Bruno VeSota 1922 - 1976 By Barry Brown Bruno VeSota website

One of the most fascinating character players connected with the fantasy genre in the Fifties and Sixties was a 5' 10 1/2", 275 pound actor-director named Bruno VeSota, who usually sported a moustache and chomped on a ubiquitous cigar. In an eighteen-year period he appeared in over fifty films, was one of the earliest members of the Roger Corman stock company and later had a brief run in Jerry Warren pictures. One of the advantages of a career comprised primarily of roles in low-budget independents was the freedom it allowed an adept actor's actor such as VeSota to create distinguishable characters. The screen personalities he presented included a motley assortment of Irish, Germans, Russians, strip-joint operators and Santa Clauses, winos and junkyard dealers, art connoisseurs and diplomats. But a concomitant disadvantage to both versatility and extensive participation in 'small' pictures is the anonymity the two, in combination, can breed. And so it was that, nearly a quarter of a century after his entrance into films, one of the medium's finer character players remained one of its most neglected, even till the time of his death.

He was born Bruno William VeSota in Chicago on March 25, 1922, the second of three sons of Lithuanian immigrants Kasmir and Eleanora VeSota. Bruno caught the acting bug early in life when, in seventh grade at St. George's, a Catholic parochial school, he was persuaded by his teacher, Sister Anne Marie (sister of the distinguished stage and screen actress Blanche Yurka) to play the old villain in a children's play, Christopher's Orphan. By the time he was nineteen years old, the chubby lad had decided on a career as an actor and joined the local WPA theatre in Chicago, the Hobart. It was there that he learned the theatre basics: acting (the modified Delsarte technique, which he adamantly defends*), makeup and direction.

*Francois Delsarte (1811-1871), a French musician and teacher, created a system for developing bodily grace and improving dramatic expression, significant elements of which are traceable in the theories of Constantin Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov. Purists would have Delsarte and Stanislavski in conflict, but the two are wedded by the axiom that physical action creates emotional response.

VeSota made his directorial debut in the early forties with a production of Richard III and thereafter directed everything from classics to light comedies, not only at the Hobart, but in the by-now all but extinct arena of the tentshow.

After a few years with the Hobart, Bruno did a short stint on Lithuanian radio, followed by a longer job on English-language radio, where his most impressive credit came when he did the voice of Churchill in a semi-documentary concerning the development of the atomic bomb aired nationally by CBS the night after the destruction of Hiroshima. VeSota, an admirer of Orson Welles and somewhat of a lookalike, had early developed an impressively thick and resonant voice which served him well, particularly in that heyday of radio. During this same time, he joined with the Actors Company of Chicago where he continued to work on the stage.

In 1945, VeSota turned to work in live television production in Chicago, first for WBKB-TV, a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures, then for WGN-TV, where another now noted character actor, the late John McGiver, was a staff writer. The next four years was a veritable maelstrom of activity. All in all, Bruno worked as the producer and director of over two thousand live tv shows, acting in over two hundred. He was involved with everything from cook shows to dramatic presentations. Two of the latter were series: Jeffrey Hall, Criminologist and Cross Questions, a courtroom drama aired on the CBS network as They Stand Accused. One of the station's more effective dramatic presentations was of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart, in which Bruno played the old man with the blind eye, devising his own makeup with the use of half a ping-pong ball.

With the advent of the fifties, however, the mushrooming popularity of television led to the centralization of tv production in New York and Los Angeles with a sharp decline in Chicago actors' employment a peripheral result. In 1952, Ben Roseman, a friend who had been scene designer on a theatre production of Summer and Smoke that Bruno had directed, suggested they both move to Hollywood. Bruno concurred and the pair arrived there in July, '52. Six months later, on January 3, 1953, Genevieve 'Jebbie' O'Connor, VeSota's secretary at WGN in Chicago, became Mrs. VeSota and the first of six children, Bruno, Jr., arrived the following December (followed by all-girl triplets, Marie, Grace and Ellie, in 1956 and boy-girl twins, Jack and Jill, in '57).

