Today marks the 83rd Academy Awards Show. Last year some 42 million viewers tuned in to watch the hoopla. While this is far behind the 111 million mark achieved here in the U.S. by those watching the Super Bowl, it’s  still a staggering number. (The global numbers for the television audience to both events shoot to 150 million and 1 billion, respectively.) I’m able to tangentially tap into the popularity of the Academy awards show thanks to the relatively neglected realm belonging to Oscar‘s shorts. This year, the calendar film series I program devoted these last five days to screening them all. The previous three years we’ve shown both the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts and Live-Action Shorts, but this is the very first year we also had access to the Documentary Shorts. READ MORE

This is the story of one of the least funny (or most not funny) comedies I’ve ever forced myself to sit through.  A film so profoundly insulting and hateful that it almost exceeds my ability to imagine how anyone ever found it amusing.  But they did, and so this is also the story of changing fashions, in movies and comedies and men.

William Haines was born in 1900—he was a child of the movie age.  At the age of 14, he ran away from home (under circumstances I’ll explain later) and led an itinerant life until he was discovered by Samuel Goldwyn and signed to a movie contract.  This was not a ticket to stardom—he proceeded to work in background roles and bit parts for years, as if destined for also-ran status.

Little by little he migrated to the front of the screen, and as he did, critics started to take notice—and as they started to take notice, they started to complain.  Below are some typical descriptions of Haines’ performances, and see if they gradually cohere into a picture for you:

“brash, perennial youth”

“fresh, breezy, overconfident”

“overbearing wisecracker”

“conceited, obnoxious”

1926 was the breakthrough year.  Two important things happened in 1926, of which I’ll only tell you one now (if you get the sense I’m withholding something, you’re right, I am).  He starred in BROWN OF HARVARD, in which he played an obnoxious charmer—a role he inhabited so perfectly, and which audiences embraced so thoroughly, it became his personal niche.  A William Haines movie was a vehicle, a justification for Haines to come on and act like a jackass.  Metro’s ads plugged “the smart aleck of the screen” and “its irrepressible wisecracker.”  Irving Thalberg said that Haines was what modern movie audiences wanted from a comedian—as opposed to the old-hat stuff being offered by the slapstick clowns, now increasingly seen by the big studios as passé.

Critics pretty much hated this act, while audiences embraced it.  Screenland Magazine wrote of one of his flicks, “the star plays another of his cut-up roles that makes the critics gnash their teeth and audiences chortle.”  Haines was his generation’s Adam Sandler.

Before I start to take apart Haines’ THE GIRL SAID NO, which may be one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, let me establish the guy’s credentials: from 1928 to 1932 he was one of the top 5 box office stars.  An exhibitor poll listed him as second only to Lon Chaney in popularity.  When MGM entered the talkie age, the first of their major stars to speak onscreen: Haines.  He may be a forgotten name today, but his work was mainstream American comedy in its day.

Let me also state that while I chose THE GIRL SAID NO as my example to present here, I’ve seen a few other of Haine’s vehicles—enough to feel confident that I haven’t plucked one bad egg out of the bowl to unfairly denounce.

On the surface, this thing appears to have promise: its comedy pedigree is respectable.  THE GIRL SAID NO was a 1930 feature directed by Sam Wood, just five years away from directing the Marx Brothers in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA and A DAY AT THE RACES.  It co-stars comedienne Polly Moran and features a showstopping cameo by Marie Dressler (and it is a sign of Haines’ diminished presence in popular culture today that Warner Archive, despairing of selling this DVD on the basis of Haines’ name alone, heavily emphasizes Dressler’s, as if her brief screen time constitutes a major part of the movie).

The scene goes on as you might predict: Dressler gets increasingly drunk, and Haines takes advantage of her inebriated state to sell her some bonds.

In a way, you’ve now got an inkling of what the title means.  In this case, we had a girl, or a woman, Marie Dressler, who was adamant about her desires (I won’t buy any bonds, and I hate Denver, plus I don’t like parks), and in comes Haines who steamrolls over every objection she has—literally forcing her to yield to his will.  Doesn’t matter if she says no, Haines doesn’t take no for an answer.

But. . . buying a bond isn’t a bad thing, and financing a public park isn’t a bad thing, and he confesses to her and she accepts him, and we can leave that scene feeling OK.  He was a good salesman, using his wiles and charm to make a sale.  Society smiles on that.

Too bad the title isn’t referring to Marie Dressler.  No, THE GIRL SAID NO means exactly what you think it does.  This is basically a rape comedy.

