Some Canadian guy I met in the elevator the other day sends this scan of a page from the original screenplay for Syriana, and says:
The line, as people have seen in the trailer and the movie, is "Corruption is why we win." This is a monologue about the virtues of corruption delivered by the actor Tim Blake Nelson, who plays an Oil industry lobbyist from the south named Danny Dalton, to Jeffrey Wright, an African-American corporate lawyer named Bennett Holiday.
One wonders why the writer/director Stephen Gaghan dropped the racist slur. Probably because it would further demonize a character who is already portrayed as amoral.
Link to full-size image of scanned page.
And if you haven't seen the film yet, you must. Link.
See also the related participate.net "Oil Change" website: Link, and this MP3 of a roundtable discussion with George Clooney, Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Siddig, See No Evil author Robert Baer, and writer/director Stephen Gaghan, interviewed by John Gallagher for the National Board of Review: Link.
Update: Warner Brothers has released the entire text of the Syriana screenplay online: Link.
