The remarkably named Joy Bang was a memorable cult figure across a string of movies and television shows of the late 1960s and early 1970s, usually typecast as "hippie" chicks who were free and easy-going in their sexuality. Born Joy Wener in Kansas City, Missouri in 1945, she was raised in New York City, and turned to acting in the 1960s, working under the name Joy Bang. Her screen debut came with a small role in Jack Bond's drama Separation (1968). At the turn of the 1960s into the 1970s, Bang appeared in a string of low-budget movies such as Maidstone and The Sky Pirate. At one point, she also briefly became part of Don Kirshner's extended stable of talent when she was cast in the pilot for a proposed musical/western series called The Kowboys. The series, co-starring a young Michael Martin Murphey and Boomer Castleman, both of the band the Lewis & Clark Expedition, was an odd western/musical adventure series, sort of The Monkees meets Here Come The Brides, and failed to sell, though the pilot did air in the summer of 1970. Bang resumed her career as a perennial guest star, working in television dramas (Mission Impossible, The Bold Ones, The Young Lawyers, Hawaii Five-0) before returning to feature film work in Red Sky At Morning and Pretty Maids All In A Row. In most of these movies, and in her television work in a toned-down manner, Bang usually played a gentle free-spirited girl, evocative of the popular perception of the "hippie" ethos, seemingly innocent about yet cognizant of her youthful sexuality, and all the more provocative for that combination of attributes. As a point of reference, Carly Simon had achieved something of a similar portrayal with her on-screen acting/performing appearance in Milos Forman's Taking Off at just about this same time. And with her image, innocent looks, and inherently provocative name, Bang should have been a natural for the talk-show circuit (one can just imagine Johnny Carson, in his "Art Fern/Tea-Time Movie" voice, having merciless fun announcing her as a guest) and media stardom. But it never quite happened that way, and she remained a working actress with a small (but growing) cult following.

Bang did move up to a better class of movie and much larger big-screen roles in 1972, in Bill L. Norton's Cisco Pike and Paul Williams' Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues, before making what should have been a career-defining appearance in Woody Allen's film of his own stage hit Play It Again, Sam (1972), as Julie, the willowy, free-loving girl that Allen's nebish-y protagonist takes out on a disastrous date. (Ironically, Diane Keaton, who co-starred in the movie Play It Again, Sam and the original play, had been up for the role that Bang won in The Kowboys pilot).

That same year, she had a co-starring role in Night Of The Cobra Woman, a low-budget Philippines-made horror picture in which Bang -- playing a research scientist -- battles a supernatural menace. This picture, rather than Allen's movie, seemed to define the path of her career -- by the following year, she was co-starring in the horror film Messiah Of Evil (which earned her screen credits alongside the likes of Elisha Cook, Jr. and Royal Dano). These pictures weren't enough to sustain a career, however -- horror stardom at that production level wouldn't become a route to enduring work until the following decade, and the advent of made-for-cable and direct-to-video genre films -- and after appearances in episodes of Adam-12 and Police Story she retired from acting. As of the start of the twenty-first century, she reportedly was working as a professional in the health-care field.

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