Now, Haines doesn’t actually rape Leila Hyams.  But watch this clip and tell me if you think I’m exaggerating:

I don’t know about you, but watching him make sport of her crying gives me the willies.  I felt like I needed to shower after watching this thing.  Haines’ behavior throughout the film violates all manner of laws, norms, and social convention regarding sexual harassment.  He cajoles, threatens, taunts, and manipulates Leila relentlessly.

This is just a taste of Haines’ idea of courtship.

At any given moment in the film, Leila’s face is contorted with horror or revulsion.  It goes on like this for 90 minutes!  All the way to the damn ending!  In screwball comedies, the playful hostility between boy and girl melts into romance by the final reel, but that moment of conciliation almost never occurs here.  Even as late as THE GIRL SAID NO‘s finale (am I SPOILING this for you?) he literally ties her up and gags her, to drag her unwillingly from her wedding.

And to this we are expected to laugh, and cheer.  By all evidence, audiences in 1930 did.

I was so appalled by all this, I pulled out  The Funsters, edited by James Robert Parish and William T. Leonard, to get some background and context on Haines.  I needed to understand, seriously, how did anybody ever enjoy this?  The biographical essay didn’t help much in answering this question—reading those things about Haines being a top box office star, hailed by Thalberg as the Next Big Thing in Comedy. . . I mean, it just got me depressed.

At the same time, the book’s entry on Haines asked a new question, one that hadn’t occurred to me before.  There was something more to Haines, that Parish et al found problematic.  They clearly didn’t want to address it but couldn’t entirely avoid it–so they did the literary equivalent of mumbling something under their breath and coughing into their collective hand.  There it was–a fleeting aside in a throwaway sentence–and it changed my impression of Haines.

That passing comment prompted me to do some more research, some more digging—because I was realizing that it wasn’t just that THE GIRL SAID NO seemed to wallow in the obsolete sexual mores of a different age, the fate of Mr. Haines overall did.

When Haines ran away from home at the age of fourteen, he did so in the arms of another boy, a lad Haines called his boyfriend.  When he was discovered by Goldwyn in 1922, Haines was working as a model, living in the nascent gay community of Greenwich Village.  The second important thing that happened to him in 1926 was that he met Jimmie Shields, who became his committed partner.  They lived together for nearly fifty years.

Haines’ homosexuality was no secret to the studio, but the studio hoped to keep it a secret from audiences.  His oversexed screen persona was one way of projecting a straight image onto comic mannerisms that, if you rewatch the clips above with this new information, may now seem effete.  Studio PR hacks invented gossip linking him with Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Barbara LaMour.  To which Haines told the press, he preferred the company of Polly Moran.

Let’s run a clip of Polly Moran to clarify that reference:

I don’t doubt that Haines enjoyed Moran’s company.  I don’t doubt the experienced comedienne would have been enjoyable company for anyone—but for studio publicists trying to establish Haines’ heterosexual bona fides, he wasn’t helping.

Nor was he helping when he was arrested for soliciting sex with a sailor in a YMCA in 1933.  Newspapers got wind of this, and MGM realized the genie was out of the bottle.  Haines was presented with an ultimatum: he could maintain his career if he squelched these “rumors,” and the only way to do that definitively (in the studio’s estimation) was a sham marriage.  To his credit, Haines didn’t blink.  He walked out of the studio, forever, with Shields’ hand in his, and never looked back.

Now, none of this changes the fact that THE GIRL SAID NO tries to make jokes out of ignoring that a girl said “no” (and even puts it in the title!)  None of it makes Haines’ excessive mugging funny.  But, it does put Haines’ behavior into a social context: he lived in an age where America was much more comfortable with joking about rape than it was admitting that two men could be in love.  And in a world of such upside-down values, he stayed true to who he was–and accepted the consequence of his decisions.

So, I’ll still rank Haines as one of the least funny and most annoying screen comedians of all time, but he another side as well: he and Shields founded an interior design company, and among their clients were such Hollywood luminaries as Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett, Nunnally Johnson, and Jack L. Warner.  Their firm still exists: www.williamhaines.com, and it seems all his talent was in design.  He wasn’t funny, but he had a good eye.

Once again, our rootless reporter David Konow takes the stage with a piece written for but never published by the defunct Geek Monthly, which we at The Movie Morlocks are proud to present now for the first time ever… RHS

“A man who doesn’t go his own way is nothing.” – Billy Jack

He was a half-breed Vietnam vet, a counter-culture superhero who stood up for the downtrodden, and fought against society’s wrongs. He was an anti-hero of his time, a pop-culture icon of the early ‘70’s. He was also a staunchly independent filmmaker who made movies his way, and made a lot of money in the process.