Bruno wasn't in town long before he and Ben ran into Ben's actor friend, Don Brodie, a familiar face in films of the late thirties and early forties, who was looking for actors for a theatrical production he was to direct. He invited Bruno to audition; Bruno did and got a leading part only to see the production, which was also to feature Frank DeKova, called off shortly after. But Brodie did not forget the talented fat man and it wasn't long before VeSota received a call from Brodie offering him a days' work for ten dollars and meals in a ten-minute amateur film. The producer was a fellow named John Parker, son of a Portland, Oregon theatre owner. Parker's secretary, Adrienne Barrett, had told him of a dream she'd had of herself restlessly sleeping, then waking, looking around, being attracted to her bureau drawer which she opens. Inside the drawer is a severed hand. The hand opens to reveal a broach clutched in its palm. Parker, a horror film buff, decided to make a short movie.

The small crew worked fifteen or sixteen hours, completing the picture in one day and receiving thirty dollars apiece for their labor. A few days later, after Parker viewed the rushes of the film, he was so impressed that he decided to make a full-length movie without dialogue and in the months ahead he came to rely greatly on Bruno's expertise.

Filmed intermittently over a period of one year, Dementia as the final sixty-minute product was titled, has been a perennial art house presentation since its belated (it was completed in 1953) release in 1956. Often billed with Tod Browning's equally bizarre Freaks, Dementia is indeed silent throughout save for a score by the late George Antheil and the singing voice of Marni Nixon. It explores, in a diffuse series of dream sequences, the whys of the prescence of the severed hand in the woman's drawer. The girl is seen in a bar, looking reckless, and wearing about her neck the very broach we've seen before. She allows herself to be picked up by a repulsive, richly-dressed glutton (Bruno) who, before he turns his appetite towards her, finds it necessary to finish devouring a whole chicken. Returning with him to his penthouse suite, the neurotic woman has a fit of revulsion when the man makes a pass at her, stabs him with a switchblade knife she has managed to produce and pushes him off the balcony. As he falls, he grabs the broach she wears, then plunges to his death. In a panic, the girl rushes out of the building and into an alley where she sees a crowd of people surrounding the body and through their legs she sees the dead man's hand and the broach within it. She crawls on her hands and knees inbetween the legs of the crowd, hoping to snatch the broach away without being seen, but the hand holds the ornament in a death-grip. The girl looks up at the crowd and sees only a group of silent, headless figures (the effect was achieved by covering the actors' heads with a black cloth and shooting against the night sky). She then takes out her knife and cuts the hand of at the wrist. So much accounting for the hand. Another surrealistic scene takes place in a graveyard where a headless figure leads the girl to view the murder of her two-timing mother, shot to death by her jealous husband.

Though Parker gets credit for producing, directing and writing the script, and Bruno shares credit with Ben Roseman as associate producer, VeSota explained otherwise: "(Parker) was the type of guy who would get into a mood and he would turn to me and say 'Bruno, direct'. And he would walk off the set. Or he'd give me a call and say 'Everything's ready. When you show up, Bru, direct.' I would say roughly that I directed more than half of the picture. I mean, just out and out directing. But I would say that ninety nine and nine-tenths was all over Parker's shoulder, telling him what to do." Ditto the script: "I wrote it all except the first dream sequence, the dream Adrienne Barrett told John Parker."

When Parker made the decision to turn Dementia into a full-length feature, he began paying Bruno and several others, including Jebbie VeSota, seventy-five dollars a week, one hundred a week when they worked. Sometimes shooting would take place but once a month. In the meantime, it was Bruno who did much of the work. "I had to piece all this together through talking to her (Barrett) and getting into the dream she had and making up my own phony sequences in the show, things that would look interesting on the screen and grab people's attention. It was a gimmick. It was my baby. Parker wanted me to do it and every time I handed in the script he liked it and we shot."

