By: Jeffrey Ressner

There’s a heckuva lot to see in “W,” Oliver Stone’s new George Bush biopic that portrays the president as a drunken lout in college and follows him all the way through his handling of the insurgency after the invasion of Iraq.

But there were many other parts Stone filmed that won’t make it to the big screen, including two dream sequences featuring Saddam Hussein, a take on Bush’s born-again conversion to Christianity, and even a scene in which he practices his wobbly pilot skills in a small plane and spins out of control in the desert.

The movie, which screened for critics this week and is receiving mixed reviews, has a final running time of 129 minutes. But Stone decided to save some of the more fantastic and surreal moments for the DVD director’s cut and possibly international versions of the film. Stone says the deleted scenes were cut to tighten the film and keep the action moving, but the actor who plays Hussein also blames it on harsh language, among other reasons.

According to Sayed Badreya, the Arab-American actor who portrays Hussein, Stone dropped two “over-the-top” fantasy sequences in which the Iraqi dictator confronts and cusses out the American president. At a press conference earlier this week, Stone said he had to lose the Hussein scenes because the movie was “too long.”

“When I first went to film the scenes, I knew there was a chance they could get cut because of the way they were written — they were very raw,” Badreya told Politico last weekend. The language, he added, was R-rated, while “W.” producers were aiming for — and eventually received — a PG-13 rating that allows younger audiences into theaters and can add millions more to the final box office tally.

Stone has said he’s hoping parents will see “W.” with their children, much as he saw the absurdist political satire “Dr. Strangelove” with his folks while growing up.

One scene in “W.” has Bush watching television and seeing Hussein on the screen cursing at him before Bush chokes on that infamous pretzel. The other imagines Bush flying over Baghdad on a magic carpet while Hussein stands atop a hill, literally rattling a saber and screaming obscenities.

“We talked about it, and I told Oliver I knew it would be trouble, but he said, ‘Let’s play it and we’ll see,’” recalled Badreya. “But recently he sent me an e-mail and said that I was right.”

Badreya says that in his e-mail, Stone wrote that the dream sequences were ultimately deemed “too silly” to fit the movie’s overall tone, and he indicated to Badreya that both could later be included on the DVD or overseas versions. The actor said he put a lot of time into studying Hussein — “I had to get his voice, his style of walking and talking right,” he said. “My responsibility was to play him as a character, not a cartoon.”

Badreya was sanguine about all of his hard work ending up as DVD extras. Then again, he’s an old hand in show business. An Egyptian who came to New York in the late 1970s and roomed with Woody Harrelson as he went to film school and pursued his moviemaking dreams, he found Hollywood offered plenty of opportunities to play Hezbollah gunmen (“The Insider”), Middle East soldiers (“Three Kings”) and various terrorist types.

“Since the beginning of cinema there have been stereotypes,” he told Politico about the dilemma of playing Arab terrorists on screen. “The villain has always been a minority — whether it was Native Americans, African-Americans or Japanese-Americans. Now it’s the Iranians and Arabs.”

Hollywood’s widespread stereotyping of Middle Eastern men doesn’t come as any surprise to cinema experts. “At any given period, Hollywood needs an ethnic type to serve as ‘the other,’ and today it’s the Arabs,” said Professor Howard Suber of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. “Arab women have long been used to add exotic aspects to a story, while Arab men have frequently been portrayed as swarthy foreigners.”

Suber, whose book “The Power of Film” remains one of the most popular cinema texts, told Politico that after 9/11, the door was flung further open to demonize anyone from the Middle East. “Arabs became an easy target,” he said.

When Badreya started his career, only two or three Arab-American actors could find full-time work around Hollywood — but after 9/11, the number of Middle Eastern actors expanded nearly tenfold. Given this competitive environment, he welcomed the chance to portray Hussein in Stone’s biopic. (Badreya, who got plenty of on-screen time this summer with “Iron Man” and Adam Sandler’s “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” also appears in an upcoming film titled “Gitmo.”)

This week, most of the media got its first gander at “W,” with Stone and his cast holding screenings and press conferences in Los Angeles. Last week, however, Variety Editor-in-Chief Peter Bart caught an early showing of the film but didn’t give away much in his review. Calling it “engrossing” and proof that Stone “hasn’t lost his edge,” Bart described the climactic scene as an imagined conversation between the elder and younger Bushes in which 41 declares, “Thanks to Junior, no Bush will ever again be elected to public office.”

Count on a windfall of publicity for "W." in the days ahead, with Stone’s appearance on "Larry King Live" on Monday followed by Josh Brolin hosting “Saturday Night Live.”

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