The Return Of Billy Jack

Tom Laughlin has set out to do for videocassettes what Amway did for household products and Domino's did for pizza

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TONIGHT, SOME 20 EARNEST CITIZENS have filled the folding chairs in the living room of this house on a quiet side street in Hartford. Among them are a truck driver, a retired owner of an automobile dealership, a high-school teacher, an educational consultant, a secretary, and a retired music teacher. All in all, with pizza and soda in the kitchen, it is the kind of congenial gathering favored by neighborhood-improvement associations. And it is precisely this impression that makes the assembly's true purpose all the more incredible.

It is not trash collection or canine litter control tht they have on their minds this night, but rather revolution and profit. The insurgency is aimed at overthrowing the American motion-picture establishment, some 3,000 miles away in Hollywood. And to accomplish that, they contemplate an innovation that could transform the $7.2-billion-a-year videocassette industry, whose growth has been called "the largest unforeseen ascending curve in the history of visual entertainment."

With us tonight, freshly arrived from Los Angeles, is the creator of this grand ambition. "Whoever controls distribution in the video industry," he is saying, "will also control the film industry." As he speaks, a vision of new economic possibilities begins to take shape, and at its center is a vertically integrated corporation featuring an assortment of business activities that will include motion-picture production, videocassette distribution, wholesaling, a chain of video and electronic equipment superstores, catalog sales, and television home shopping.

Nor is that all of it -- or even the best of it.

The real secret of this new company's success, he is saying, shall be found in a network of 300,000 independent distributors who will do for videocassettes more or less what Amway did for household products and Domino's did for pizza -- namely, they will deliver them to your house. And it is through this process that a direct link will be forged from the corporation through the distributor to the consumer, creating a system that finally harnesses the power of the home-video explosion in ways that would make any workaday movie mogul absolutely delirious. "The reason I'm running around the country meeting in living rooms," our speaker says, "is because I want to build a new studio that's bigger than a Paramount or a Twentieth Century-Fox." And what lies behind this driving ambition? "So I can make films my way."

At this point you might begin to think him a bit unusual, this visionary egotist who has traveled across the country to spout what would normally be considered outrageous blather at people he's never even met. And you would be right.

Do you remember Billy Jack?

In the early 1970s, Billy Jack intruded on the American consciousness as the hero in a movie of the same name. He was a singular character -- a mystical, half-Indian Vietnam veteran capable of unleashing devastating karate kicks when provoked. In his better moods, Billy liked to wander around practicing enigmatic facial expressions often suggesting pained existential foreboding. It was a character type later to be cloned in such Billy-come-lately heroes as Dirty Harry and John Rambo.

Billy, you may recall, wore jeans, a black T-shirt, and a signature black Navaho hat with a wide, round brim and a rounded crown circled by a beaded band. Thus attired, and armed with kick and grimace, Billy appeared in the Southwest near an Indian reservation to protect the Freedom School, its headmistress, Jean, and its student body of disadvantaged youths from the mindless persecution of local rednecks and lunatics. In his own way, Billy preached the Golden Rule, but he gave it some bite. He did not put up with any crap -- kick, chop, kick.

The film, arriving as it did during a turbulent period in our history, found a young and enthusiastic audience who themselves wanted to kick a few butts and who saw Billy as a champion of their own discontent. Billy Jack became a cult hero, and Tom Laughlin, who wrote, produced, and directed the movie and starred as Billy, became a multimillionaire and an authentic Hollywood celebrity who once had to be escorted out of Disneyland under guard because of the surging crowd around him and his family.

And that's who stands before us now -- Tom Laughlin, the Billy Jack of old.

Well . . . almost of old.

Unfortunately, Billy's been a little down on his luck recently.

The early summer of 1987 has not gone as planned. Superficially, Laughlin's circumstances still suggest the life of the successful Hollywood celebrity. His estate in the affluent Los Angeles community of Brentwood hints after Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and features such show biz accoutrements as swimming pool, tennis court, ice-cream bar, indoor gym, and, of course, screening room. And Laughlin himself is sitting at his familiar spot behind the narrow, 30-foot-long conference table he uses as a desk.

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