Django was mentioned in the closing credits of Heatstroke (1982) as coming soon.

In a 1992 Manshots interview Gage said the picture was canceled because the budget was getting very large but not all the production funding was able to be raised.

In 2008, in a reply to a blog questioner, Joe Gage said "After Richard West appeared in Heatstroke, I wrote Django specifically for him. He subsequently died and I didn’t want to make it without him."

According to an interview with West, the plot was about a detective "who's slightly outside the law."