With many people today not knowing about pop culture beyond ten years ago, or even less, it’s understandable that modern movie fans wouldn’t know who Billy Jack, or Tom Laughlin, was, or what he meant in his time. Laughlin, the actor / writer / director who played Billy Jack, came up in the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls era of young filmmakers who wanted to tear down the old establishment and build their own empires, and he also had a similar rise and fall. The Billy Jack movies aren’t remembered like THE GODFATHER (1972) and STAR WARS (1977) today but they were big hits in their time, and their cost to profit ratio was very impressive, even by today’s standards. A “Missing Persons” report in Variety asked, “Why didn’t [Laughlin] become George Lucas?,” and it’s not too far-fetched to compare him to the billionaire creator of STAR WARS, because Laughlin achieved what Lucas did on a smaller scale.  Like Lucas, he self-financed his own movies and would either distribute them himself, or release them through a major studio and split the money. Also like Lucas, Laughlin got a much bigger chunk of the profits than most filmmakers, and had complete creative control over his work. And unfortunately like Lucas, Laughlin was also bullheaded and insistent on his way or the highway, often to the point of self-sabotage.

It was Laughlin’s blessing and curse that he couldn’t work within the system. He was always a fighter, but eventually he got into too many fights. “He was a wild guy, and very difficult to do business with,” says Brian Potter, who co-wrote the song “One Tin Solider,” which became the theme of BILLY JACK. “He blamed the studios for being difficult, for lacking vision, for not understanding what they had, and not marketing and promoting the film the way he felt they should have been. He was always at war.”

Laughlin is a polarizing figure to this day. There are plenty of people who still shudder when they recall working with him, and there are people who recall working with Laughlin fondly. Some who dealt with the good and the bad equally, and even tangled with him in court, still respected him as a filmmaker and an independent spirit. Whatever brought it all crashing to a halt – his own hubris, the powers that be, or both – his movies, and his story, are well worth revisiting today.

Laughlin’s place of birth has been listed as Minnesota in some places, others say Wisconsin, but according to the wikipedia version, he was born in Minnesota in 1931, and raised in Wisconsin.  Laughlin wouldn’t talk about his childhood much in interviews, but he didn’t have it easy growing up. His family was poor, often on welfare, and as he told New York magazine, “I thought it was incredibly magical that other families had cars…”

Laughlin grew into a big bruiser of a guy, and he described himself in his high school years as, “always the wild kid, the troublemaker, but still the leader.” He went on to play football in college, but after he saw Marlon Brando perform in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951) he decided to become an actor.  Laughlin’s wife and partner in the Billy Jack movies was Delores Taylor, who everyone called Dody. Taylor grew up on an Indian reservation in Rosebud South Dakota, and like Laughlin, grew up poor. Tom and Dody moved to Hollywood in 1955 when she was pregnant with their first child (Tom and Delores married in 1956, and are still married to this day).  Laughlin was still floundering financially once he started his own family, but then he was discovered by William Wellman, the famed director of the first A STAR IS BORN (1937), and the gangster classic THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931). Laughlin did stunts for Wellman, who gave him a role in his 1958 movie LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE. (Tom also had bit parts in GIDGET and SOUTH PACIFIC). Whatever money the Laughlins could spare went into renting movie equipment.

The Laughlins made two movies independently, THE PROPER TIME (1960) and THE YOUNG SINNER (1965), where Laughlin played a Christ-like figure. Neither film was successful but United Artists liked Laughlin and signed him under contract as an actor; Laughlin walked away after ten weeks. The Laughlins also opened a Montessori School in their home but Tom clashed with the parents and the school went under in 1965, once again leaving the family broke.  Laughlin’s fortunes finally turned around when he met a stewardess named Elizabeth James on a flight. He wanted to cast her in something, but wanted her to write the script as well. The movie she wrote, BORN LOSERS (1967) was America’s first introduction to Billy Jack.

In BORN LOSERS, Billy Jack battles a biker gang. The movie was released by American International Pictures (AIP), the legendary B movie company who created the biker movie genre a year earlier with THE WILD ANGELS (1966). Sam Arkoff was the co-founder of AIP, and in his autobiography, he remembered Laughlin approaching him about distributing BORN LISERS, which Laughlin had to stop shooting once he ran out of production money.

In those days, indie companies like AIP were their own entities, they weren’t branches of major studios like Miramax became with Disney. Arkoff liked the fact that Laughlin worked outside the system, just like AIP ran their own shop away from mainstream Hollywood.  Laughlin snuck a rough cut of the movie out of the lab to show AIP, and even in raw form Arkoff was impressed with the picture. Billy Jack “was a role fit for John Wayne, but Laughlin pulled it off exceptionally well.” AIP put up $300,000 to pay off the investors, and give Laughlin enough money to finish the movie.  Once BORN LOSERSwas released, “it became a major hit,” Arkoff recalled, “not only in the U.S., but world-wide. In one theater in Mexico City, the picture ran for more than a year.”

