girl and bondage genres for years to come, Bruce Seven, 59, died this past Saturday at 10:30 pm. An avid Star Trek fan, Seven succumbed to what is believed to be complications both from emphysema and a stroke that confined him to a wheelchair about five years ago. The medication which Seven took for his emphysema is what's believed to have lent him a much older appearance due to its tendency to thin the skin.
Seven who was a race car buff and had a partnership in a speed shop, came from a background in mainstream filmmaking. He worked both for Warner Brothers and Paramount where he specialized in special effects. The film Looker was one of Seven's more notable mainstream projects. During the advent of video technology, Seven acquired a camera and began tinkering around with filmmaking and started shooting bondage features for Bizarre Video and Lipstik.
Seven eventually met up with John Stagliano in 1983 and entered a business partnership that lasted about a year at which time Seven was offered a deal in 1984 with Vivid to shoot Ginger Lynn who was the company's first contract girl. Seven was also married to Bionca about this time [they married at the top of an escalator during the CES Show, Loretta Sterling was his best man]. Seven teamed up with Sterling and Ed Powers to do the Loose Ends series for 4-Play - another series which defined Seven's unique abilities to shoot raw, unfettered sex.
Seven continually battled illness with emphysema during the late 80's, recovered, and eventually re-united with Stagliano and began shooting award-winning all-girl movies with some of the nastiest scenes ever committed to video. In the mid 90's Seven suffered a stroke that pretty much took him out of the running of his company's day-to-day operations.
Seven's former business partner on two occasions, John Stallion, offered some history of him and Bruce Seven in the business: "I was going to shoot my first video. My partner was an agent David House who was running Pretty Girl International. I was a model working as an actor for David off and on, just doing still picture layouts. At the same time I was producing a little porno newspaper of my own.
"David suggested that we do a video together. This was 1983. One of the reasons why he said that was because Bruce Seven was casting videos through him. Video was brand new. David wanted me to meet Bruce. We met Bruce and made a deal where I financed the first video I shot. Eventually David copped out on the deal. He said pay him just as a still photographer. He was going to be the cameraman but Bruce wound up shooting the rest of the movie. I paid Bruce 10% of the gross of the movie. Bruce helped me with contacts for getting the movie edited. Because we hit it off so well, personality -wise, we were partners from the middle of '83 till about May of '84 producing videos together.
"Bruce helped me a lot having shot about four or five videos. We talked for hours about how to make videos. It was a great experience because that afternoon that I met Bruce Seven and saw what he was shooting, I went crazy. He was shooting really hot sex. It was the best stuff I had ever seen in my life at that point.
"We just had a lot of similar ideas on how to shoot sex which we were not seeing. Part of the problem with that was people were shooting on film in awkward situations. When we started shooting on video, we just shot a lot of stuff where it was Bruce and me and Mike Cates - we just worked on getting shots. Nobody really gave a shit about trying to find really good shots in a sex scene. Most of the time, the cameraman was some guy from Hollywood shooting film who wasn't a real pornographer. Once in awhile you had a guy like Alex deRenzy, but most of them didn't have a good eye. Most of the vast majority of cameramen in this business really weren't very good.
"Bruce was an excellent cameraman when he started. I loved the way Bruce shot. When Michael Cates took over and Bruce was editing, we kind of diverged in style. Bruce got into this kick of doing a lot more cuts than I did. But when Bruce first started shooting, he didn't do so many cuts.
"We spent that first year working together as 50-50 partners. We did something called Hot Spa which was a script I wrote. We sold it to Caballero. We also four little things for Loretta Sterling. We did about four movies for Hal Freeman at Hollywood Video. One called Teasers. I can't remember the rest of them. We also did something called Dance Fever that Ginger Lynn did a masturbation scene in.
"In the summer of '84 at the CES Show, Bruce got an offer to make the Ginger movies for Vivid.
"We butt heads directing. Basically Bruce and I said we don't need each other. We need to go our own way and that's what we did. Bruce was tremendously successful with the Ginger movies which did very well. I kind of floundered around and did one movie every two or three months. I got no recognition as a directing , but Bruce got a lot at first. Then he got really sick in 1986. Loretta Sterling said that he had gone over to Bruce's house to put his papers together. Bruce was ready to die. He got better then he started shooting more. I worked for him very little after that. I did a real bad job for him choreographing one movie for him for 4-Play.
"In 1990 when I had my company and was going for about a year, Patrick and I had Bruce direct the girl-girl movies that we did. Bruce then wanted to do bondage, so he was the first person I made a deal with as an outside producer at Evil Angel. Bruce did the bondage stuff and I helped him a lot. I'm in several of those movies. I was terrible and didn't know bondage like I know it today.
