Billy Jack

Billy Jack is a 1960s–70s American film series featuring Billy Jack, a half-Indian martial artist and Vietnam veteran who protects Indians, hippies, and young people from the tyranny of The Man, and teaches peace through the repeated use of bone-crunching violence.
Ex-Green Beret martial arts expert Tom "Laughin'" Laughlin directed, wrote, and produced the series as well as playing the title character. His performance as a hippie-avenging hero led to him twice becoming a perennial candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
==Films==
===The Born Losers (1967)===
The first in the series, The Born Losers is a B-movie about a biker gang terrorizing a small town of hippies, and it's up to Billy Jack to save the day. It was largely based on an incident where members of the Hell's Angels were arrested for raping five teenage girls in Monterey, California. Due to it being rather generic and routine, the movie is not as well known as its sequels.
===Billy Jack (1971)===
The most famous, and probably most watchable, movie in the series. Originally written in 1954, the plot revolves around Billy Jack protecting the "Freedom School", a hippie school for runaways, troubled youth, and other cool cats on an Indian reservation in Arizona, from lame-o square locals who are under the indoctrination of The Man and hate the school's "peace 'n' love 'n' stuff" values. Basically, it's what you'd get if you took left-wing politics riding the post-Woodstock mood, Native American shamanism, vigilante justice, martial arts, and improvisational street theater and put them all together into a blender. It also has a rather familiar ending, where our lone anti-hero holes up in a compound and fends off law enforcement for a few days.
===The Trial of Billy Jack (1974)===
Trial continues directly from the events of the last film, with Billy Jack in prison and the students at the Freedom School rebuilding and angering the locals once again with their efforts to bring truth to power. Watch our intrepid vision-questing shaman confront cobra spirits, turn red, turn blue, punch Jesus in the face, and more. This sequel was more ambitious than its predecessor, being nearly three hours long, totally paranoid, and attempting to tap into the outrage over child abuse, Watergate, and Kent State by portraying white people, the U.S. government, and conservatives as so gosh-darned cartoonishly evil. To demonstrate Laughlin's utter lack of shame, Trial climaxes with the National Guard massacring the students, with one Guardsman shooting a little boy with no hands in the back as he tries to rescue his pet rabbit.
After Trial, Laughlin attempted to branch out from the Billy Jack series with The Master Gunfighter in 1975. The Master Gunfighter, a remake of the 1969 Japanese samurai film Goyôkin reimagined as a Western (but still featuring samurai swordfighting and Eastern-ish costumes for some reason), was a dud, causing Laughlin to return to Billy Jack with his next movie...
===Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977)===
...that movie being a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and a cheap one at that. This film stars several semi-famous actors (Luci Arnaz, E.G. Marshall, Pat O'Brien), as Billy Jack trades vigilante justice for filibustering, and is somehow allowed into the U.S. Senate despite all his anti-government shenanigans in the previous two movies. Here the crux of the plot is nuclear reactors and pollution, as opposed to over-the-top Republican supervillains; since the Vietnam draft was over and Nixon was out by 1977, Laughlin desperately needed something else to direct his ire at.
===Further efforts===
Laughlin made several attempts to get a fifth Billy Jack film off the ground, none of which went anywhere. He came closest with The Return of Billy Jack, whose plot would have involved Billy Jack taking on a child pornography ring in New York. Production began in 1985, but Laughlin banged his head on a low-raise ceiling while filming Billy Jack's church confessional scene, and developed a swelling head-lump that forced him to halt production. By the time he recovered, he had gone for broke, with only a minute of footage completed.
Laughlin kept at it until his death in 2013, trying to restart production and also having unrealized plans for a TV series.
==Theme song==
Billy Jacks syrupy, folky theme song, "One Tin Soldier", became a Top 20 hit for the one-hit wonder band Coven, with hippie lyrics about religious hypocrisy: "Go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat a friend. Do it in the name of heaven, you can justify it in the end. There won't be any trumpets blowing, come the judgement day. On the bloody morning after, one tin soldier rides away." Coven's earlier record, the occult-themed Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls, featured songs about witchcraft and Satanism, including a Black Mass performed in Latin. This raised ire from numerous conservative watchdog groups, as if the movie's hippie themes weren't enough.
Teresa Laughlin (Tom Laughlin and co-star Delores Taylor's daughter) performs a stirring rendition of the song in The Trial of Billy Jack.
==Release==
In 2000, the four Billy Jack films would be released in a DVD box set. The quality of these DVDs is questionable; the films appear to be 4:3 pan-and-scan versions.
==Reception and legacy==
The Born Losers was a fairly inept and apolitical film, that was quickly forgotten by critics and overshadowed by its sequels.
Despite its piss poor production values (badly dubbed-in dialogue, choppy editing, scenes where the actors are clearly winging it, etc.), critics gave Billy Jack a pass due to its street theater improv humor and campy entertainment value. While its early '70s counterculture politics caused it to become dated and forgotten rather quickly, the film's greatest legacy was arguably behind-the-scenes, in how it revolutionized film advertising and distribution. Billy Jack was largely a hit through Laughlin's own efforts; after it flopped in its initial release, he sued Warner Bros. to get the rights to distribute the film himself. He did just that in 1973, upon which it was a smash hit, largely through his use of targeted TV ads rather than the print advertising that the major studios relied on at the time. By the end of the '70s, any film studio worth a damn had figured out how to market their films on television.
The Trial of Billy Jack was panned by critics, who thought it was a preachy mess and lacked any quotable lines or coherence, unlike its predecessor which received perfectly lukewarm reviews and was at least fun in a campy way. Laughlin shot back by organizing an essay contest, where fans could write rebuttals to the terrible reviews his movie received; unfortunately, no convincing rebuttals were produced, other than ones that consisted of "Peace and love, peace and love" being repeated over and over. However, like its predecessor, Trial was a box office hit; Laughlin pulled a similar distribution trick to the last movie with this one, opening the movie nationally in over a thousand theaters, a distribution strategy that was unheard of then but quickly became standard for studio releases big and small.
Billy Jack Goes Washington did even worse, not even having the box-office success that Trial did. It was so bad that it didn't even see a widespread release, unlike the first three films (something Laughlin, naturally, blamed on a government conspiracy), and killed both the series and Laughlin's career as a filmmaker. Legend has it that, because the film exposed the corruption in Washington at the time, it pissed off enough people to get it banned.
For all its left-wing counter-culture politics, Billy Jack is probably partly responsible for all the right-wing vigilante movies which since followed, starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal. The continuum goes roughly like this: Billy Jack → Walking Tall → Death Wish → First Blood → Rambo: First Blood Part II → On Deadly Ground etc.
===Life imitates art===
Life imitated art in 1973, just two years after the release of Billy Jack, when American Indian Movement gunmen took over Wounded Knee, South Dakota and held off federal agents before surrendering, a scenario that mirrored that of the movie.
In a bizarre irony given that Billy Jack was filmed in Prescott, Arizona, in June 2010 there was a controversy over a mural at a Prescott school. It seems the local yokels didn't like the mural depicting black and Hispanic children, so the principal agreed the childrens' faces would be repainted to make the nonwhite kids... white! At least he didn't do it by pouring flour all over them.
==See also==
*Grand Funk Railroad
*Watergate
*Kent State
*Hippie
*Billy Joel
Category:Films
Category:1960s
Category:1970s