Saddam Hussein wakes at about 3am and takes a swim. His back hurts and the swimming helps. You’d never know he has a slipped disc because he never shows his limp. You’d never know he has grey hair because he dyes it black. You’d never know he needs reading glasses because his aides print his speeches in huge letters, just a few lines on each page.

Saddam sleeps for only four or five hours. Because when he sleeps, he shuts his eyes. And when he shuts his eyes, he has to trust those around him. And that is the one thing the Great Uncle cannot do.

“I think that was the most single most fascinating, destructive thing about him,” says Alex Holmes, director of four-part HBO/BBC Two drama House Of Saddam. “Saddam had a complete incapacity to trust anyone. And the closer somebody was to him, the more fearful he was of them.” Built on two years of research and interviews, Holmes’ uniquely intimate portrait of Saddam’s inner circle of family and confidantes paints an operatic true-life drama. “We spoke to people who’d been in government with him, right through to members of his staff, cooks, a cleaner, members of his security details,” says Holmes. “And Saddam emerged as a far more complex, more shocking individual. Born into incredible poverty, he overcame his sense of his own inadequacy by determining never to be in a weak position. This is what motivated so much of his brutality.”

Unlocking the doors to Saddam’s inner circle to find a violent family drama of power, ambition, betrayal and fear, House Of Saddam was been dubbed ‘The Sopranos in Iraq’. It’s a sweet sell, but a cleaner fit is The Godfather. Saddam loved the saga. Easy to see why: Don Vito Corleone is a patriarch who builds a mighty family empire from nothing, driven on by ruthlessness and fate. “With the importance of family alongside power and politics, there’s a direct parallel between Saddam’s regime and a Mafia organisation,” explains Holmes. “His brothers, his uncles and his cousins were really the core of his regime because he thought these were the people he could trust.”

Men like Saddam’s youngest half-brother (La Haine’s Said Taghmaoui), head of the notorious state-security system, feared for its use of torture and assassination. ‘Chemical Ali’ (The Kingdom’s Uri Gavriel) was Saddam’s other half-brother, who slaughtered up to 200,000 Kurds using poisonous gas. Saddam’s nephew Hussein Kamel (Syriana’s Amr Waked) married his favourite daughter and created the Great Uncle’s personal guard.

But if those walking the corridors of the House Of Saddam thought they were safer than the thousands of Iraqis being murdered in the streets, they were wrong.  “The trouble with Saddam was, by definition, the people he thought were most dangerous to him were those closest to him,” says Holmes. “They knew where his weaknesses were, so they became the greatest threat. Often, the most horrific things were what Saddam could do to inner circle. This was a man who had the power of life and death over those around him as well as the Iraqi population.”

And so it went for Hussain Kamel, killed after defecting then returning to Saddam’s family. “The murder of his brother-in-law was shocking – this was a man who he had actually grown up with. They’d shared the same household, they’d spent their entire childhood together. And yet, for political reasons, he was prepared to have him killed. That was scary, this ruthless commitment that nothing should be allowed to threaten his dream of greatness.”

For Saddam, weakness was something to be abhorred and violently amputated. Saddam’s palaces – and there were more than 20 of them – flowed with fountains, pools and in-door streams. In the desert country of Iraq, water is a symbol of power. As Saddam’s daily paranoia grew, blood flowed just as freely.

After suffering early losses in the war with Iran, Saddam asked his ministers for advice. Health Minister Riyadh Ibrahim suggested Saddam temporarily step down to encourage peace negotiations. Bits of Ibrahim’s dismembered body were delivered to his wife the next day. When one of his generals was overhead bad-mouthing the dictator, a simple execution was deemed too lenient. Before killing him, Saddam had his tongue be cut out, his son executed, his home bulldozed and his wife and other children left on the street.

“Not only this, but Saddam prided himself on his ability to carry out the violence himself,” explains Holmes. “In some ways, this was the core of his success. He was a man willing to do what others flinched from.” When he seized power in 1979, Saddam forced top party members to help execute more than 20 of their ‘traitor’ colleagues. When it came to Adnan Hamdani, the official who had been his close friend for the last decade, Saddam pulled the trigger himself. Having done so, he then visited Hamdani’s family and paid his sincere condolences. Condolences, not apologies. The distinction was clear.