"In the 1990's I was selling Bruce's stuff up until 95 or 96. He financed Bionca and Bionca ran the business. After about a year of Bionca running it, it was a natural thing for Bruce to leave and go over to Bionca. I said fine, that's what he should do.
"Bruce pretty much kept shooting the same way his whole career, but his skill was not in how he shot. He shot nastier but what he would do was get inside the heads of the models. He'd get them to perform for them. Bruce was the first person I ever saw do that. Rocco kind of does that now. Because Bruce was into bondage and nasty sex, he'd hire Porsche Lynn and all these girls who were into nasty sex. He'd get them to do harder and nastier stuff than they ever did before. That's where his talent was. He was the first person to shoot hard, nasty sex consistently. Today you can say Bruce was ahead of the curve.
"He was the best guy to do business with. I don't know of anybody who ever said they got screwed by Bruce Seven. Ever.
Patrick Collins: "Bruce impacted the business in such a big way. He was one of a kind. He was an amazing sonofabitch. As sick as he looked, the day I met him 11 years ago, he made it through everything. Mike [Cates] and I were talking last month. We heard that he moved to his mother's house; we were trying to get a phone number on him. We didn't follow it through.
"This is kind of like getting the wind knocked out of you. Bruce was a father to me. I met him this day 11 years ago. Bruce wanted to shoot Tianna. I went over to his house and met him. I fell in love with the fucking guy. He was so cool. Being a guy who loves porn and was so sick of porn, I found a Bruce 7 movie, Loose Ends 3 at my neighborhood video store. When I put it on, it was so amazing. I then looked through every videotape at my store to find another Bruce 7 tape. Little did I know that I would end up meeting the guy and in some ways become my surrogate father.
"Bruce is the reason I am a director. When I shot my first movie, Buttwoman Does Budapest, I was so focused on the mistakes that I had made, that I was just ready to trash it. I talked to him after I had been in the editing room and said fuck it, I'm going to get rid of this movie. I told John Stagliano who had been an investor on it, I'll give you your money back. I'm not releasing this, it's a piece of shit. Bruce said bring it on over, I'll look at it. He watched the whole fucking movie and didn't say a word. You know how Bruce was. At the end of it he said, if you wanted to make something like me or John, you didn't do it. But what you got here is a good little movie. That meant everything to me because I knew he meant it. If the movie was fucked up, he'd have told me.
"Bruce was always for the little guy. He had a courage that was palpable. You knew the motherfucker, even in a wheel chair, was nobody to fuck with. You were part of the family with him. That included the late night phone calls.
"There was a time when Bill Margold wrote that Bruce was nothing but a drunk. I got real pissed off and wrote and article and you guys published it. I wanted to respond to that editorial letter. It really hurt Bruce's feelings. That was the time I said Margold was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.
"I don't know exactly what happened, but my gut tells me that he just gave up. I knew that he was at his mom's. That was not a good sign. I only had my guesses which have been conformed as to how he ended up there. He sold his catalog. I know he offered it to John. John said no. My guess is John said no because he wanted Bruce to have something. But Bruce just went out and sold it to Pleasure.
"I'm about to do this fisting movie, and one of the things that I need is rubber gloves. The first fucking time I ever saw rubber gloves outside of an operating room was on a Bruce Seven set. And olive oil. Fucking olive oil.
"Bruce was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back because he had the biggest heart in the world. And he also had enough heart, that if you needed him to go into a roomful of loaded shotguns pointed at his stupid Irish head, he'd do it for you. The thing is he'd always do for others; he just didn't do for himself, and it was always a source of frustration.
"The last time we talked at length he was sitting in his office playing a computer game. I just knew he didn't want to talk. I said, 'Bruce, you're not a fucking businessman. Why are you doing this? You're losing everything.' He didn't want to hear that. I wasn't telling him that to make him feel bad. I wanted him to go back with John and do it that way so he could do what he did best. But he was a very proud guy, do.
"As an industry, we lost a guy that had integrity. You didn't have to agree with him. Bruce would push the limits, but he'd push the limits by letting girls do things that they wanted to do. He didn't push the limits by choking girls until they'd cry. He'd never have a part of that. Most of these motherfuckers who do that now, have no idea who the fuck Bruce ever was. Bruce would have shot a motherfucker that did that to somebody he knew. On the other hand, he knew the limits of these girls, and he'd help them get there. They'd want to do it for him. They'd do things for him that they wouldn't do for other directors. It was okay to be yourself around Bruce. He was not judgmental.