All told, Dementia cost over sixty thousand dollars to make. Most of the effective black and white photography was shot by a UCLA instructor of cinema with lighting assistance by a still photographer named Albert Duvall. Later, however, the craft unions forced the hiring of a union crew, headed by cinematographer William Thompson who, though he receives sole credit on the piece, photographed less than ten per cent of the picture.

Because of the hand-cutting scene, Dementia was initially banned in New York, though it did receive, eventually, a rather tepid review from Richard Nason of the New York Times, who labeled it "a piece of film juvenilia."* Today it's weaknesses

*New York Times, Dec.23, 1955, page 14.

seem less due to its contrivances (after all, all's fair with a dream sequence) than the ludicrous performance of Adrienne Barrett in the lead. Though physically supberb for the role (she appears to be a neurotic man-hater), her acting is atrocious. At the point in the picture when Bruno wanted her to register sudden shock upon first spotting the broach in the dead man's hand, she knew not how to comply. After several unsuccessful tries, VeSota had the prop man surreptitiously load a gun with blanks: "So now I was going to try again and I said 'Adrienne, just follow what I say. Run into the scene, breaking hard…..When I tell you to turn, turn slowly towards me and look at me.' Which she did. At the point where she's looking at me, I pulled the trigger of the gun. The shot!! She is jarred out of her wits and almost faints and I got the reaction I wanted!".

An interesting postscript to Dementia is that pirated clips from a scene in the film featuring Barrett's delusions of a number of hands crawling towards her while she stands on a small bandstand and people about her are laughing were used in the film The Blob, supposedly representing a movie entitled Daughter of Horror. While the audience watches the film, the blob kills the projectionist and sends the terrified crowd running from the theatre as it oozes through the booth into the house. Still later, a clip from this scene in The Blob was featured in John Landis' delightful horror-film parody Schlock so that, in effect, a movie within a movie within a movie existed.

Between the time shooting began on Dementia and its completion, Bruno had managed to break into professional films. In fact, he had done at least two pictures in this period, making his debut as a bookie with one good courtroom scene in The System, a 1953 release starring Frank Lovejoy in a story about a gambling syndicate. In the next two years he handed a series of minor roles in pictures, including the part of Simmonds, an irate citizen of the two Marlon Brando's and Lee Marvin's motorcycle gangs invade in The Wild One. His first important supporting role was as Webb, a hash-house proprietor, in Hugo Haas' Bait, which featured Cedric Hardwicke as the Devil watching the tale of an old prospector (Haas) married to a sexy young woman (Cleo Moore) who plots to kill his young partner (John Agar).

In 1954 Bruno was introduced to Roger Corman through Jonathan Haze (Bruno called him 'Jackie'), whom VeSota had met a Googie's, an actor's hangout next door to Schwab's drugstore in Hollywood. Jackie had played a small part both in Dementia and, later, in the first film Corman had produced, The Monster from the Ocean Floor. Upon being introduced, Corman spouted "Oh yes, I saw you in Dementia." After talking awhile, Bruno, without reading for the part, was cast as a truckdriver in The Fast and the Furious, Corman's second picture, a murder melodrama with a number of racedriving sequences as a sideline attraction. "Of course, I was so happy", recalled Bruno. "I figured the fame of Dementia is really reaching out now."

Before the period when VeSota became heavily involved with Corman, however, he directed, officially, his first feature film, made in '54, but not released until two years later. It came about by accident one day when Bruno ran into a wealthy young actor named Burt Kaiser, who'd performed under Bruno's direction in an episode of Jeffrey Hall, Criminologist back in the Chicago live tv days. Kaiser was hot on the heels of a career as a movie actor and suggested Bruno write a low-budget script with a meaty role for Kaiser, which Bruno could direct. Only too happy to oblige, VeSota came up with a story about a police lieutenant seeking the killer of a Hollywood starlet. The murderer turns out to be a maniacal caricaturist (played by producer Kaiser). The picture, Female Jungle, was shot in six days on a budget of forty-nine thousand dollars. Besides Lawrence Tierney as the cop and Kathleen Crowley the romantic interest, the film featured a young actress named Jayne Mansfield in her film debut. In the supporting department were John Carradine (who'd been chosen over an aging Victor Moore) as a newspaperman and former B-movie leading man Cornelius Keefe (who'd changed his name to Jack Hill to avoid repercussions from unpopular political involvements). Bruno himself played the husband of a waitress in the picture.

