked being on the set with each other. I don’t want to disparage anybody else I’ve worked with, but I just like the way he makes a film. He has a great respect for the medium, and how much it costs.”

“About halfway through the shoot Denzel came into my trailer one night with two cigars and a bottle of cognac. He knocked on the door and suggested a drink. So we just sat there chatting. And there’s something he said that I’ll always remember… He said, ‘I’ve never said this to any other actor, but man, I wish I was playing your role.’

“When I got this script, I knew how much Denzel wanted to do it,” Crowe continues. “Also, I had been following it from a distance for a couple of years, seeing the machinations and how the production fell apart. So when they sent me the script…I read it and what was great on the page about it was the character of Frank Lucas…. That conversation with Denzel came to mind because I was reading it going, ‘Man, I wish I was playing Frank Lucas.’”