"There's so many of us who really knew Bruce well. The list goes on and on. He gave Stagliano his first shot. It's a big loss for me, personally. This guy showed me how to live. He gave me advice that was so valuable to me. We'd have conversation where I didn't know what to do or how to handle a situation. One time John and I were arguing about something. He came into the room and goes, 'What the fuck happened here? This used to be fun. Money fucks things up.' What he said in those few words, we understood and that argument stopped right then. For as few words as he used, Bruce could say something and make you think.
"I loved him, man. The time we shot him in the Bottom Dweller 2 in the coffin gave me the creeps. But in the movie we had him coming out of the coffin."
Michael Cates: "We worked special effects together for about three years. I knew him from the beginning when he'd come into the special effects shop with a video camera. He was just starting to shoot little things. He was just practicing but had it in his mind what he wanted to do."
Cates remembers injuring a finger during a baseball game and was out of work for several weeks. He went over to Seven's house one day. "I'm knocking on the door and there's no answer," Cates remembers. "I'm knocking again and he finally comes to the door. He opens it just a crack. I ask him what's going on. He said he was shooting a bondage movie. It was his first one. It was with Dannica Rae. After that, I came over and helped him edit it on a real antique system that he was renting. From that point, we just worked together on everything. He was the main shooter. Eventually he became more of the director, I picked up and became his main shooter. It's been quite a few years.
"After his stroke, he didn't really try to rehabilitate himself. After he sold his titles and his name, he didn't have anything, and I guess he just kind of gave up in the end. Which was really sad. He was the type of person who didn't want to talk. I didn't realize he had gone down so fast recently. I didn't realize it was to that extent. But when I got a call Sunday morning from Glenn Barren, I just knew.
"I knew him when he was fat and healthy. There are pictures of him and me together when I was tall and skinny. He had weight on him. Then it was the opposite. He was the thin, frail one and I'm walking around like Oliver Hardy.
"Bruce and I worked at Paramount, but our main studio was out of Burbank Studios, the Warner Brothers' lot. That was our main one. We were so high in seniority at Warner Brothers, that when they had to get rid of somebody, they got rid of everybody below us. Then, eventually, if there was nothing there, they had to lay us off. Then we went to Paramount and picked up a job there. We'd work through that thing, then Burbank would call us back. That's what we did.
"Even in the studios, Bruce was one of those guys, and I could never figure out how he did it, where we'd both go in to a job on the same level, doing the same thing, and, within a day, I'm wearing a tool belt and he's wearing a tape measure giving the orders. He just had the knack, talk to somebody, and with three words turn them around. Some people might have thought he was a bastard, but the fact was he gave more of a shit about somebody than himself. If somebody needed something, he'd be there for you.
"It's a big loss. He was one of the pioneers in video when people were still shooting films. We got a lot of bad press from the filmmakers back then who saw these young punk videographers coming in. Bruce was the one who put this industry on the road with the video bonanza that followed.
Ed Powers: "I first met Bruce when I was interviewing him on the set of Loose Ends 1. {Powers, who was writing for Hot Times magazine at the time, went on to team up with Seven for subsequent Loose Ends production, the most notable one being Loose Ends VI where Jamie Gillis played the devil - "Loose Ends was the #1 selling 4-Play title," Powers says.]
Powers: "I heard so many warnings about him being a tough guy and not really liking the press. But we got along really well. I wrote down a lot of the questions I was going to ask him and showed them to him first. I think at that time there was a particular magazine that he wasn't very happy about and how they wrote something about him. During that time critics were running rampant. A lot of things haven't changed. Bill Margold was very opinionated...the late Marc Weiss, people like that. But I got along very well with Bruce and it became a friendship with him and Bionca. I was there for their wedding.
[Seven and Bionca got married at the top of the escalator at the Sahara during one of the CES shows. Though he procured some rice for the occasion, Powers remembers that Anal Lube was the ammunition of choice during the ceremony. "It was one of those Las Vegas incidents that you never forget," Powers says.]
It was my idea and a great little movie
"Bruce went on his own and found distribution with John Stagliano. Once he went under contract, the business-end of our relationship was ending though I always wanted to do another Loose Ends with Bruce. Distribution gave Bruce great opportunity because 4-Play always stayed small. It didn't think small. It stayed small. Bruce was very happy with that deal with John.
"But we kept in touch. I'd call Bruce up, but if he was ever watching Star Trek, you could never talk to him because his whole concentration was with that or Babylon 5. He loved those shows.