The next film in the series, simply titled BILLY JACK, was released by Warner Brothers in 1971. This time, Billy Jack is looking over and protecting the kids in “the Freedom School,” which provided a hippie alternative education, and it was obviously based on the school Tom and Dody ran in real life. Dody would co-star with Laughlin as Jean, the woman running the school, and the three Laughlin children, Teresa, Frank, and Christina, also appear as students. The Freedom School is a sanctuary for the local runaways and Native American kids. Along with Marlon Brando, Laughlin was another major actor who helped raise awareness of the plight of the American Indians in the ‘70’s. Some speculated that Laughlin believed he was Native American himself, but as he explained in the movies and in interviews, being an American Indian was a state of mind. “I am not Billy Jack,” he told People, “but Billy Jack lives in me.”

Anyone who’s ever taken a screenwriting class knows that conflict is story, and Jean provides the conflict at the heart of the Billy Jack films. Jean’s a pacifist, where Billy has no problem kickin’ some ass to settle things. He battles the local racist peckerwoods with kung fu, and he’d usually take off his boots to fight barefoot. “He was one of the first people to even delve into martial arts and try to put them into popular films,” says Beverly Walker, who worked with Laughlin on THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (1974). “He was really ahead of his time.”

Warner Brothers put together several ad campaigns for Billy Jack, and one cleverly explained the paradoxes of the film:

“Billy Jack Is: A bike riding, karate chopping, hip shooting, messenger of peace.”

Many have remarked about Laughlin’s charisma onscreen and off, and cinematographer John M. Stephens, who shot most of Billy Jack, was won over by Tom’s passion for the story. “When I went in to talk to him about it, we got along real good,” Stephens says. “I wanted that picture to work because I liked the script and what it stood for.”  Although BILLY JACK stayed close to its script, it often has an improvisational, cinema verte documentary feel. “Sometimes we shot the rehearsals and they didn’t know we were shooting,” Stephens says. “That’s what Tom liked, the naturalness of the conversations. I learned a lot working with Tom.”  Before production began, AIP liked the BILLY JACK script, and made a deal with Laughlin to distribute the film. But Arkoff wasn’t happy with the dailies he was seeing, and didn’t think it would cut together into a comprehensible movie. AIP let Laughlin go, and 20^th Century Fox bought out AIP’s interest in the film. But then Laughlin went to loggerheads with Fox over creative control, and after a standoff where Laughlin claimed he stole the soundtrack and threatened to erase a reel of it a week, Fox backed off and bought out Laughlin for $100,000.  Then Laughlin tried Warner Brothers. Former Warner executive Fred Weintraub recalled being the first at the studio to see BILLY JACK. After the success of EASY RIDER (1969), the major studios wanted to be in the hippie business, and Weintraub brought Woodstock to the company. “They wanted somebody who knew that market,” he says.  Weintraub recalls he was asked to take a look at BILLY JACK “because I had a long ponytail, and I was sort of the ‘hip’ one in those days. I thought it was interesting and different, there was nothing like it, and I was always someone who sought out things that were a little unusual. I recommended that Teddy (Warner chairman Ted Ashley) see it, and I suggested that Warners buy it.”

When Laughlin screened BILLY JACK for Ashley, his wife was moved to tears by the film, which apparently sealed the deal. Warner Brothers bought Billy Jack for $1.8 million (Billy Jack reportedly cost about $650,000).  “I didn’t know Laughlin at that point,” Weintraub continues. “I think if I had known him then, I would have said, ‘Hey guys, you have no idea what trouble you’re in for!’ Laughlin was a funny kind of guy to classify because you never really got to know him, and he came in loaded with all kinds of baggage.”  When Warners released BILLY JACK in 1971, Laughlin was furious the studio dumped the movie into drive-ins and secondary markets when he was promised an A release. “Tom had proof that it was shown as a second run B picture,” says Stephens. “He had pictures (of the theaters).”  Weintraub recalls “there wasn’t any great enthusiasm” for BILLY JACK at Warner Brothers, and nobody saw it as a potential blockbuster, but as far as Laughlin’s suit against Warners, “The studio treated it nicely, I don’t believe that nonsense.”

Usually when a studio bobbles a film’s release, the star or director will complain about it to anyone who will listen, then make their next movie somewhere else. Laughlin went a step further by suing Warner Brothers for $34 million, and deciding he’d re-release Billy Jack himself, “four walling” it regionally.  It’s not clear if Laughlin was the first to do this or not, but four walling meant renting a theater for a set fee, and whoever rents the theater keeps what the movie makes at the box office. When Laughlin re-released BILLY JACK to sixty-five theaters in 1973, it was a huge success, making over $20 million dollars, and he split the take with Warner Brothers 50/50 (Try to imagine a major movie star or a director other than Lucas or Spielberg getting this kind of split today).  The theme for the opening and closing credits of Billy Jack was the anti-war anthem, “One Tin Soldier,” which was a minor hit before Laughin used it in the film, and the song made several trips back to the charts with the BILLY JACK re-issues.