VeSota's major work for Corman began in 1956. From '56 to '59, he worked in over a dozen films for, or in association with, the Corman brothers, Gene and Roger. Many of these were of the teenage melodrama category which Corman, more than any other one producer, popularized. Rock All Night, Carnival Rock, Teenage Doll, Hot Car Girl and the early Jack Nicholson picture The Cry Baby Killer -- all were Corman pictures in which Bruno appeared. In Hot Car Girl (1958), he played for the first time one of his most effective characters, a junkyard dealer. Four years later he was even more impressive in the same type role, this time in the low-budget Fairway release The Choppers, starring the multi-untalented non-singer, non-actor Arch Hall, Jr. Bruno's very bulk, when attired in slopping clothes, the tops of his socks showing beneath the cuffs of his trousers and he himself slouched disgruntedly on a moth-eaten couch with its springs poking out in the middle of a lonely no-man's land of discarded junk -- this was the image that made him one of the great symbols of fifties and sixties low-budget films and the minor cult-figure he remains.                          

His own favorite role, however, was of a different ilk. In Daddy-O (1959), he played the cultured gangster Sidney Chillis, speaking with affected, velvety tones (a la Sydney Greenstreet) and being ever so nice to poor Dick Contino as he convinces him it is in his best interest to help smuggle drugs into the community where VeSota runs a teen hangout as a front for his undercover activities. The film gave Bruno co-star billing.

Aside from his classic roles, however, VeSota's visage became increasingly familiar to horror film aficionadoes as the years went by and eventually these pictures came to outnumber those he'd done in all other categories.

In The Undead (1957), his first fantasy film for Corman, Bruno was a meek innkeeper whose courtesy towards witch Allison Hayes is rewarded with his being beheaded. Less than a year later, he turned up as a Russian diplomat in War of the Satellites and the year following was an art connoisseur in Corman's classic A Bucket of Blood. All three pictures, incidentally, had Dick Miller in the cast and it is interesting to compare the previous chapters in this book on Miller and Jonathan Haze to see how closely all three men's careers were, for a time, interwoven.

The same year A Bucket of Blood was made (almost the same week, one might be tempted to say) Bruno appeared as a comical nightwatchman who becomes a victim of woman-wasp Susan Cabot in The Wasp Woman and as a grocery store owner who, after forcing at gunpoint his philandering wife (Yvette Vickers) and her lover (Michael Emmet) into the swamp where they are killed by monstrous leeches commits suicide in Attack of the Giant Leeches.

Amidst all this acting activity, Bruno managed to direct another feature, The Brain Eaters, released in 1958. Although the nominal producer was actor Ed Nelson, who starred in the picture, the financial backing came from Roger Corman. Again, it was Jonathan Haze who brought VeSota and Corman together on the deal.

Corman needed product for his company, Filmgroup, to sell to American International. Knowing VeSota had directed Female Jungle and most of Dementia, Corman asked if he'd like to do a picture for him. Bruno answered in the affirmative, dreamed up a story, had another friend from the Chicago live tv days, actor-writer Gordon Urquhart, come up with a screenplay, then took it to Corman, who gave it the go-ahead. Urquhart, who had also appeared in Female Jungle, was to star as Dr. Kettering in this tale of a scientific expedition to the bowels of the earth that resurfaces fifty years later. The survivors return with creatures on their backs that control their brains*. Assisted by

* Originally titled The Keepers, the title change to The Brain Eaters was made by the distributing firm, American International. Robert Heinlein, whose novel The Puppet Masters, with its creatures from outer space who, through the use of their antennae, control the brains of earthlings, bore a coincidental resemblance to Bruno's idea, threatened Corman with a plagiarism suit. The case was settled out of court. VeSota had, in fact, never read Heinlein's novel until after the charges were made.

