At the time, anyone familiar with the economics of motion-picture distribution would have said that Laughlin had just thrown away a picture. After all, he would be trying to resurrect a film that was already two years old and that had already exhausted its potential, having earned $6 million in film rentals -- not bad, but not great, either. But Laughlin had other ideas. He intended to rewrite the book on motionpicture distribution. And he set out to prove the value of his approach with the help of Max E. Youngstein, a Hollywood veteran whom he had hired to direct the refurbished distribution campaign.
Youngstein, a shrewd and exacting businessman, was the perfect complement to the more conceptually oriented Laughlin. A former executive of United Artists and one of the three original owners of that studio when it was acquired from Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, Youngstein had seen over the years just about everything there was to see in the motion-picture business. So when Laughlin learned that exhibitors simply did not want to screen a two-year-old played-out picture, Youngstein was ready with a solution -- a little-used distribution technique known as "four-walling" that he had learned from some of its pioneering practitioners in Salt Lake City.
In the more traditional method, a movie house and a distributor split the proceeds from the box office according to one of any number of standard formulas. Risks and rewards are thus shared by both parties. In four-walling, there is no sharing -- the producer/distributor pays the movie theater a flat weekly rental fee, provides his own staff of ushers and operators, and keeps the box-office receipts entirely to himself. The less likely a movie is to be a hit, the more willing a theater would be to accept a fourwall arrangement. Billy Jack looked like just such a flop, so exhibitors willingly agreed to four-walling. Laughlin, however, intended to add his own twist to Youngstein's plan.
It was at this moment that Laughlin unveiled the first of his industry-transforming ideas. Interestingly, Laughlin had first spotted its raw potential in, of all places, a less than grade-B movie, appropriately called Poor White Trash.
"That movie was so bad," Laughlin recalls, "it was unreleasable. But a guy came here with it anyhow and he had to pay the theaters to play it. In those days, a big picture spent $45,000 on television ads -- they didn't believe in advertising. But this guy spent $150,000, and he had these terrible ads made where he is hidden behind a acreen claiming his life is in danger from the Ku Klux Klan, and the police are after him because this film is so controversial. And he went out and did $250,000. After a week, the theaters threw him out because it was so bad, but for that week he really drove them in there. I never forgot that. And I often wondered after that why somebody doesn't try that with a good picture."
In Laughlin's hands, the untapped power of television advertising became, in true Hollywood style, "supersaturation advertising." In a radical departure from existing practices, Laughlin spent more than $300,000 to develop and air nearly a dozen local television spots. Laughlin recalls that Warner Bros. went "totally crazy" over the expenditure, but the results were spectacular: Billy Jack opened that spring in more than 50 theaters in southern California and during the first week grossed $1.2 million, breaking the previous box-office record set by The Godfather. It was merely the opening shot in a distribution campaign that would leave Hollywood flabbergasted.
Nor was it as easy, mind you, as simply buying TV time and watching the money roll in. Unlike the major studios, which are able to plug their pictures into distribution channels that are already highly developed and well oiled, Laughlin and Youngstein had to grub out their play dates with their bare hands, state by state, theater by theater. They put together teams of five or six people; trained them as hosts, ticket collectors, and cashiers; got them a headquarters in the local Ramada Inn; and sent them out to introduce their rented theaters to the righteous wonders of Billy Jack. Powered by the teams and an advertising expenditure that eventually totaled $7 million, it took 18 months to march Billy Jack across the country. And when it was all over, the two-year-old played-out film had racked up an additional $42 million in domestic film rentals, which Laughlin and Warner Bros. split down the middle.
"Tom gets dismissed by a lot of people because he has the reputation for being a pretty hard nut to deal with," says Youngstein, who himself once sued Laughlin in a dispute over money, "but he ought to be given a lot more credit than he's getting. He's a man who does not believe that the method that was used yesterday is necessarily the best way to reach a maximum audience and get the maximum income from a picture. The establishment has a tendency to be so rigid in its approaches that he is constantly looking for different ways of reaching more people."
Indeed, no sooner had Billy Jack been taken out of circulation than Laughlin unveiled his second audience-grabbing, industry-rattling masterstroke, which he called, again in proper Hollywood style, the "megamultiple release." The occasion for this felicitous phrasing was the November 1974 premiere of the sequel film The Trial of Billy Jack. Laughlin had abandoned his four-walling technique because in later analysis he had determined that it was simply too expensive to finance the supporting logistics. But even though he now turned to a more traditional form of distribution, his modifications would permanently alter its substance and application. At a time when the major studios usually opened even a big film at only 65 locations, Laughlin opened his new picture at 1,200 theaters. Then he amplified the power of this megamultiple with a souped-up version of supersaturation. The ads for Billy Jack had been local and regional, but with Trial Laughlin used national television -- more than $3 million of it in the first week alone. Ultimately, says Laughlin, the film that cost him $3.5 million to make earned $32 million in domestic rentals in the first 30 days. Although opinion varies, there is considerable evidence that it was Laughlin's use of the megamultiple that caused the industry to adopt it as a standard practice, one that has since added millions to its revenues. At the time, Variety itself assessed the impact of Laughlin's combined innovations with a headline that read: "Tom Laughlin Stuns Old Film Biz Pros."
