NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD’s Duane Jones ponders immortality in a glass of blood in Bill Gunn’s unusual vampire film GANJA & HESS.
which film doctor Fima Noveck used in the more straightforward version. In shooting the movie, Gunn often favored improvisa- tions over what he had put in his script. Opinions differ over whether he wrote exploitable ele- ments he always intended to jetti- son in order to secure financing, or was a believer in an organic filmmaking process whereby the script was merely a stage in the evolution of a project, as opposed to an architect’s plan which must be followed to the letter. BLOOD COUPLE used the original script as a template, and many of the changes take the film back to the pitch Gunn had sold. He was cer- tainly aware that his own preferred approach risked alienating audi- ences—an opening caption seems to have been included late in the editing process because otherwise the actual story would be extremely hard to follow. Most Blaxploitation movies in- habit the streets and ghettos. Even the Horror, Western, War and Private
Eye entries in the field present a world of explosive racial tensions and the fantasy of black heroes and heroines—invariably from an underprivileged background— fighting back against nasty white oppressors. GANJA & HESS is set in a different black America. Dr. Hess Green (NIGHT OF THE LIV- ING DEAD’s Duane Jones) and his research assistant Dr. George Meda (Gunn), are highly-qualified aca- demics (Hess’ skills with geology never come into the plot, though) who are well-travelled (Hess speaks fluent French, Meda tells an anecdote about visiting Hol- land), cultured enough to be sur- rounded by prime artifacts of European and African art, well- dressed without any SUPER FLY flashiness and inhabit a world of upper-class luxury (Hess has a butler, a chauffeur and a Rolls- Royce). Even Meda’s widow Ganja (THE BEAST MUST DIE’s Marlene Clark), a more street-level character, sports elegant clothes and expects fine things on a
platter, even as she sneers at any- one who comes near her with an actual platter.
For awhile, it seems the film might even be taking place in a fantasy America without racial strife, until Meda threatens suicide and Hess angrily asks him who he thinks will be in trouble with the law if a black corpse shows up in a neighborhood where he’s the only black resident. Turned vampire (a word the film prissily never uses), Hess ventures into an inner city inhabited by the sorts of folks found in regular blax- ploitation, though the thuggish pimp (stuntman Tommy Lane, a veteran of SHAFT and LIVE AND LET DIE) and his blonde-wigged hooker (Candece Tarpley) are no- where near as glamorized as the equivalents in THE MACK or THE CANDY TANGERINE MAN. The bar/brothel is cramped, unappeal- ing and gaudy and the scrappy fight between Hess and the pimp winds up with the vampire licking blood off a dirty floor and being
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