His son Uday once boasted that he and his brother Qusay had been taken to prisons by their father to witness executions and torture to toughen them up for “the difficult tasks ahead”. Sure enough, if there was one member of Saddam’s house who was feared more than the dictator, it was Uday. Saddam’s eldest son was a sadistic madman: vicious, drunken, narcissistic, a terrifying walking parody of his father’s id. Saddam tolerated him until he murdered one of the Great Uncle’s top aides at a party. Uday immediately tried to kill himself with sleeping pills. As his stomach was being pumped, Saddam stormed into the emergency room, pushed aside the doctors and struck Uday in the face, shouting “Your blood will flow like my friend’s!”

But Saddam would rarely raise his voice when speaking to those close to him, always polite, always calm. “I lost count of the number of people who told me Saddam had a very special relationship with them,” says Holmes. “‘He trusted me’, ‘I was the one who could tell him the truth’; ‘No one else to speak to him like I could’… After you’ve heard that four or five times, you start to think, clearly, this was one of his skills: he had this capacity to make the person who he was focused on feel special.”

Saddam had been married for three decades to his wife Sajida (played by House Of Sand And Fog’s Shohreh Aghdashloo). Saddam gave her million-dollar shopping sprees and beautiful clothes. She remained loyal – despite her husband’s relationships with other women. As ever with Saddam, there are stories. Stories that he took virgins to his bed each night. That he even had one young woman killed after a decadent affair. Everyone knew about Samira (played by Casualty’s Christine Stephen-Daly), his long-time mistress and future wife. Not least her husband.

But no one – not his wives, his sons or his aides – knew what Saddam was thinking. “Because his perspective was far longer than the average human perspective on historical events,” says Holmes. “He liked to dream about what his regime would look like in 300 years time. But it wasn’t to be…”

The Godfather trilogy is really the tragic story of Vito Corleone’s son, whose paranoid obsession with power destroys him as he murders his own brother and ends up isolated, trapped and alone. Impossible to know whether Saddam appreciated the irony, as lay back in alone bed, staring at the books about Joseph Stalin that lined the walls.

Publication: ShortList

Desert. Humvees. Marines. Military jargon. Machinegun fire. Searing yellow explosion. Man down, man down… Just as they did with their magnificent cop/crime epic The Wire, writer / producers David Simon and Ed Burns drop us neck-deep into Generation Kill‘s Iraq war saga without a word of briefing. “We wanted you to be disorientated,” says Simon, on the first episode yak-track of this three-disc set. “We’re willing to let you catch up on your own terms.”

Makes perfect sense: Rolling Stone writer Evan Wright was embedded with the Marines’ First Recon Battalion, publishing his insider account of the marines’ tip-of-the-spear Iraq invasion in 2003.

Ambitious, demanding and constantly absorbing, Simon and Burns’ seven-part HBO adap wastes no time targeting the alpha-male boredom and bravado of parched pre-combat. But as First Recon heads for Baghdad, jarhead weariness rapidly shades into a brilliant study of the chaos, incompetence and emotion of conflict. Powered by fast, funny dialogue, a superb acting ensemble and a sandstorm of detail, Generation Kill’s drama proves a gripping straddle of deft cinematic style and compulsive docu-reality. As a grunt’s-eye view of history’s most documented war, it doesn’t get better.

Packed audio commentaries with Simon, Burns and directors Susanna White and Simon Cellan-Jones are strapped to each episode, along with mission maps and an fascinating interview with Wright and some of the real First Recon marines.

RATING: ★★★★★

EXTRAS: ★★★★

Publication: Total Film.

“There’s a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking, a lot of steak-eating and unprotected sex. It’s Disneyland.” If only Mad Men creator Matt Weiner had written that on the first page of his script. We might not have had to wait seven years for the smartest US TV drama since The Sopranos.

