But then it comes to him. . . .
The idea to revolutionize the videocassette industry, finance his own studio, and get his film made that way. . . .
If you can't beat the industry, you can always become the industry.
It was the long way around, true -- kind of like a man who, because he wanted a room for the night, had to build the Waldorf-Astoria first. But tapping into the mother lode of videocassette dollars promised a far more lasting financial freedom to make his films his way then any one picture could ever hope to provide. What's more, he was one of the few people around who could actually walk in off the street, propose to renovate an entire industry, and still merit serious attention. After all, he'd developed the techniques to do it before -- not just once, but twice.
More than just making films, Laughlin has always wanted to transform the way Hollywood does business. During his career, he has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to introduce innovative business techniques in motion-picture financing, marketing, and distribution. Fully 20 years ago, Laughlin set out on a quest to build a studio of his own based on what he claims is a new economic model -- one that could free the industry of the boom-or-bust mentality and persistent management purges so often associated with the business practices of the major Hollywood studios. That journey has been anything but smooth. Along the way, Laughlin has, at various times, found it necessary to question the motives and integrity of the Hollywood establishment, both in the pages of the industry press and in the California courts. As a result, and depending on who is speaking, Laughlin is either an imaginative, resourceful, occasionally heroic maverick unafraid to confront the powers that be, or he is a combative, litigious, and eccentric loner with a huge chip on his shoulder.
In retrospect, it seems that the Fates had never intended him to rise smoothly to eminence. Time and again, progress toward his dream studio was set upon by wind shears of unexpected turbulence.
"Tom's been up and down all his life," says William Wellman Jr., an actor, writer, and free-lance producer who has known Laughlin for 30 years. "It's a big, giant yo-yo world he lives in."
Most of the agony and ecstasy since transcribed as Laughlin's public profile now fills four manila folders with newspaper and magazine clips at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the earliest entries Laughlin leaves Milwaukee, where he grew up, and arrives in Hollywood during the late 1950s with his pregnant wife, Delores, and $100 and change. From there and well into the '60s, Laughlin's career followed the usual path traveled by aspiring actors, including relatively obscure supporting roles in several motion pictures. But Laughlin was not merely an actor; he was a student of industry economics and a theoretician with simmering entrepreneurial inclinations of his own. It was a side of Laughlin that first saw the light of day when, in 1965, he favored each of the major Hollywood studios with a copy of a report he had written entitled "Corporate Organization in the Film Industry." In this 84-page analysis, Laughlin ranged widely, considering industry problems and recommending specific solutions in management technique and corporate structure. It was not at all the kind of thing usually expected of a supporting actor, and apparently it fell on deaf ears. Only one studio executive responded with a brief chat over a sandwich in his office. Laughlin -- young, aggressive, not without an awareness of his own destiny -- was not discouraged.
By 1971, Laughlin was considerably less obscure, and if you looked closely he could be spotted scrabbling along the slopes directly beneath the stormy peaks of Hollywood notoriety. Laughlin the actor had become Laughlin the producer, a promising filmmaker who had managed to turn out a few moderately successful, very low-budget movies. Those early efforts, in turn, enabled him to raise nearly $750,000 for yet another movie, the one he seems to have been born to make.
Laughlin had waited a long time to produce Billy Jack. The idea for the character actually first occurred to him nearly 15 years earlier during a visit to Delores's hometown of Winner, S.D. There, on the edge of the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Laughlin saw one too many examples of whites abusing Indians. Not only was Billy Jack the embodiment of his own outrage over that particular experience, but the character also came very close to expressing the elemental stuff of Laughlin's own considerable personality. "A man or woman," Laughlin says, "who does not go his or her own way in life is nothing."
What that philosophy actually meant to Laughlin in practice was about to become apparent. For no sooner was Billy Jack released than Laughlin was in court suing its distributor, Warner Bros., for "dumping" the film at drive-ins and obscure neighborhood theaters rather than booking it in the better venues as had been promised. For two years, the lawsuit churned in its own bile until Laughlin proposed an alternate solution: if the studio would provide advertising support, he would distribute the picture himself. If the arrangement succeeded, Laughlin and Warner would split the profits. But if he failed, Laughlin would agree to give up not only all the profits he had already earned on the film, but all future profits as well. Warner, in effect, would then own the movie outright.
