In the Hall of Jabootu Greats, no one, save perhaps Richard Burton, looms as large as writer / director / producer / actor Tom Laughlin. Indeed, Mr. Laughlin’s small handful of films, especially his four Billy Jack pictures, were in a real sense the meat and potatoes of this site. Reviews of films like The Master Gunfighter, Billy Jack Goes to Washington and especially The Trial of Billy Jack are part and parcel of whatever this site has been. Of his work, well, it’s there in the reviews. I don’t know what more I can possibly add.
Born in 1931, Mr. Laughlin gained early, if local, fame as a high school and college football player. Fittingly, there was an eligibility issue at one point, perhaps his first run in with The Powers That Be. He attended the University of South Dakota, where he met his future wife and lifelong partner, Delores Taylor. Ms. Taylor would be at his side for all future endeavors, most notably as his costar and romantic partner in the Billy Jack movies.
Mr. Laughlin caught the acting and directing bugs at USD, and went on to a spotty career of episodic TV and genre movie appearances. He eventually left acting and founded a Montessori school. This failed in 1965, leading him back to Hollywood. Soon he would make The Born Losers, the film that introduced the Billy Jack character. The character wasn’t fully realized, or made much of an impact though, until 1971 when he made Billy Jack.
The film was quickly dumped by Warner Bros. Mr. Laughlin, hugely dissatisfied, by the studio’s treatment of the picture, sued to gain control of it. He won, and his own technique of limited releases supported with massive TV ads, turned the film into a monster hit and influenced movie release patterns for decades to come.
This new clout allowed Mr. Laughlin to make his magnum opus, the three hour The Trial of Billy Jack. In retrospect it’s a bizarre document of his time, rife with borderline insane political paranoia. But it struck a chord with the youth of the time, and was a gigantic financial success.
As expected, though, hubris caught up with Mr. Laughlin. His moment in time, like that of so many political radicals of the period, passed quickly with the ending of the Viet Nam war and with the forced exit of President Nixon. His next Billy Jack film, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, was a mess that was released at a time when interest in such things was waning.
In what is perhaps Mr. Laughlin’s most embarrassing moment, he perhaps inevitably saw the hand of political conspiracy in the film’s financial failure. Decades later he would still relay stories of powerful political figures who supposedly sabotaged the, it must be said, laughably bad and ponderous film.
Part of its failure, it must be said, was due to Mr. Laughlin’s admirable intent to turn away from the rather hypocritical martial arts aspect of the character, which in truth was always the main driver of the character’s success. If Billy Jack was a warrior for peace, and Mr. Laughlin was always in the end more interested in the peace, his audience was more interested in the warrior.
In the decades following, Mr. Laughlin was a regular minor presence on television every once in a while, due to his ongoing serial runs for the presidency. Needless to say, nothing much ever came from these.
In nothing else, Mr. Laughlin’s work pretty much defined action films for decades to come, most notably in the hands of Steven Seagal, whose work pretty much just ripped off the Billy Jack movies wholesale.
Mr. Laughlin was 82 at the time of his passing.