“One Tin Solider” was written by the songwriting team of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter. Lambert, now a real estate agent, co-wrote with Potter “Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I Got)” for the Four Tops, “Don’t Pull Your Love Out” for Joe Frank and Reynolds, and he also produced Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” album, as well as the song “Baby Come Back” by Player.  “One Tin Soldier” was one of the first songs Lambert and Potter wrote together, and they originally wrote it for a Canadian band called The Original Caste, who specialized in social message tunes. “It was adopted by most of the anti-war groups that would demonstrate,” Lambert says. “’One Tin Soldier’ was often among the many songs they would sing in those rallies .’”  The song was a big hit in Canada, and a modest hit in America, before Laughlin gave Lambert a call about a year after “One Tin Soldier” was first released.  “I didn’t know who he was,” Lambert recalls, “but he was telling me he had been camping in Canada, and he heard this song. He said, ‘My God, it sounds as if it’s something that was written specifically for my film.’ He was amazed that in the middle of nowhere he heard this thing on the radio.”  For various business reasons, Laughlin couldn’t use the Original Caste version, so the song was re-recorded for the movie by a group named Coven. “Since Billy Jack was independently produced,  we had some questions whether it would find its audience,” Lambert continues. “But there was something very powerful about the movie, and we recognized it would help find its way to a young audience, which is in fact what happened.”

With the money pouring in from the Billy Jack re-release, the Laughlin family now lived in a Brentwood estate with an expensive security system, two Doberman guard dogs, and a screening room. Laughlin also set up offices in Culver City and launched Billy Jack Enterprises, where he had over 100 employees and a huge overhead. But most importantly, Laughlin next set to work on the next chapter of the Billy Jack saga, which began shooting in March 1973.  THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (1974) was a nearly three-hour epic, again financed by the Laughlins, who put up $2.5 million of their own money to make the film, and about $3 million for advertising.  All in, the film cost the Laughlins about $7.8 million.

AIP kept in touch with Laughlin, and Arkoff recalled, “We certainly maintained mutual respect for each other.” After the huge success of the Billy Jack re-release, AIP gave Laughlin development money for THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK, and had an option to distribute the picture.  When Beverly Walker was contacted about working on TRIAL, she’d never even heard of the Billy Jack movies. As a publicist, Walker worked such films as AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s hippie epic ZABRISKIE POINT (1971). She also worked for a PR firm that handled the New York Film Festival, as well as The Museum of Modern Art Film Program. “Films of a kind of haughty nature,” Walker says. “Tom wasn’t in that kind of place. He was really never accepted by the Eastern people or serious film critics.” Nevertheless, once they met, Laughlin and Walker hit it off immediately. When Walker learned what the Billy Jack concept was about, she discovered she was “completely at one with Tom’s political views.” For what was going on in the country, the Billy Jack movies “hit the zeitgeist,” Walker continues. “It hit the nail right on the head.” Walker also admired Laughlin’s abilities as a filmmaker. As the driving force behind the Billy Jack movies, Laughlin was truly an auteur, the fancy French term for a total filmmaker, where a movie is the end result of one person’s vision.

“Absolutely he was an auteur,” says Walker. “He was very underestimated on a lot of different levels. He’s a very talented filmmaker, and he’s very ballsy. He should be spoken of on the same level as Francis Coppola, George Lucas, and Dennis Hopper. I think he was as important as any of them, and arguably more important in terms of reflecting the times.”  Walker was initially hired to write an official making of “diary” of the shoot, but once the associate producer on TRIAL got fired, Walker moved into the position, even though she had never produced a film before. “I think it was a title without any significant responsibilities,” Walker says. “I just did whatever he asked me to do, and I remember that casting was a big part of it. I was casting little parts, not extras, but people who had one or two lines. I think he liked having somebody he could talk to and throw ideas around with.”

Shooting locations for THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK included the Grand Canyon and John Ford’s beloved Monument Valley in Utah. “Shooting in the Grand Canyon was one of the most memorable experiences in my life,” Walker says. “We used helicopters like taxis to get around. We’d go on top of mesas, and fly down to the floor of the valley of all these fantastic, iconic places.”  Before TRIAL opened in over a thousand theaters, Laughlin also launched a huge saturation advertising campaign on TV, which was considered déclassé at the time. If a movie was advertised heavily on TV, or opened in too many theaters at once, it was assumed the movie was a piece of shit, and the studio was trying to take the money and run. As Laughlin told reporter Marie Brenner, “I hope people aren’t beginning to think that just because a movie is advertised a lot on TV, it’s junk.”

