Russell Crowe as Richie Roberts in American Gangster David Lee/Courtesy of Universal Studios

"I don't think anybody wants zealotry in their police force," says Russell Crowe referring to his character's stoic belief in his duty as a police officer. "There's always got to be room for what you might call 'benign corruption.' Nobody blames a man who steals food to feed his starving children, but on the other hand somebody who picks up a badge and takes an oath to serve and protect, we do expect a certain level of essential honesty [from … But during] the particular time we're talking about [in] most western countries, drugs just suddenly became a gigantic thing: You went from talking in terms of tens of thousands to hundreds of millions. That temptation hit the police force at the same time as the temptation to take those drugs that were readily available hit the people on the streets."

When Roberts stumbles across a million dollars in cash in the trunk of a dealer's car, he becomes the precinct pariah for turning in the cash instead of splitting it with his partner. He is later hand-picked to head up a federal narcotics squad, and before long he posts Frank Lucas's headshot at the top of his bulletin board of most-wanted dope kingpins.

When principal photography on American Gangster began in late 2004, it was to have been a very different film. Benicio Del Toro was attached as Roberts and Training Day's Antoine Fuqua was directing. But Universal pulled the plug on the escalating costs associated with the project, and Denzel Washington cashed in on $20 million for his pay-or-play deal with little faith that the project would ever be resuscitated. But super-producer Brian Grazer never gave up on the Zaillian script and continued to pursue his dream director for the film, Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, Black Hawk Down).

"I get a lot of scripts sent, but for the most part, 97 percent are not that good," Scott says. "But this one was from a friend of mine, Steve Zaillian, who [sent] this script [to] me, I think, four and a half years ago saying: 'What do you think of this?' I was off doing something else, but his material is always quite special, and it's really been distilled very well onto paper where he's thought about it. He's a very thoughtful, very sensitive writer. So, honestly, once I got it and came on board with Brian [Grazer], I said: 'At 165 pages, I'll sit with you and maybe it would be better for me to do my homework.'"

Scott worked with Zaillian to develop the sub-plot of Richie Roberts's storyline into a full-fledged parallel thread equal to Lucas's rags-to-riches tale. The most attractive aspect of the final script, Scott says, is its double-helix dynamic. The two leads "never meet each other until about 15 minutes from the end," he says. "That's really a big challenge and very unusual. Unusual is good."

Scott posits that it was essential for certain questions to be asked of the characters in order to have two equally balanced, fleshed-out stories: "Do we really need Richie's wife? Do we really need the fact that he's getting divorced? Do we really need the fact that he's got a dysfunctional private life? Do we really need the fact that Frank Lucas family comes [from North Carolina to help him]?