Gene sez: "With all the wonderful tributes being offered about the late Bruce Seven earlier this week at his informal Irish Wake, it started to annoy me that I couldn't find a piece I wrote about him in 1990 when Bruce, who I nicknamed Mr. Blister, was at the height of his free-wheeling, curmudgeonly, shoot-from-the-hip game. Luckily, I stumbled across it, and here it is, for the record.
"Depending whether he's wearing a beard or not, Bruce Seven strikes a kind of look that reminds you of a grizzled prospector from an old Hopalong Cassidy movie: flinty eyes that could dish out ice burns, a voice [thanks to a long term bout with emphysema] that sometimes wears no pants, and a put-on snarl like you're trying to con him into a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Now, there you're going to lose. Because Seven is the industry's resident dungeon master. Piss him off and he'll string you up like Victoria Paris in one of his B&D features. Looks like Paris is his pet whipping girl for now. Seven put her through some pretty weird paces, first in Ghostlusters and more recently, House of Dark Dreams, a feature he's releasing under his own company label, Bruce Seven Productions.
"Victoria is definitely a cute little submissive, and she really enjoyed it," Seven says. "But then I'm a horny S.O.B. She was screaming at me: ‘Bruce, Bruce what happened to the candle wax. You promised you'd drip candle wax on me!' " Seven chuckles thinking about it. Seven claims it was all Paris' idea. But, according to Seven, it's really Bionca, his better half, and Tianna who are "becoming a team of raving idiots."
"We just get in there and do crazy shit," he says. "If you can't have fun doing it, what's the sense of doing it. But I think we're giving people what they want to see. At least it's not dull." Seven comments about "putting the quality back into bondage." Somehow, quality and bondage aren't two words you normally associate, much like "meaningful" and "torture" in the same breath. Guess it's all in the perspective.
Seven's House of Dark Dreams, however, is a throwback to the "Olga" series of the 1960's with the likes of Olga's Girls and Olga's House of Shame, etc. With two major differences: Seven does not look like Madame Olga who had long, ravenish hair and big tits. And, on a minor note, "Night on Bald Mountain" is nowhere to be found in the Seven music score. Other than that, Victoria Paris, the new uncrowned princess of pain, gets ushered through a turnstyle of similar bondage sequences.
Asked about what he's doing to Paris' glamor girl image, Seven just flashes the enogmatic smile of a masked high executioner. But all of House of Dark Dreams is table scraps compared to what Seven intends to do with Dance With the Devil, if he ever gets around to doing it. On first talk he was projecting a five-day shoot with a storyline that could conceivably be upsetting to a lot of folk with an attempt to out-taboo every no-no video on the market. Before he gets to that feature which he's supposed to be co-directing with Loretta Sterling, Seven first wraps up a title called Suspension for his video label. It was casually suggested he rename it Suspenders and have everyone walk around wearing a pair like Mark Kernes. Seven merely laughed, maniacally, and threatened to torture me.
"It's more work than I ever thought," he says about cranking out titles for his own label. "I'm frankly tired of doing ‘dick' movies. I don't want to add any more clutter to the junk already out there." His fans who extoll him for his hot and heavy sex despite somewhat vapid storylines might not be too happy to hear that. "Oh, they tell me they love to jack off to my stuff. I'm very popular in the 25-cent booths, you know."
Seven is a former f/x man - physical effects: smoke, fire, rain, water, wind and a couple of severed arms thrown in. "I don't particularly like that kind of shit [severed arms]," he growls. With 18 years in mainstream pictures, Seven still maintains his union card but says he'd never consider going back because of his health problems.
Bondage started out just being a "hobby" with him. "I shot amateur stuff 20 years ago on 8mm that you just wouldn't believe," he says. Seven indicates that it was for his own personal library. Seven got his first professional break around 1980 by shooting some footage for Bizarre Video and continued with bondage and some girl-girl before he ever shot his first hardcore scenes. Loose Ends is his sentimental favorite but Seven claims he reached his peak with Loose Ends VI.
Seven admits he didn't know what videotape was when he got handed his first video camera. "I definitely never saw three-quarter inch before and definitely never saw an editing machine before. But I went in and did it anyway. I made a lot of mistakes.
"You can see where my mind tends to go with my movies," he added. "It's spanking. Loose Ends has a terrific bondage scene in it. But with the way things are today, I can't put bondage scenes in my hardcore pictures. But who knows what you can do anymore? Now with my own company, I'm out of hardcore. I just want to be comfortable with what I'm doing. I just want to shoot good quality tapes with beautiful girls and have the support of the industry."