Laughlin also got advances from each theater that would play THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK for $8-10,000 each, and according to one report, the movie was in the black before it was released. As with saturation advertising, opening over a thousand theaters opening day wasn’t done for major movies then. A big release, like say THE GODFATHER, would open in the major cities first, then make its way down to the suburbs, then finally wound up in the secondary markets like the drive-ins.  Laughlin sneak previewed the film for potential distributors in July 1974. As reported in Box Office magazine and Variety, at a North Hollywood preview, fans began lining up at 10 in the morning for a 7:40 P.M. preview at the 900-seat Lankershim Theater. When Billy Jack first appeared in the film the audience applauded; during the fight scenes they shouted at the screen, “Go Jack!,” and “Get down, Billy!” Once it was released on November 13, 1974, THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK was a big success, making $35 million at the box office.

But it wasn’t long before Laughlin’s reputation for volatility started reaching the press. Throughout cinema history, a number of directors have earned reputations for being tyrants and screamers, and Laughlin had quite a rep for going ballistic himself. John A. Stephens has certainly worked with tough directors in his career (William Friedkin and John Frankenheimer come to mind), and he recalled Laughlin losing his cool several times during the BILLY JACK shoot, but it wasn’t an every day occurrence.  During the TRIAL OF BILLY JACK shoot, however, Laughlin’s tirades and firings grew more frequent, and one magazine profile even captured Laughlin flying into a Christian Bale style rant at an underling: “You have destroyed my creative processes by walking into this meeting. If I were Paul Newman, I’d throw you off the set. If I were Clint Eastwood, I’d have your ass kicked off this picture.”

Laughlin also became embroiled in a number of lawsuits, and at one point was spending $500,000 a year in legal fees. AIP ended up suing Laughlin because they had an option to distribute THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK, but Laughlin claimed he was going to do it himself with the help of his Native American friends (the film ultimately landed at United Artists).  When AIP took Laughlin to court, they also decided to re-release BORN LOSERS to ride off the success of the Billy Jack series, and it did big business again. Laughlin had a piece of the movie, and was making money off the re-release, but he countersued AIP for “encroaching on his property.”  Arkoff and Laughlin tried to settle things out of court, but several meetings set up to try and make peace went nowhere. Laughlin even proposed that Arkoff should sell AIP to him, but no money would exchange hands. Laughlin then explained once the word got out that he owned AIP, their stock would go through the roof and make Arkoff a fortune.  The courts sided with AIP, but any ads for BORN LOSERS had to state twice that it was a reissue. Laughlin also had to pay AIP $2 million for breach of contract for going to United Artists with THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK. which came out of his cut of the BORN LOSERS reissue.

In spite of his troubles, there was no reason to think Billy Jack wouldn’t keep riding high, but it wasn’t long before the bottom fell out. While the people loved Billy Jack, Laughlin didn’t get much love from the critics, who often found him a pompous, self-important blow hard. He told Newsweek, “Anyone who really is good at tapping into the deeper level of the collective psyche is almost never appreciated in his lifetime or ever.”  In the spring of 1975, Laughlin re-released THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK with his infamous Billy Jack Vs. the Critics campaign. To win, you had to write the best 300-word essay on why the critics were out of touch with what moviegoers liked (several thousand entries came in to Billy Jack headquarters).  Tom’s war with the critics notwithstanding, the reissue of THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK flopped, some speculating because it came out again too soon after the movie’s initial winter release, and Laughlin pulled it after a week.

That October, Laughlin had a whole new movie ready for release, again through United Artists, called THE MASTER GUNFIGHTER (1975). It was a remake of a 1969 Japanese film called GOYOKIN, and although Gunfighter was westernized, it featured Laughlin fighting with samurai swords on horseback.  THE MASTER GUNFIGHTER is a beautiful looking film; the locations and camerawork alone are worth the price of admission. Again, the Laughlins put up the money for the production and advertising budgets, costing them a total of $7 million, but the film didn’t perform at the box office, and wasn’t available for home viewing until it was finally released on DVD in 2002.

By 1977, the fourth movie in the Billy Jack series, BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON, was ready for release. The problem was Laughlin couldn’t get anyone to release it. As usual, the Laughlins financed the film itself, which reportedly cost $7.5 million, but it never found a distributor, and the movie remained unseen for twenty years.  Like another icon of ‘70’s cinema, Francis Ford Coppola, Laughlin bet everything he had, and lost. After Laughlin lost his fortune on the failure of THE MASTER GUNFIGHTER, and the Washington production costs, he owed millions to creditors, who attached his Brentwood home as collateral. He also sued Warner Brothers again, this time for selling BILLY JACK to network television.  Laughlin refused to sell the film to TV for years because he wanted to keep re-releasing it in theaters. He claimed Warner Brothers pressured him to sell the movie to T.V. while he was making BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON and was in dire straits financially (the suit was settled in 1978).