"When I first met Bruce, his emphysema was getting progressively worse. He'd cough and cough and cough....I saw a private side of Bruce that most people didn't get to see. He was very well liked by the girls in the business, and he like them. He was very popular and he had charisma though he was tough and thought of us a codger. He was very giving and was a very big force in Bionca's wife in a positive way. They were like Ricky and Lucy; or Burns and Allen.
"Bruce was quite young, but he had that outwardly, ornery, codgerly look. But I think that's what the emphysema did to him. The passing of Bruce is a tough one for all the industry and everybody that knows him. He was a great force and did a lot not only in the industry but as a human being. He was very kind. He has to be remembered as being kind, giving and sharing. When I talked about guts at the AVN show, his picture is next to guts in the dictionary, especially fighting his health and continuing to stay in the business. He was the gutsiest guy I ever knew and I looked up to him. Now I guess I'll look up to him forever, because he's there."
Loretta Sterling: "Bruce and I go back to the early 1980's. He was working with Lipstik. He started doing a little bit of bondage. He worked for Paramount for awhile and worked on the movie Looker. From their film experience there, the kind of delved into the bondage-stuff and did stuff for Lipstik. Their stuff was in the beginning was godawful sound and picture quality, but he learned through his mistakes."
Sterling said he first met Seven through performer Rose Royce. "She introduced us to Bruce at the Sandpiper restaurant," Sterling recalls. "At that time we had six movies out with 4-Play. He was a producer of shows and we wanted to talk to him. We started shooting things together and had a lot of success with the Loose Ends series for 4-Play. It was all because of him. Everything I know today I learned from him. He was kind of my mentor. It was just the last couple of years I haven't seen too much of him. Whenever I'd call, he'd be having a coughing fit."
Sterling said the last show he worked on with Seven was Hot Rod to Hell. "At that point he was too weak to move," Sterling said. "He directed from a monitor. He sat in the chair with his scotch and didn't move.
"It's like an end of an era for me," Sterling added. "There was so many obstacles in his life with his illness. I really got to hand it to him.
Jamie Gills: "The last time I saw Bruce I saluted him. There's not too many people in the industy that I would do that for. He was being wheeled into some kind of event in LA, I guess by Bionca, and I just instinctively did that as he came through the door. I have no military background, but I felt that was the appropriate thing to do when I saw Bruce wheeled in. He gave me a kind of acknowledgment that a superior officer would give.
"I worked with Bruce a number of times over the years and it was always a nice experience. He had a lot of heart and a lot of warmth. There was a humanity on his set which is harder to find now in this business. Everybody wanted to do their best for Bruce. He elicited that from people. That kind of spirit is not so much around anymore, and I feel sorry for kids now who will be missing some of that history
John T. Bone: It's kind of sad. It really is. He was a fucking legend. This is someone who you have to acknowledge as an integral part of our history. He was one of the greats." Bone said though he never worked with Seven, he was someone Seven used to swear at. I was the young whippersnapper," Bone remembers. "He hated me. I would go into Jim South's office and he'd say to me, 'Arrrgh, you fuckin' new kid, what the fuck do you know?' What's terrible, you begin to realize the prior generation of great guys are all dying. What's really sad is that you and I are no longer the kids. We are now becoming the older generation, and it's going to be our turn to die. Then the snottynose little bastards we're shouting at will go, 'He's an old fuck, but he's part of the history.'
Henri Pachard with whom Seven did a celebrated feature called Conflict years ago had this to add: "I haven't see Bruce in person in over a year. Bruce and I had the same birthday. He was one year younger than me. Every June 4th we would get together and get drunk. It was a ritual. That's how Conflict came about. Ed Powers was working at Vidco at the time and he came up with the idea of Conflict. Life was easier back then.
"We did that one piece together and talked about other projects. We kept each other constantly informed about projects that were going on. We shared a lot of common things. He lived with talent. I tried it once. [Pachard laughs.] I said if Bruce can do it, I can do it. Wrong. I went to visit him at the hospital, but he so embarrassed he made all the gestures for me to live. I saw him once or twice after that. Bionca and I talked about some projects that we never went forward with.
"I know that Bionca turned around so much. Here she was this jailbird, party girl, etc. You name it, she did it. But when he had that stroke, she turned herself around and changed her whole agenda.
Jim South: "Bruce Seven was a very good man. I knew him 15 to 20 years. He'd be here constantly. He was a very nice person, very honest and treated the girls very well. He always paid the talent and always paid the agent - the best."
