For as long as there's been such a thing as democratic elections, there have been people goofing on it. The Museum of Hoaxes has posted its selection of "The Top 20 Satirical Candidates of All Time", including such vote-getters as Stephen Colbert Walt Kelly's Pogo, Gracie Allen, Will Rogers, "Superbarrio", and the Yippie candidate Pigasus, who, in the midst od the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, was taken into custody by Chicago police "citing a law that banned bringing livestock into a city", after which he "was taken to the Anti-Cruelty society, given a bath, fed, and placed in an outside pen. His subsequent fate is unknown." Slate has its own slide show tribute to the "fictional presidential candidates" whose campaigns have left junk shops and eBay sellers' lists festooned with buttons and bumper stickers urging people to vote for Snoopy, Archie Bunker, Alfred E. Neuman, Fred Flintstone, and Ken Griffey, Jr., whose fictional status may be open to debate, even if he did share a ticket with Mariner Moose. Left out of all this was perhaps the most notable movie star slash presidential candidate of recent years, who has at least one foot in both the satirical and fictional camps even though evidence exists that he's real and he means it. On this election day, let's spare a thought for Tom Laughlin, who as the writer-director-producer-star of a series of films starring himself as the mystical ass-kicker Billy Jack, managed to bridge the worlds of entertainment and politics as well as those of the white man and the Native American, not to mention those of the counterculture hero and the scary crank.
Laughlin started acting on TV in the 1950s and in 1957 starred in Robert Altman's first feature, The Delinquents. By all accounts a charismatic individual but one who had great difficulty at playing and working well with others, Laughlin kept his acting career going as best he could while dabbling in other aspects of filmmaking, mostly on the far edges of the industry: he wrote and directed such exploitation films as Like Father, Like Son (1965) and The Babysitter (1969 and edited the 1963 horror picture The Slime People. But his first real labor of love was the 1967 The Born Losers, in which he introduced the character of Billy Jack. Hiding behind a raft of pseudonyms, Laughlin wrote, produced, and directed the movie and, under his own name, played Billy Jack, a part-Native American, ex-Green Beret and Vietnam vet. Disgusted with and alienated from an unjust society, Billy Jack has come home to seek solace in the mountains, coming into town whenever he catches a whiff of bad behavior that he must correct with his flying feet and fists. The losers of the title are a barbarous motorcycle game who terrorize a hot babe who rides her own chopper around town while decked out in a white bikini and unflattering sunglasses; they are the principal beneficiaries of the movie's message that Billy Jack is someone who it will not do to mess with. Losers, which one critic speculated "must be the most amateurish bad movie that ever wound up on Variety's list of the highest grossing films of all time", cleaned up by tying its auteur's concerns to the chassis of the then-hot wheeler movie genre; a couple of years later, the makers of Easy Rider would turn the same trick and really take it to the bank.
The success of Born Losers made it easier for Laughlin to raise the money to make his follow-up, Billy Jack, but he fell out with A.I.P., the first studio involved with the production, and after 20th-Century Fox stepped in to enable him to complete the film, they refused to handle the final product. Warner Brothers released Billy Jack in 1971, but Laughlin was so unhappy with their distribution efforts that he took charge himself and supervised a massive re-issue campaign that ultimately made Billy Jack an under-the-radar cultural event of the early seventies. The movie fully established Billy Jack as a New Age savior and political radical who is tragically hip to the raping and pillaging of the American dream. He is also tragic in his ability to whup the bad guys; Billy Jack is a nonpareil example of the type of the reluctant violent hero who doesn't want to go around beating the tar out of folks, but who, as he puts it in a key speech in Billy Jack, sees the beautiful face of someone who has been subjected to bigotry and mistreatment and, as much as he may regret it he...just...goes... nuts! He has reason to. In Billy Jack, the central villain rapes Billy's platonic best woman friend, Jeanne, played by Laughlin's wife, Dolores Taylor. In the sequel, the two hour-fifty-minute The Trial of Billy Jack, which opened in 1974 hot on the heels of the Billy Jack re-release, the government attempts to railroad Billy for having tried to stop, and subsequently blown the whistle on, the massacre at My Lai. Meanwhile, Dolores Taylor's "Freedom School", full of progressive-minded kids being encouraged to express their young selves, is destroyed by an assault of trigger-happy National Guardsmen in response to the students' having exposed the "truth" in a series of what Taylor, who as the bardic voice-over narrator of all these films serves as Gabrielle to her husband's Xena, Warrior Princess, refers to as "scorching exposes."