Laughlin certainly made a lot of enemies over time, and probably couldn’t find many to help him when he was in need, but by the time Washington was ready for release, the country, and the movie business, had changed. Two of Laughlin’s biggest targets, Nixon and Vietnam, were both thankfully over-with, and the unprecedented success of Lucas’ space opera proved that audiences wanted happier, escapist entertainment after being beaten down by the war and political corruption.  Still, Walker felt there would have been a place for Billy Jack at the end of the ‘70’s. “BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON was a good movie,” Walker says, “and the spirit of the times was still such that it would have been successful.”

Once BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON went down, Laughlin disappeared from the pop culture radar, and became a lost relic of his era. From time to time there would be press reports about planned comebacks, and grandiose plans of recreating his independent empire. Another Billy Jack film, THE RETURN OF BILLY JACK, went into production in late 1985, and reportedly there was still major studio interest in a Billy Jack comeback (Laughlin met with Paramount about potentially distributing the film in 1986), but the production ran out of money and was never completed.  Laughlin also for President in 1992, 2004 and 2008, and these days he also has a YouTube channel where he’s still speaking out against political corruption, and shilling his DVD box set, which features all four Billy Jack movies.  In 2002, Variety reported of another attempt at bringing Billy Jack back, this time with Laughlin passing the torch to Keanu Reeves of all, ah, actors. The production companies Jersey Films (who co-produced PULP FICTION), and 3 Arts (who co-produced I AM LEGEND), were in talks with Laughlin, who now controls the Billy Jack rights, and Reeves was looking at Billy Jack as his first potential movie after finishing the Matrix trilogy.

Laughlin ultimately made a deal with Intermedia, the company that made Takashi Mike’s ONE MISSED CALL (2003), and predictably enough it ended in a lawsuit, with the rights to BILLY JACK bouncing back to Laughlin in 2004. After Mel Gibson’s self-financed success with THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), Laughlin was hoping to bring Billy Jack back in a similar way in 2005. As with every other attempted Billy Jack comeback, nothing came of it.  Hollywood manager / producer Gavin Polone, who knows a thing or two about being a rebellious outcast, tried to help Laughlin come back because he was a big fan of Billy Jack growing up, but when things fell apart, he lamented to the New York Times that Laughlin still couldn’t work within the system.  Polone shouldn’t have been surprised. Fitting in with the system was never what Tom Laughlin, and the Billy Jack character, was ever about. “Tom was very anti-establishment,” Walker says. “That, above all, is the dominant theme of his movies. The content of the movies, they way they were made, the way they were distributed; it was all part of the piece. He couldn’t have done it any other way.”

Copyright 2009, David Konow, All Rights Reserved

I’ve been thinking about Vincente Minnelli’s films a lot lately. It started around the holidays after I caught one of my favorite Minnelli musicals, Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), playing on TCM one evening. I’d seen the film many times before but I paid closer attention to the lush sets, beautiful costumes and meticulous staging. I became mesmerized by the bright pops of color and the unexpected ways that characters mingled with their environments. In the following weeks it seemed like Minnelli’s films were haunting me. In the past few months I’ve caught snippets of Father of the Bride (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Tea and Sympathy (1956) playing on television and I’ve been obsessively reading Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment edited by Joe McElhaney. Last week I decided to revisit another one of my favorite Vincente Minnelli films, his metaphysical musical ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (1970). The deceased director will be celebrating his 108th birthday on February 28th and I thought it would be as good a time as any to share a few of my thoughts about this vastly underrated film.

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In its 11th year, the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, which runs February 18th – March 4th, is as staunchly idiosyncratic as ever. The slate is chosen by the venerable magazine’s contributors and editors, with an assist from the Asian genre aficionados at Subway Cinema, who are co-presenting three features. Pulling from brows both high and low, they open with the historical excavations of Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew and close with the horror kicks of James Wan’s Insidious and the  morbid comedy of John Landis’ Burke and Hare. In between lies an entire range of obscure festival titles (El Sicario), forgotten repertory gems (Fassbinder’s I Only Want You to Love Me, Peter Yates’ Robbery) and the latest philosophical doc from Werner Herzog, the 3D Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Herzog’s film is one of the few with U.S. theatrical distribution (from IFC Films), so for many of these titles this series is the only opportunity to see them on the big screen.