Instead the title page read, ‘Mad Men. A term coined in the late 1950s to describe the advertising executives of Madison avenue. They coined it.’ Weiner was not a Mad Man. He was a sitcom writer. Worse than that, he was a sitcom writer for Ted Danson. “I worked on Becker for three years,” recalls Weiner. But about a year into it I said, ‘You know what, this is not what I want to do when I grow up.’” He was already 35, married to an architect, with three young children.

Before he sat down to write the Mad Men pilot, Weiner sucked up ’50s and ’60s culture. He read Salinger, Cheever and Kerouac. He studied vintage girl-power bestsellers like Sex And The Single Girl (inspiration for Sex And The City) and The Feminine Mystique (helped ignited the women’s movement in 1963). He watched movies like Jack Lemmon’s bittersweet satire The Apartment and Walter Matthau sexism comedy A Guide for the Married Man. He smoked a lot of cigarettes.

And in 2002, Weiner sent his completed Mad Men pilot as a writing sample to The Sopranos creator David Chase. Bada bing. Chase loved it. Leaning back 50 years to New York 1961, the story zeroes in on the life of Don Draper, the suave creative director of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency. Smoking and drinking like rock-stars, he and his slick-suited Brylcreemed execs dream up killer slogans for tobacco companies, backstab each other, jovially harass their secretaries, hook up with their mistresses and placate their lonely housewives. Like Weiner said, it was Disneyland.

“It was what you’re always hoping to see,” remembers Chase. “It was lively and it had something new to say. Here was someone who had written a story about advertising in the 1960s and was looking at recent American history through that prism.” He immediately hired Weiner to work as a writer on his Mafia masterpiece. Now the hottest new writer on HBO’s biggest hit, Weiner wasted no time pitching Mad Men to the network. Chase himself submitted the script.

HBO’s response? No. Less than no. In a baffling decision that would return to bite them hard, they never even got back to him. Weiner still doesn’t like talking about it. Neither does anyone at HBO. “All I can tell you is that it was very disappointing that they did not notice me, because I was part of the family” he admits.

Crushed, Weiner did what anyone would do. He started killing people. He helped suffocate Christopher Moltisanti in an SUV. He shot Bobby Baccalieri in a model-train shop. As a writer and exec producer of The Sopranos, he got paid for it too, inking those episodes and many others during the series’ climactic final three seasons.

Meanwhile, Mad Men’s pilot script gathered dust. For seven years, neither HBO or Showtime or anyone else ever asked about it. But as The Sopranos was wrapping up its goodbye season, US cable network AMC put out word they were looking for a new original series. They saw Mad Men and snapped it up instantly, handing Weiner a $3 million budget for the pilot, a modest $2.3 million for each episode and two rules for life. “I can’t swear and I can’t show nudity,” says Weiner. Everything else? That was all good.

Smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism… Mad Men ticks off the ’60s seven deadly sins inside its first few minutes. Talk about men behaving badly. “Admen were the rock stars of that era,” says Weiner. “Creative, cocky, anti-authority. They made a lot of money and they lived hard. On page six of the script, Don had his fourth drink. Anyone who’s seen the show who’s been there has said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing.’ It is not an exaggeration that people used to start the second they got in the office.” He grins lightly. “Actually, when I was trying to find old advertising guys who were there, to talk to them about it, it was difficult. Because they’re dead.”

Survivor’s testimony came from Della Femina, the former American advertising legend behind Becks beer and Pan Am airlines. Famously, his proposed slogan for the Japanese-owned Panasonic account was, ‘From Those Wonderful Folk Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.’ “People had bottles in their drawers,” recalled the Femina, when quizzed about the show’s authenticity. “The bartender would start shaking our martinis as soon as we walked in. Mad Men accurate reflects what went on.”

Which, more than anything, including a lot of smoking. At the office. In front of the kids. At the gynaecologists. And looking damn cool doing it. From the very first day’s shooting, beautiful veils of smoke drifted through Weiner’s sets. Lighters clicked constantly. Smouldering butts stacked up in the ashtrays. “There’s something burning but it’s herbal cigarettes,” admits Weiner, who even banned non-smokers from lighting up in-character. “You don’t want actors smoking real cigarettes. I’ve been on sets where people throw up, they’ve smoked so much.”

