PEACE BROTHER

REMEMBER BILLY JACK? Probably not if you’re under 40 and not American. Written, produced, directed by and starring Tom Laughlin, Billy Jack (1971) was a western for the Easy Rider generation: the story of a peace-lovin’, karate-kickin’ loner who protects a ‘free school’ against the reactionary inhabitants of one of those small towns who were the villains of most late-sixties, early-seventies movies. Billy Jack preached peace but could kick ass like nobody’s business.

No studio wanted to handle the film, so Laughlin self-distributed it, making it what he claimed to be the most successful independent movie of all time with 65 million admissions. That, he says, makes it even bigger than The Blair Witch Project, which sold a mere 30 million tickets.

Anyway, Laughlin blazed ahead with The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) and Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977) then quit the movie business to teach Jungian psychology at Yale and Stanford (or that’s what Variety says) and everyone forgot about Billy Jack, especially since the kind of states-rights self-distribution which made the first film such a hit got buried in the multiplexisation of America.

In March, Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher of Jersey Films announced plans to revive the franchise. And Mike De Luca, who has moved from New Line to DreamWorks, bought into the idea.

The title character - a spiritual half-Native American who, in the original, is also a Vietnam vet - will be updated in as yet undisclosed ways and was to have been played by Keanu Reeves. The latter’s own company, 3 Arts, was to have been an equity-holder in the production, and Reeves was going to make it when he returned from shooting the two back-to-back sequels to The Matrix in Australia.

But things don’t run any smoother in Hollywood nowadays than they did back in the early seventies. And, a couple of months after the original announcement, the whole project upped stakes and moved to Intermedia, shedding Reeves and Jersey Films en route. Laughlin, good hippie that he is, blamed the collapse of the original deal on “lawyers”, and muttered something about possibly still using Reeves as the hero. Intermedia’s production chief Basil Iwanyk wisely limited himself to describing Billy Jack as “a classic formula”.

And speaking - as we were a couple of paragraphs ago - of The Matrix, Nona Gaye (Marvin’s daughter who played one of the champ’s wives in Ali) has ratcheted her career up a couple of notches by taking over from singer Aaliyah (who was killed in a plane crash in the Caribbean shortly before the release of Queen of the Damned).

Gaye plays Zee, who wasn’t in Matrix 1, plays a small role in Matrix 2 (aka Reloaded), then becomes a significant character in Matrix 3 (aka Revolutions). Aaliyah had finished her scenes in Reloaded, but these will now be reshot with Gaye. The singer’s parents, meanwhile, are suing the record company responsible for the video-shoot at the end of which the plane crash took place.

THE (FLORIDA)KEYS TO SUCCESS

I’VE NEVER GIVEN much thought to what I might have in common with Bill Clinton. But one thing I know that Bubba and I do share is a fierce enthusiasm for the novels of Carl Hiassen. Now, finally, that enthusiasm seems to be taken on by someone who is capable of translating Hiassen’s distinctively seedy world successfully onto the big screen: screenwriter Michael Tolkin, who got an Oscar nomination for The Player and most recently scripted Changing Lanes (Preview 57).

Hiassen, a former crime reporter on the Miami Herald (a paper for which he still writes three weekly columns, including one which I recall as being the best single commentary on the farcical Presidential recounts of November 2001), has become a best-selling novelist with a series of books which always pretty much have the same cast of characters, even though the names change from novel to novel. And the setting, too, is always the same: southern Dade county, the Everglades, the Keys…

There’s almost always a reporter who has been fired for uncovering a little too much corruption (or maybe just screwing the wrong politician’s wife). He loves classic rock ‘n’ roll and Warren Zevon in particular and gets caught up in some case involving environmental pollution, an unscrupulous millionaire and a series of deaths.

Castle Rock is the only company to have had a stab at turning a Hiassen novel into a major movie so far with Striptease, in which about the only thing right was Burt Reynolds’ sleazily venal politician. Now, however, Fox 2000 have optioned Hiassen’s latest, Basket Case, featuring (you’ve guessed it) a one-time star investigative reporter who stumbles on an attempt to cover up the death of an ageing rock star in the Bahamas (a mere cruise-hop from Miami). And they’ve hired Tolkin to adapt it.

Basket Case is still at script stage. Meanwhile, a UK production company, Seminal Films, has optioned Hiassen’s Double Whammy, a surreal story of a developer’s attempts to turn a stagnant artificial canal into a condominium-fringed paradise by way of a heavily promoted but rigged bass-fishing contest.

And, in a similar vein, director Curtis Hanson has bought the rights to a series of novels by Charles Willeford, a former WWII tank commander turned hobo turned novelist, who wrote about the same kinds of characters and the same kind of world 20 years before Hiassen (maverick seventies director Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter was based on one of Willeford’s novels).

All in all, then, good news for those of us who believe that the best crime movies are the ones that are made from the best crime novels - like The Big Sleep, Strangers on a Train, The Long Goodbye…