Where Even Mavericks Have a Home

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Shot for half-a-million dollars, Easy Rider recouped more than $50 million at the box office. Flush with cash, Hopper purchased the Taos home of Mabel Dodge Luhan in an attempt to form a latter-day artist colony as vibrant as the 1920s scene that attracted Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe and other illuminati to Taos. Alas, the dream faded in a drug-induced haze.

The demise of Captain America and Billy didn't spell the death of the biker movie cycle. Many leather-clad renegades spun onto screens in the wake of Easy Rider's phenomenal success. One of them was Billy Jack, a half-breed Indian and ex-Green Beret karate expert who didn't cotton to racists and rednecks. Tom Laughlin introduced the hard-fisted avenger in Born Losers, a low-budget biker flick actually completed before Easy Rider. But Billy Jack's explosive force wasn't felt until Laughlin developed a full-fledged feature around the character.

The 1971 movie Billy Jack, based in New Mexico, suggested that contemporary conflicts could be settled with a mix of Old West vigilante justice and Old Testament vengeance. Returning home from Vietnam with a pocketful of medals, Billy Jack discovers local riffraff terrorizing the hippie students at a free school for runaways. The most repugnant goon dumps flour over an Indian child to see how she'd look as a paleface. The school's pacifist founder (played by Laughlin's wife, Delores Taylor) advises turning the other cheek, but Billy Jack answers violence with violence. Surrounded by bullies, hopelessly outnumbered, he makes like David in his classic showdown with Goliath, uttering the immortal "I'm going to take this right foot and I'm going to whomp you on that side of the face."

Billy Jack did just that at the box office, where it proved to be a giant slayer. Shot for $800,000, the film returned more than $32 million on its initial investment. To put that into perspective, Billy Jack, at today's ticket prices, would gross in excess of $250 million, equaling the domestic performance of 1997 box-office frontrunner Men in Black. While Warner Bros. provided the initial seed money for the movie, Laughlin wrested control of the picture away from the studio, and distributed it himself. He had too much at stake to let it die on the vine. Besides starring with Taylor, he directed Billy Jack (under the pseudonym T.C. Frank), co-wrote it (as Frank Christina) and produced it (as Mary Rose Solti). Billy Jack spawned two sequels in the 1970s, and Laughlin hasn't abandoned hope of reviving his righteous streetfighter for a new millennium. He continues to seek funding to do a new Billy Jack, set on the Navajo Reservation.

The '60s flood of independent films slowed to a trickle by the '70s and '80s. During this long, dry spell, New Mexico snared a few offbeat projects, such as the bawdy B-movie Truck Stop Women (1974) showcasing the attributes of former Playboy centerfold Claudia Jennings and the campy Western spoof Lust in the Dust (1985). It wasn't nearly as salacious as the title implied or as might be construed from the presence of Divine, taking a breather from more demented duties under the direction of John Waters. One bright spot relieved the monotony - the rise of a new band of small-budgeted pictures exploring ethnic themes.