“I’d pitched the story of Mad Men to a couple of people and they said, ‘There’s too much smoking’ or ‘Don is too unlikable’. And I’m like, ‘I write on The Sopranos and I’m watching the most on-paper unlikable person in the world.’ Well, guess what? Jim Gandolfini played that person and it made a huge difference.” All matinee looks and flinty charisma, 36-year-old TV journeyman John Hamm was cast as leading alpha-male Don Draper in a no-star cast of ace character actors. Chiselled actors and glamorexic actresses didn’t get hired. Because no one got implants and collagen shots in 1961. “A lot of these characters don’t look like characters you see on TV,” says John Slattery, who plays Draper’s boss Roger Sterling.

During the shoot, lead-man Hamm was in less danger from a herbal high than Weiner’s lovingly designed period sets. “During one scene, they were moving wall panels and they dropped one on my head,” remembers Hamm. “Which ended my shooting day. I had seven stitches. It was my first injury of many on this show. I had a broken hand and a dislocated shoulder.”

All of which Weiner would consider a small price to pay. The Mad Men creator, it turned out, had a hardcore addiction to realism to rival that of David Simon, creator of Baltimore-set crime epic The Wire. (There must be something in the water in Baltimore. Weiner was born there.) Weiner freaked out over every tiny detail. He freaked everyone else out. “Because men always were shaven during that period, I sometimes had to shave the actors two or three times a day to make sure there was no growth whatsoever,” says make-up artist Debbie Zoller. Weiner approved everyone actor, costume, hairstyle and prop. Before each episode, he held a “tone meeting” with the director during which he essentially performed the entire show himself. Just so they understood.

Hiring crew from The Sopranos, Weiner recreated the Rat Pack romance of ’60s New York in classic style. Nothing else on TV looked like it. Hitchcock was a massive visual influence (Weiner is a film-school graduate), right from the tumbling Saul Bass credit sequence.  Stacks of Sears catalogs and Better Homes And Gardens magazines from the ’50s provided the blueprint for the Mad Men’s stylish time-warp.  Bullet bras, fedoras, big skirts, white shirts and neat rows of IBM electric typewriters. “Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology,” says office queen-bee Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) as she introduces a naive new employee to her first day at Sterling Cooper. “It looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.”

This was where Mad Men really kicked: Weiner’s brilliant dialogue, jewelled with throwaway zingers. “What do women want?” ponders Draper. “Who cares?” says his baffled boss Sterling. “Have we ever hired any Jews?” he asks Draper. “Not on my watch,” say Draper. “You want me to run down to the deli and grab somebody?” Back in 1960, political correctness was knowing how to knot your tie right.

“Were we really that horrible? Yes we were!” grins co-writer Andre Jacquemetton. “Sometimes it’s a bit jarring, because we’ll write certain things and it’s like, ‘Oh my god. Are we really writing this line?’” Weiner’s core co-writing team consisted of four men and three women. One of them is Jacquemetton’s wife. “We know it’s a good script when we do our table read and the heads lower, like, five times,” she laughs. “I definitely cringe at the sexist things the guys say. The guys cringe too.”

If no one cringed, they’d likely hear one of Weiner’s favourite phrases barked at them: “That sounds like a TV show.” It was their cue to try again. “I’ve watched a lot of TV in my life and I’ve really tried to do things that don’t lie about human behaviour,” says the creator. “You’re repelled by it, but also thrilled by it.”

In fact, Mad Men’s consistently adult, witty drama is more sardonic love-letter than acid satire. Behind the haze of scotch and cigarette smoke, Don Draper’s battles in the boardrooms and the bedrooms rapidly shade into a dark, rich, subtle study of masculine crisis. Fascinating inner struggles motor each character – and Season One is loaded with at least two spring-coiled twists. “Mad Men is about conflicting desires in the American male and the people who pay the price for that,” explains Weiner. Who are? “Who are the women.”

