Lost & Found: Bill Gunn's X-Rated Debut Film Stop!
Last year, I published a piece on the 1973 psychotronic horror film Ganja & Hess, written and directed by Bill Gunn. In that piece, I mentioned Gunn's first film, titled Stop!, which was made in 1970 but was never properly released.
A few days ago, to my surprise, I found out that the film was finally made available to view online, and that it happened just two days after I published that article. I’m beginning to think I have some sort of magical power.
Before diving into the film, a little backstory…
In 1969, Warner Bros. released The Learning Tree, the first Hollywood film by a black director. Gordon Parks wrote, produced, and directed the film based on his 1963 novel, a semi-autobiographical account of his adolescence in Kansas in the 1920s. Information on that film’s box office reception is unclear, but I guess it did well enough for Parks to find another directing gig at MGM, where he would make this flick about a black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks.
The following year, 1970, Warner Bros. would hire another black artist to write and direct his own film for the studio: Bill Gunn. He was primarily known as a writer, and his bibliography includes 29 plays, 2 novels, and several screenplays and teleplays. He also acted on the stage alongside James Dean, and became friends with him along with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
His film was titled Stop!, and it received an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, for its stronger sexual content. Warner Bros. would not give the film a wide release, and instead showed it in a small number of theaters across the United States in 1972, and then the film vanished.
Since then, the film would appear again for two more screenings. In 1990, one year after Gunn's death, a 35mm print of the film would be screened at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and then in 2010, a VHS copy would be screened for free at The Brooklyn Museum.
Finally, on December 29th, 2022, the film was uploaded onto the Internet Archive by user DynamiteFilms. It is unclear how the uploader obtained the film, but nevertheless, we can now see the film for ourselves, and after over half a century of buildup, it's nothing too remarkable.
It's a marriage drama, following Michael and his wife Lee, who move into a lavish villa in San Juan so the husband can write his book. So it also serves as a prelude to The Shining.
Michael and Lee aren't doing so hot. Mike wants to have a baby, but Lee is on the pill, so they yell at each other a lot. The sound quality is quite bad, so it can sometimes be difficult to make out what the two are saying.
One day, Lee walks in to find her husband banging a hooker, who then has the gall to walk up to the wife and demand, "Dinero!"
As their marriage is crumbling, they meet the beautiful Marlene Clark, playing a character named Marlene. How original. Marlene is married to a man named Richard. Things are further complicated when Lee falls for Richard.
The final act of the film then devolves into a series of slow, trippy montages scored by psychedelic mod jazz, featuring one sexual encounter after another. First, there’s a three-way with Michael, Lee, and Marlene, and then a sex scene with Michael and Richard.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was probably this sensual gay lovemaking that pushed the MPAA over the edge to slap the X on it. That is, if the sex scene with the hooker or the conversation about masturbation didn’t already do the trick.
Remember, this was 1970. Fast forward to 1999, and the MPAA would slap NC-17 ratings onto Boys Don’t Cry and But I’m a Cheerleader for lesbian love scenes that were no more explicit than what you’d see in a Sharon Stone vehicle.
In 1971, Warner Bros. would release two more high-profile X-rated films: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell’s The Devils. Both directors had more clout than Gunn, and the studio wasn’t willing to take the same gamble on an unproven, first-time filmmaker. Not to mention how difficult it was for a black filmmaker to get his foot in the door in the first place.
The Devils was similarly shelved for half a century after its release, due to its provocative imagery mixing explicit sex with religion. The full, uncut version has rarely been shown since 1971, as Warner Bros. is responsible for blocking its release on home video. While The Devils has been hailed by many as one of the best films of the 1970s, I doubt much of the same praise will be heaped upon Bill Gunn’s Stop!
It is clear to see that the film was made during Hollywood's post-Easy Rider phase, with a lot of meandering montages with characters pontificating about love and freedom over footage of the actors frolicking around San Juan, almost as if this was a big excuse for the cast and crew to go on vacation.
You may notice many of the same traits of Gunn's later film Ganja & Hess, including the trippy montages, and some similar imagery, such as a naked man in the bathroom holding a gun to himself, or a candlelit love scene with Marlene Clark. There's also similar anecdotes about plane rides that could've been drawn from Gunn's own experience. Despite having a larger budget than Ganja & Hess, Stop! doesn't feel as complete a vision as the later film.
The crumbling marriage story is rather standard, and not enough is added to it to make the breakdown of the characters and the breakdown of the film all that intriguing. It doesn’t have as strong of a hook. Those sex scenes are really rather tame compared to what we’ve seen since.
Sometimes it is claimed that Warner Bros. lost their print of the film, and others claim that the studio had trouble clearing the rights to the music in the film, which features Ry Cooder on guitar. Groovy!
Despite the film not being all that stimulating, I still say it’s worth watching as a piece of history. It’s the second Hollywood film by a black director. The fact that it took until the '70s for that to happen really says a lot.
After his sour experience with Warner Bros, Bill Gunn would go independent for his next film, and let his imagination loose, among other things.
To learn about my current “1994 in Film” project, click here.
