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