Ironic that, considering who vets Weiner’s scripts. That would be Mrs Weiner. When he wrote Mad Men, he didn’t just sit down and start typing. He spoke it out loud, every part, line by line. “Every single script goes through my wife,” he explains. “She inevitably says, ‘What is it about?’ We talk about it and I’m always angry when she’s talking. I mean, my writers come up with lots of good ideas, but she is really something. If I can see her reaction, I can see what works and what doesn’t.”

Turned out, everything worked. The terrific ensemble performances. The stylish cinematography. Weiner’s glittering writing. Scoring TV ratings of just 900,000 viewers, Mad Men didn’t touch The Sopranos’ debut season average of 3.5 million. But the all right people were watching. The New York Times and Time magazine both named it the best TV show of the year. At the Golden Globes, Mad Men won Best Television Series and Jon Hamm picked up Best Performance. It was the most most-nominated drama series at the Emmy Awards, winning four of them.

With its second season due to hit BBC4 this year and Weiner in negotiation over Season Three, Mad Men has bounced from cult surprise to cultural smash inside 12 months. The Simpsons’ Halloween episode ‘How to Get Ahead in Dead-vertising’ sees Homer falling in slo-mo past a number of advertising slogans. Facebook groups ask ‘What would Don Draper do?’. Barack Obama took a copy of the Mad Men DVD with him on his campaign trail. But perhaps the most notable fan is HBO co-president Richard Plepler, who took over at the network in June 2007. One month before the debut of the pilot his predecessor turned down. “Mad Men is a magnificent show,” he says, wryly. “The only problem with it is it’s not on HBO.”

Read Jonathan’s original article at ShortList.

As the greatest cop-drama on TV comes to an end, ShortList taps up creator David Simon on The Wire…

Barack Obama thinks The Wire is the best show on television. So does the director of WALL-E. So do the drug-dealers on the street-corners of Baltimore. So, it seems, does everyone. After its six years, 60 episodes and five seasons concluded this summer, the cop drama has become the most critically acclaimed series in the history of US TV.

“I am a little surprised,” says creator David Simon. Pause. Exit false-modesty. “Well, after the first season, I thought it would be something special,” he admits. “By the way, I didn’t know if anyone was going to watch it! And didn’t give a shit, really!” Then again, The Wire’s success has nothing to do with huge audiences (at best, its viewing figures were a third of The Sopranos‘). Nothing to do with awards (it’s never won an Emmy). And nothing to do with other crime dramas that had both (“I’ve haven’t seen The Sopranos,” shrugs Simon. “I’ve watched about 10 minutes of The Shield… I don’t watch television. I don’t watch anything that has commercials.”)

It has a lot more to a drug-dealer who forgot to duck. “I can remember everything about it,” says the 48-year-old writer and producer. “It was this drug dealer, name was Kenny, got shot, in the eye, at Walbrook Junction, in January 1989. And I can remember everything about him, the living room, the stuff tacked to his refrigerator… It was the first time I spent time in a room with a dead body and I remember the entire scene.”

David Simon was 27, a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, and one month into a year he would spend shadowing the city’s homicide unit. Cutting his long hair to blend in with the detectives (“I became a piece of the furniture”), he worked six- and seven-day weeks following the detectives through crime scenes, suspects’ apartments, courtrooms and morgues. Simon’s year on the Baltimore mean streets had birthed two books, Homicide: Life On The Killing Fields and The Corner, both adapted into TV dramas. But 11 years after he saw Kenny on the slab, he pitched HBO something else: a cop show so realistic that “that no one who sees its take on the culture of crime and crime-fighting can watch anything like CSI or NYPD Blue or Law & Order again without knowing that every punch was pulled on those shows.”

It was some pitch. This wasn’t a cop show. This was a the great American novel. “It was in the making of The Corner that I realised I might be able to put together everything I felt having reported on Baltimore for almost 15 years and using it the basis for a narrative depiction of urban America,” says Simon. “This was a means to tell a story about what was almost an assembly line of violence. Other cop shows were just entertainment. We were trying to tell a story about the end of empire.”

