Billy Jack Goes to Washington
|  By the time Tom Laughlin made Billy Jack Goes to Washington, the fourth and, as it turned out, last of his series of films about the counterculture warrior Billy Jack, he was batting 1.000. The first film in the series, The Born Losers (1967), was a low-budget exploitation effort made for American International Pictures (AIP) that became a major hit and helped kick off the late-’60s wave of motorcycle gang movies. Four years later he made Billy Jack (1971), one of the unlikeliest hits of its era, which was so popular that Laughlin was able to release it twice, once through a deal with Warner Bros. and then two years later in a re-negotiated deal after he successfully sued the studio for not marketing the film well enough. He made so much jack with Billy Jack that he was able to make a sequel, The Trial of Billy Jack (1974), that ran nearly three hours and was still a huge hit. By then Laughlin was a kind of folk hero himself, a tenacious do-it-yourselfer who, along with his wife, co-writer and co-star Delores Taylor, had managed to upend the studio system and succeed despite all the rules that suggested otherwise. However, Laughlin couldn’t maintain his perfect run, as Billy Jack Goes to Washington never really had the chance to make it. He suffered numerous financial and legal setbacks, mostly owing to a debts incurred by a production company he set up and the box-office failure of his one non-Billy Jack film of the 1970s, The Master Gunfighter (1976). One could also argue that he had burned so many bridges with his fierce independence and well-reported criticisms of the studio system that the film never stood of chance of gaining widespread distribution, even though The Trial of Billy Jack had set records three years earlier with its massive opening weekend. Billy Jack Goes to Washington would be a perfect title for a parody if Laughlin weren’t so serious in the endeavor. An adaptation of Frank Capra’s 1939 classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Laughlin described it as an “adaptive” remake), the final Billy Jack film continues the titular hero’s crusade against corruption and intolerance, which takes him out of the desert Southwest and all the way to the Capitol, where he fights to fund a national youth camp on the same land that a corrupt senator (E.G. Marshall) is trying to exploit for a planned nuclear plant that he pretends to oppose. While many of the interior scenes have the feel of a made-for-television movie, Laughlin was able to do quite a bit of location shooting in and around Washington, D.C., at one point getting booted from filming in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The screenplay, which was once again penned by Laughlin and Taylor, finds Billy Jack being appointed to fill in for a senator who has died of a heart attack. Those appointing him are not doing so because they think he will make a good senator, but rather because they hope to use him to court the youth and minority vote and because they assume he will be so simple and ignorant of how things work in the Washington that he won’t accomplish anything. Of course, one of the most dangerous things to do is to underestimate Billy Jack, and it turns out that he is as effective with a filibuster on the Senate floor as he is hacking and chopping his way through an army of bad guys. Unfortunately, the film as a whole is slow and preachy, dug too deep into its own sense of self-righteousness. It is pervaded by a sense of optimism that was not present in the earlier films, which tended to dramatize the unyielding power of the system to crush those who might stand in front of it (while still arguing that we must continue standing anyway). In Billy Jack Goes to Washington, the idea that one man can make a difference is real, which makes it all the more ironic that it was the one Billy Jack film that was successfully crushed by the Hollywood system, denied any kind of significant theatrical release (it only opened in three cities and then disappeared without a trace). Laughlin continued trying to get the film distributed for years, cutting it down from its original 155-minute running time to 105 minutes and holding a sneak preview in Boulder, Colorado, as late as 1980. Laughlin still didn’t quit, though. In 1985 he began filming a fifth Billy Jack film, The Return of Billy Jack, which was to follow Billy Jack as he fought against child pornographers in New York City. Originally titled Mysterious Stranger, the script was penned by Robin Hutton, a young woman who started working for Laughlin’s production company in 1979; she later co-wrote The 9 Indispensable Ingredients in Every Hit Film, TV show, Play and Novel with Laughlin and assisted with the research on his two-volume work on Jungian theory and therapy. There was enough anticipation about the project that Variety ran a front-page story in November 1985 about a press conference in which he ballyhooed the $12 million he claimed to have raised at that point (it was one of three films he was planning on making at the time), and Good Morning America interviewed Laughlin and Taylor in January 1986. Unfortunately, fate took a cruel turn, as Laughlin suffered a head injury while performing a stunt during the production, and his recovery caused such a delay that the film was eventually shut down and remained unfinished. After that, he largely fell off the radar, to the point that Variety ran an article in June 1991 under the title “Missing Persons Corner” wondering what had become of him, having gone from “maverick mini-mogul to Missing Person in less than a decade.” As it turned out, Laughlin’s days in the movie industry were over; he never wrote, directed, produced, or starred in another film, leaving Billy Jack Goes to Washington as his final completed project.
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This four-disc set includes The Born Losers (1967), Billy Jack (1971), The Trial of Billy Jack (1974), and Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977).Overall Rating: 
(2)
