Tom Laughlin as Billy Jack

Any boomer worth his salt remembers the Billy Jack franchise of films. The tough hippie with a heart of gold. They were a big deal back in the early seventies. Everyone had heard of Billy Jack. The page of “recent deaths” of celebrities in the Sunday paper had a couple of interesting tidbits in the article about Tom Laughlin’s life.

They said his “production and marketing of Billy Jack set a standard for breaking the rules on and off the screen”. And, “a long struggle by Laughlin to gain control of the low-budget, self-financed movie, a model for guerilla filmmaking”. That’s interesting, why would you have to have a legal struggle to “gain control” of a self-financed movie? Why would you have to fight and scratch to make movies at all? Isn’t that the purpose of Hollywood?

That caused me to go to Wikipedia and read up on Laughlin. Hard as it may be to believe, it kind of sounds like Warner Brothers tried to cheat him out of various rights to his property, including television rights. I know it sounds ridiculous that a Hollywood studio would try to cheat someone, but that’s the way it sounds.

Searching for the cause of this dislike of Laughlin, I looked at his earlier career. I saw the 1960 Christian film, The Young Sinner. Then there was the 1963 Christian film, We Are All Christ. Then there was the 1965 Christian film that was never completed about a Catholic priest named Father William DuBay. So I can’t imagine what it would be that would cause a young Christian in Hollywood to have trouble making films. I’m stumped.

Hollywood says they  just “make what people want to see”, so you would have thought they would embrace the wildly popular Laughlin. The guy who made huge profits on barely financed films. Nope, they fought tooth and nail to stifle him, shut him down and rip him off, I can’t imagine why.