among those cut in order to reduce the film's runtime by 45 minutes. Production John Milius The film was first announced for production in 1976 with Milius to direct from his own script. "It's very complicated", said Milius. "I've never been able to put what the movie's about in a few words. All I can say is it's a modern-day story about subversion and espionage." He elaborated in a 1976 interview saying it was "about Special Forces. It's a rightwing political thriller, a rightwing Costa-Gavras film. It takes place in Texas and involves the Texas Rangers as well. I shouldn't talk about it." However he did describe one scene: There's an operation carried out with peak efficiency where four highly trained specialists wipe out forty men. They don't wipe them out in the usual sense, because they're so good and heroic. I wanted to give the sense that these four are more than a match for forty because they're so skilled at what they do: use of explosives, automatic weapons fire, interlocking fields of fire. Their planning is so precise and perfect: they're used to thinking this way. When you come away from this battle, you're not just impressed with their skill, but also with how cold they are. Ruthlessly efficient. He also said there was a line in the film "where a Ranger is talking about being in a gunfight with people in a car and the other guy says, "That gun won't stop a car", and the Ranger says, "It will if you shoot it in the driver." That's a Milius line. I'm trying to get away from that; the rest of the script is very flat. I'm trying to write more mundane now. Rather than dazzle constantly, I'm trying to let the weight of the story carry it, and the more subtle implications of it, letting scenes play themselves out the way they would in reality. We'll see what happens. It's a definite development." In an interview for the July 1978 issue of "Crawdaddy" magazine, Milius spoke about the film as a future project, giving away the original ending. "A group of drug dealers take over a town in Texas, then finally one person, a Vietnam veteran, stands up to them and wipes them out. Then we cut to a meeting room at the Pentagon, where we find out it was all a top secret experiment to