Released a couple of months after the resignation of Richard Nixon, The Trial of Billy Jack was a blockbuster hit, and in retrospect, its release may be seen as as clear a point of the real end of the sixties as anything else that happened at the midpoint of the seventies. Billy Jack had included in its cast a few improvisational comedians (including Howard Hesseman) who, along with the fresh-faced kids, were allowed to smuggle a little humor and freshness in with the self-righteousness and the megalomania. (Watching the funnymen cutting up on the margins of his movie, Laughlin looks as if he had a thought balloon above his head reading, "I see, this is what you Earth people call 'humor.' Very amusing.") Laughlin would never manage to follow up on it. His next Billy Jack film, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, in which the enemy of the The Man is somehow elected to the Senate and where he crusades against nuclear power, was never given a real theatrical release, maybe because there was some doubt as to whether the audience that so enjoyed watching Billy kicking ass and taking names would enjoy a movie that built to a climax in which he defeats the murderous villains by staging a filibuster. And his one stab at concocting a starring vehicle for himself in which he didn't play Billy Jack, the 1975 mixed-genre The Master Gunfighter--an anti-Establishment action Western co-starring Super Fly's Ron O'Neal and featuring a mix of gunplay and samurai sword duals--was a flat bust. With time on his hands, Laughlin put his money where his mouth was and ran for president, twice, first (in 1992) as a Democrat and then, in 2004, as a Republican. He didn't get very far on either occasion, but the press releases announcing that he's throwing his hat into the ring are always good for a brief flurry of filler news stories whose tone ranges from polite to snickering. He is said to be considering a run for governor of California. If he ever announces, filler news people across the country will instantly die of pleasure from contemplating the headline, "BILLY JACK PLANS TO REPLACE THE TERMINATOR."
Now seventy-seven, Laughlin may have finally found the right medium for his talents in the Internet. At his website, one can read his and Dolores Taylor's "personal statement" ("We disdain both political Parties. We stand with George Washington..."), tick off the "18 Reasons why McCain is completely unqualified psychologically and mentally to be Commander in Chief", salute the names inscribed in the Patriot's Hall of Fame ("enshrining those true heroes who are fighting for America’s true values", including Quincy Jones and Don Imus), find out why Laughlin has it in for the Supreme Court, discover "the proof the war is all about oil", buy a documentary relating "the incredible struggles Tom and Delores went through to get Billy Jack and their films to the screen", and read the official transcript of Laughlin doing Diane Sawyer's dream analysis. (There are also sections headlined, "Stop inciting racism & hatred", "Pastor Rick Warren lied to us", and "Joe the Plumber is a fraud.") Perhaps less remarkable than Laughlin's political aspirations is the news that he still plans to someday make another Billy Jack film, presumably starring himself, given how hard it is to imagine him ever handing the role off to somebody else. Years ago, Laughlin let it be known that he was seeking investors for Billy Jack for President, in which Billy would expose the truth about the Iraq War and lead the charge to impeach George W. Bush. Events having overtaken that idea, the title has since been changed to Billy Jack and Jeanne, suggesting an autumnal romance and a summing-up. Laughlin has been talking about a comeback for a long, long time now, and he hasn't had much to show for it yet besides a series of videotaped pitch sessions posted on-line. But in a year in which so much that once seemed unlikely has come to pass, and with Laughlin's own record of beating the odds by sheer dint of his remarkable force of will, would we really bet against him? Well, yeah.