American Gangster

Ridley Scott’s 2007 film came out of Mark Jacobson’s New York magazine profile of Frank Lucas. For most of its 157 minutes Lucas and Richie Roberts, the detective chasing him, never share a scene: one grows a distribution business, the other a case file, and the film treats both as the same work. Its relationship to fact ended up in court. A closing title card said Lucas’s cooperation led to the conviction of three quarters of New York’s drug agents. In a suit for roughly 400 retired federal agents, Judge Colleen McMahon called that statement wholly inaccurate, yet dismissed the case in February 2008 because the film identifies no individual agent. Lucas’s own account is shakier. The story that heroin came home from Vietnam in dead servicemen’s coffins was denied to the end of his life by Ike Atkinson, who ran the actual pipeline: he said the drugs travelled inside hollowed teak furniture, and that he invented the word coffin to keep Lucas from the real method. Both Academy Award nominations lost: Ruby Dee for Actress in a Supporting Role, and Art Direction. A good fit if you want the two strands held apart for hours on purpose. Not for you if you read a closing title card as a guarantee of fact; a court found this one untrue.