Bill Gunn

William Harrison Gunn was born on the fifteenth of July 1934 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Harrison Gunn Sr. — a Philadelphia jazz pianist — and Louise Alexander Gunn — a Philadelphia poet of the Harlem Renaissance circle. He was raised in the Black middle-class community of West Philadelphia.

He served in the United States Navy from 1952 to 1954 in the post-Korean War period — and relocated to New York in 1954 to study acting under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre from 1954 to 1956.

He worked across the late 1950s and 1960s as a stage and television actor — including roles in the Off-Broadway productions of Take a Giant Step of 1956, A Hatful of Rain of 1956, and Member of the Wedding of 1958 — and the television series Naked City, Tarzan, and The Patty Duke Show.

He wrote the screenplay for the Hal Ashby film The Landlord in 1970 — a study of a white heir who buys a Brooklyn tenement and discovers its Black tenant community — and the screenplay for the Robert Mulligan film The Angel Levine in 1970, an adaptation of the Bernard Malamud short story.

He directed his first feature film, Stop, in 1970 — a forty-three-minute experimental drama produced by Warner Bros. and shelved without release.

He directed Ganja & Hess in 1973 — a one-hundred-and-ten-minute Black avant-garde vampire film commissioned by the Kelly-Jordan production company. Ganja & Hess was selected for the International Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival of May 1973 — and was edited without his approval into a re-released version, Blood Couple, that ran in American exploitation cinemas in 1973 and 1974. The original Gunn cut of Ganja & Hess was restored and released by the Museum of Modern Art in 1998.

He directed Personal Problems in 1981 — a two-hundred-minute experimental serial television drama written by Ishmael Reed and produced for public-access Manhattan cable. Personal Problems is at this day the principal experimental Black-American serial-television drama of the early 1980s.

He wrote three further produced plays — Black Picture Show of 1975, Rhinestone Sharecropping of 1981 (autobiographical), and The Forbidden City of 1989, which premiered the night after his death.

He died at Nyack, New York on the fifth of April 1989 of complications of encephalitis, at fifty-four.

He is honored here as the director of Ganja & Hess.