A Degree Absolute! episode forty-one: "Brass Target" with Keith Phipps

Our guest Keith Phipps is not just a sterling critic and a dad — an essential component when we cover a movie as openly paternal as 1978’s post-WWII espionage thriller Brass Target . He is also the author of new book examining the career of a singularly idiosyncratic actor. A Degree Absolute! endorses Keith’s book Age of Cage absolutely.

And Brass Target? Well, minute-for-minute, it has the most undiluted Patty McG purity rating of any film we’ve covered save perhaps for Braveheart. It’s much harder to find but worth the hunt for those such as we. Invest in physical media, people.

Brass Target

Screenplay by Alvin Boretz, adapted from Frederick Nolan’s novel The Algonquin Project

Directed by John Hough

Released December 22, 1978

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Our song: "A Degree Absolute!"

Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek

Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark

Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark

Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark

Bass by Marcus Newstead

The Ongoing Failure of the PG-13 Rating: The Movie

In perhaps the strangest milestone of my I-guess-you-could-call-it-a-career, The Dissolve has adapted an essay of mine that they published back in December into a very clever two-and-a-half-minute animated short. Keith Phipps, who edited the original essay, wrote the script.

I'm honored. The original piece is here. Please note that it cites Guardians of the Galaxy as the top-grossing picture of 2014 in the U.S., which it was at the time of publication; Guardians was subsequently out-earned by The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 and American Sniper. Anyway, my thanks to Keith and to animators Mack Williams and Benji Williams and their team for doing such a beautiful job with this. I've embedded the video above, but please go watch it on The Dissolve, where it's accompanied by a behind-the-scenes video wherein Mack Williams pulls back the curtain on how he turned a script into a cartoon.

Deleted Scene: The Infiltration Unit

The "mimetic pollyalloy" T-1000 in its natural habitat.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day originally had a sunlit coda set on the National Mall in the no-longer-grim future of 2029 with Linda Hamilton in unconvincing old age makeup. Director James Cameron was right to cut it.

My essay about the movie's villain that ran on The Dissolve last week originally had a rambling 500-word introduction. My editor, Keith Phipps, was right to cut it.

So here it is!

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Sixty-one minutes into the theatrical cut of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, there’s a shot so hokey that only the unrelenting intensity of the preceding hour could keep the audience from laughing.

Sarah Connor and her son John — future Che Guevara of the resistance against SkyNet, the artificial intelligence network destined to nuke the Northern Hemisphere and then hunt the human vermin scurrying among its ashes — speed away from the insane asylum from which Sarah has just pulled off a desperate jailbreak. They’re in a commandeered police car driven by the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger model) Terminator, their ally.

In the rearview mirror, we see the advanced T-1000 Terminator, which wants nothing on Earth but to kill them, in an awkward foot pursuit with two swords/dredging hooks for hands. He is played by Robert Patrick, a 32-year-old former Bowling Green University linebacker who trained himself to sprint full speed with his mouth closed, the way no human being runs, for the role. He looks graceful, fast, and lethal every time he runs in the movie except this one.

Where he looks ridiculous.

Terminator Scissorhands.

Sent from the future by the malevolent supercomputer StruwwelpeterNet to snip the heads off bad little boys and girls.

Is what he looks like.

We know by this point the T-1000 is made from a “mimetic polyalloy” that can rearrange itself into stabby metal objects, and that can at least temporarily alter his appearance to make him an perfect visual doppelganger of any person he touches. We even bought the shot just a moment ago, when the T-800 fired his shotgun point blank into the T-1000’s face — well, “face” — and the thing’s bubbling metal head (just infer the quotation marks around all future references to specific body parts and gender, please) burst open like a tin of Jiffy Pop before zipping itself back together.

But that goofy shot of him running in the mirror is the last time the T-1000 will menace our heroes for 34 minutes — a perilously long chunk of a kinetic thriller like this one. T2’s roughly $100 million cost was a record high when the film went into production in 1990, but this shot wouldn’t have looked any different if it had been a penny-pinching guerilla action movie, like 1984’s The Terminator — the film that earned cowriter/director James Cameron a career.

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Read the final version of this essay at The Dissolve, which jettisoned this looooooong setup to cut to the still-quite-lengthy chase. Thanks again to Keith for his smart, patient, improving edit.