MAD DOG – A New Showtime Documentary’s Harsh and Unflinching Look At Muammar Gaddafi

By Mark Cerulli

Everyone in the west knows the name – Gaddafi. For over 40 years he was an international riddle, visiting world capitals yet sleeping in a bulletproof tent; a statesman who surrounded himself with female bodyguards and, of course, a pariah scorned by the west for acts of international terror…

In Mad Dog: Inside The Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi , a remarkable Showtime documentary premiering April 11th, director Christopher Olgiati and his team went deep inside the late despot’s hidden world. The resulting portrait is chilling, horrifying and impossible not to watch.

The film’s Executive Producer, Roy Ackerman spoke with Cinema Retro about putting together this daunting and dangerous project. “Chris (Olgiati) and I had worked together before… and he came to me about doing a film on the Lockerbie Crash and we spent a lot of time developing that but for various reasons we came to focus on Gaddafi.”

The film took three years to research and shoot in ten countries around the globe – from the United States to the Marshall Islands. (Try even finding them on a map!) Along the way the dictator’s finely honed image as a Nationalist Statesman completely unravels, revealing a desperate and perverse man who preyed on his own people.

Making any movie is all about challenges, but shooting inside Libya was in a whole other league – “It was very, very dangerous.” Roy remembers, “we went in three times and there were bombs going off and car bombs, one time we had to just leave because it was too unstable.”

The Libyan footage they did get is apocalyptic and stunning – a Mad Max moonscape of ruined buildings and burnt out interiors. They also interviewed several people who did business with the regime, including international fugitive Frank Terpil who supplied Gaddafi’s military with weapons. Another notable interview was former CIA officer Valerie Plame who provides perspective on Gaddafi’s dramatic hunt for nuclear weapons. The producers left no biographical stone unturned, even interviewing Gaddafi’s plastic surgeon who told a surreal tale of late night operations in an underground bunker, the dictator refusing general anesthesia for fear of assassination.

Through rare archival footage, we see a dashing young Gaddafi as an army officer with a killer smile, eager to bring his country out of its Colonial past. Gradually he becomes corrupted by his immense power and oil wealth (one billion dollars PER WEEK), which stripped away everything but a desire to stay in power at any cost. Outwardly a “family man”, in reality he indulged an array of dark and repulsive desires that the documentary illustrates in haunting detail.

The final chapter of Gaddafi’s tale is ironic and tragic – Western powers were willing to turn the page on Gaddafi’s notorious past due to the great equalizer – oil. Only the Arab Spring, which ripped through many countries, including Libya prevented reengagement and ultimately cost him his life. But the film’s Roy Ackerman felt that if there’s any lesson to be learned from Gaddafi, it’s proceed with caution – “You do deals with these people, they’re not stupid, they’ll get a price for it.”

You can also read it at CinemaRetro