By now disillusioned by the print media’s ability to tell the truth, Simon teamed with former homicide detective Ed Burns to co-write an epic five-series arc in which each season would focus on a different faultline snaking through Baltimore: the drug trade, the death of the working class, the city bureaucracy, the school system and the media. Eavesdropping us on to the way poverty, politics and policing interweave in the urban struggle, The Wire’s complex, innovative plots evolved with the scope, detail and density of great literature. “It’s no wonder that when it came to hire the writing staff, I didn’t hire TV writers, I hired novelists,” says Simon. “I wasn’t interesting in making anything episodic. I only want to work in chapters, not as anything that can stand alone. I want it all to be part of the book.”

Simon calls it “stealing life”. It’s what gave The Wire its unique bite: the rich characters, ghetto dialogue, potent violence and funny, believable scenes were plucked direct from Simon and Burns’ time following real homicide cases. “We stole heavily,” he says. “Many events took place blow-for-blow and a lot of characters are roughly based on people we knew.” Considering the worst criminals in The Wire are oddly tragic, human characters and the best cops are either bumbling, brutal, arrogant or handcuffed by red tape, you’d think Baltimore’s detectives might have something to say to Simon. “After the first season, I went police union bar and I expected to have my head handed to me,” he laughs. “But I bought the first round and didn’t buy a beer afterwards.” Everyone knew Simon was telling the truth. “And anyway, you can’t sue for likeness,” he adds. “Two or three of them might be combined in a single character. That’s the joy of fiction. You get to chew it up and spit it out. We don’t use anybody’s real name, but there’s nothing untrue.”

What’s more, The Wire uses real-life cops, criminals, mayors, drug-users, journalists and councilors to fill out its cast. “The face and voices of the real city,” as Simon puts it. Example? As a detective, Ed Burns put Baltimore drug kingpin Melvin Williams in jail on a 34 year sentence in 1984. Two decades later, Burns was writing salty dialogue for him, after casting him as a West Baltimore community leader.

Fact and fiction continued to blur as the series evolved. Once, a man was shot just yards from where The Wire was filming in a rough Baltimore neighborhood. Oozing blood, he staggered on to the set to be treated by the show’s medic. Word reached Simon that bootleg DVDs were circulating through the poor neighborhoods of West Baltimore: criminals were watching the show to learn how to counter police investigation techniques. But they got the biggest stamp of approval when a shabbily dressed man edged on to the set and quietly passed a bag of heroin to actor Andre Royo, dressed in character as junkie police-informant Bubbles.  ”Man, you need a fix more than I do,” he whispered.

It’s most realistic crime drama ever created. And Simon knows it. “Because it was written by someone who covered the drug trade in a given American city for 15 years and by someone who policed that drug trade for 20,” he says. “But you know what makes me really proud? You’re gonna laugh. It’s the humour. Otherwise it’d be too heartbreaking to watch. Some of that shit was Lauren & Hardy good. Two detectives arguing about which guy would you fuck if you could fuck a hot girl afterwards – that’s the stuff that makes me happy.”

Now, though, Simon has closed the case on Baltimore – or Bodymore, Murdaland, as the graffiti in The Wire’s title sequence daubs it. Next stop? Iraq. Generation Kill is Simon and Burns’ upcoming miniseries adap of Evan Wright’s non-fiction book about his experiences as a reporter joining a US Reconnaissance Battalion during the first 40 days of the 2003 Iraqi invasion. “I thought it was the best war reporting since Mike Warner’s dispatches,” says Simon. “Evan did a marvellous job of depicting these young men and the nature of modern warfare.” This time, Simon’s staying out of the field: “There’s no researching: it’s about squeezing Evan’s brain. It’s what’s on the page and what’s in his head. It’s not a matter of picking up and going back to Iraq!” No chance of going back to The Wire, either? No chance. “We built it for five seasons, all part of a singular argument. That’s our five seasons.” He shakes his head. “We’re done.”

Publication Shortlist.com.