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The independent film Winter’s Bone received four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture, which illustrates one reason why the Oscars matter. Oscar recognition ensures increased publicity and therefore a wider audience for this film in contrast to other well-done indies not lucky enough to catch the spotlight.

Set in southern Missouri, Winter’s Bone captures contemporary life in the Ozarks, where the remnants of a rural-based, traditional lifestyle clash against the vices of the modern world. Jennifer Lawrence earned her Best Actress nomination as 17-year-old Ree Dolly, who tends to her family, including a psychologically disturbed mother and two younger siblings. When their father is arrested for producing methamphetamine, he puts their house and land up for his bail bond and then disappears. Ree sets out to find him before the Dollys are kicked off the land that has been in their family for generations. Based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone authentically depicts the dark side of the contemporary rural South without resorting to the ugly stereotyping that marks so many films set below the Mason-Dixon line.

Director Debra Granik and cinematographer Michael McDonough took great pains to ensure authenticity by shooting on location in southern Missouri, noting in the DVD commentary, “We toyed with the idea of filming in other states, but ultimately came to the conclusion that shooting in Missouri was crucial, more important even than the aspect of winter. . southern Missouri is a muse for the author, Daniel Woodrell, and there’s no way that this story could be detached from its home turf.” The commentary is filled with statements about the way the locale and landscape shaped the characters and material, with McDonough declaring, “The landscape is a character.” While location shooting is often crucial to the atmosphere, authenticity, and sense of character in films, the characters in Winter’s Bone are defined by it, their motivations drawn from it, and the drama shaped by it. The same could be said of the actual residents of southern Missouri who—despite poverty, hardships, and exploitation—still live in the rural hill country of their ancestors.

THE FOOTHILLS OF APPALACHIA IN TYLER COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA--ASHBY GATRELL'S STOMPING GROUNDS

The use of locale and landscape in Winter’s Bone reminded me of a long-forgotten Civil War drama shot in Tyler and Doddridge Counties in West Virginia, where my extended family still live. No Drums, No Bugles starred a young Martin Sheen as Ashby Gatrell, a soldier who deserted both the Confederate and Union armies. He spent three years in the hills, living off the land and avoiding human contact less he be captured by either side. No Drums, No Bugles was directed as an independent production in 1972 by Clyde Ware, who hailed from West Union in Doddridge County. Ware, who was a respected director of tv westerns, such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza, died last year. With his death, it is unlikely that No Drums, No Bugles will ever see a DVD release. I have an old VHS copy of the film that is so worn, the image drops out in several scenes. When I watched the film recently, I noticed that the content reflected the issues and politics of the Vietnam era, but the low-budget indie style—with its emphasis on authentic locations—seemed remarkably contemporary.

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You wouldn’t think there would be a connection between these two people but they were linked forever in 1953 over the film adaptation of Rachel L. Carson’s award winning book, The Sea Around Us. Carson was a respected marine biologist and an unusually eloquent nature writer whose first book, Under the Sea Wind, received critical acclaim in 1941. Irwin Allen, on the other hand, was relatively unknown at the time. A journalism graduate of Columbia University, he was trying to break into the film industry and wasn’t yet famous as the producer of such sci-fi TV series as Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel or as the reigning specialist of disaster genre films like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Swarm (1978).          READ MORE

FOR THE LOVE OF FILM NOIR’S BLOGATHON: a weeklong multi-platform tribute to film noir, as a way of generating awareness of the Film Noir Foundations’s laudable efforts to restore Cy Endfield’s THE SOUND OF FURY.  Click this link to make your donation to that worthy cause—and keep reading here for a look back at the Very First Film Noir.

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I was born in 1961 but I’ll always be a child of the Fifties – genre-wise.  It took me a long time to come around to that conclusion.  I saw my first horror, science fiction and fantasy movies in the late 1960s but didn’t become discerning, didn’t identify le fantastique as my meat, until well into the 1970s.  I duly reported for all horror films through the 1980s and had a reasonably good time but by 1990 I felt like I do after a visit with the kids to In-n-Out burger… kind of bloated and disappointed in myself.  A good picture still manages to come along once in a while but now that I’m at the midway point of my life (assuming I live to 100) I find I don’t stray too much from that block of cinematic time between the silents and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968).  Yes, exceptions do apply but not so many and fewer, it seems, every year.  I still love my unbridled 30s horror movies and the well-oiled factory product that was Hollywood horror of the 1940s and 60s fright flicks continue to give me a nostalgic tingle, as do the occasional 70s spookshows… but darned if it isn’t the horror and sci-fi of the Eisenhower era, the Cold War and the Atomic Age that really sticks with me now, and to which I want to return most often for a little cinematic comfort food. READ MORE