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By: April Meneghetti We would not have suspected that someone would come up with an idea that is – however tangentially – connected to Ridley Scott's 2007 film American Gangster . But a TV series is in the works that would cover the years before Denzel Washington 's Frank Lucas burst on to the New York crime scene. Forest Whitaker is attached to star in The Godfather Of Harlem . Narcos co-creator Chris Brancato has told Screen International that he's working on the new show, with Whitaker on board as mob boss Bumpy Johnson. "It’s Harlem, the 1960s, a gangster named Bumpy Johnson was very close friends with Malcom X, so the show is about the collision of the criminal underworld and the civil rights movement," says Brancato. "It’s an opportunity to examine some of the things that are going on racially right now, but through the prism of the past." The show will be set around five years before Gangster. It's early days for the new series, and i

Russell Crowe Knows Kung Fu? Hip-hop artist and actor RZA tells me that Crowe has signed on to costar with him in The Man With the Iron Fist , a kung fu flick the Wu-Tang Clan founder is also directing. RZA will play a weapons-making village blacksmith in feudal China—and as for Crowe, RZA doesn't want to say too much. "I won't spoil it for you, but Russell's gonna be the baddest man alive," he told me yesterday at the VMAs. "That man is in fighting shape. That man will knock you out." The Man With the Iron Fist (no relation to the Marvel Comic superhero Iron Fist) starts shooting in Shanghai in December. "It's nerve-wracking," RZA said of directing Crowe. "He's a master of the craft. I'm quite sure that I may learn something from him." Crowe and RZA worked together three years ago in Ridley Scott's American Gangster . They even recorded a song together, but Gangster producers decided not to include it on t