Ed Nelson, an actor Bruno had met while working on Teenage Doll, they scouted locations, then VeSota went off to Mexico to play a Mafia hit-man in a film being directed by actor Mel Welles, Code of Silence, starring Terry Becker, now a television director. While there, he received word that Gordon Urquhart had died of cancer. When Bruno returned from Mexico, he cast his assistant, Ed Nelson, in the role.

The Brain Eaters was filmed in six days on a budget of twenty-six thousand dollars. Nelson later used footage from the film to garner a contract at Universal and became a well-known tv player, most notably on the Peyton Place series. The young character actor who played the old, bearded scientist who had been head of the underground expedition was none other than tv's Dr. Spock of Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy.

The 'monster' that represented the brain eater was devised by Nelson. He took a child's toy, a plastic ladybug with tiny antennae, attached longer antennae and glued black fur to the rest of the body, carefully cutting around the mobile plastic wings. When the resulting masterpiece was wound up, it would move about with the wings popping up and down, giving the creature a breathing effect. Nelson displayed his invention to director VeSota using a flashlight in his darkened garage and Bruno was impressed. "With the flashlight on, it looked terrific. It didn't look like a great motion picture monster effect, because it was a small monster. But when we shot it we had to turn on a hell of a lot of lights and unfortunately the creature moved in jerks and in the outdoor scene in the grass the antennae looked exactly what they were: a couple of pipecleaners!". The budget didn't provide for retakes.

Another problem was the giant silver-papered cone that would represent the ship that returns from beneath the earth. The fifty-foot high wood structure had been built on the grounds of the Pomona Bowl* and was awaiting use, but a few days before

* Pomona is a community about twenty miles out of Los Angeles.

filming was to commence a group of mysterious tiny savages hurled rocks through the sturdy metallic structure, poking holes in its paper-skin. Blood then had to be squeezed from a rock to get enough money for galvanized tin to be used as replacement metal. Despite these setbacks, The Brain Eaters was completed and made a tidy profit for everyone not directly connected with the making of it.

Amusing anecdotes were not cornered by The Brain Eaters. During the filming of The Undead at the old Empire sound stage on Sunset Boulevard, smudgepots were used, quite effectively, to simulate the eerie atmosphere of a goblin-ridden copse. But it can be difficult to simulate an appropriate reaction to a simulated fog. "Everybody's eyes were running, everybody choked" recalled Bruno. "The only person who didn't act like he was affected by all that smoke was Roger Corman. He was already counting the money the picture was going to make."

During the filming of Attack of the Giant Leeches not only did the monster suits split when they were fitted over the air-tank-equipped swimmers (the suits then were pinned together with paperclips and sewn with needle and thread) but, as Bruno better relates: "During the shooting of the underground cave (at Producers Studio in Hollywood) where the leeches bring their victims, we were standing around watching the leeches, their crummy suits coming apart, hauling up their victims and trying to pretend they're so strong they can lift Yvette Vickers up on this level. They had a ten by ten watertank loaded with several tons of water and because of the pressure of the four or five people that were in it, the tank gave. It was a canvas tank held up by wood and it gave and the tons of water came pouring towards the viewers and a friend of mine visiting the set, G.J. Mitchell*,

*G.J. Mitchell, another alumni of Chicago live tv, whom Bruno later introduced to Jerry Warren. Mitchell made his debut in Warren films, using his own name, with Attack of the Mayan Mummy. Under the pseudonym George Andre he co-starred in She was a Hippy Vampire and Blood of the Man Devil.

had to scamper out of the way. The crab dolly almost ran Mitchell over."

Save for a small role as a bartender in The Haunted Palace (1963), VeSota's work for Corman ended in 1959, after fifteen jobs as an actor, one as a director and one as a second-unit director (She Gods of Shark Reef, 1958). As Vesota said, disheartedly, of The Haunted Palace: "That was the last bone he threw to me."

After '59, Bruno wandered through an array of intriguingly obscure pictures, including 20,000 Eyes, which told the story of an investment counselor (Gene Nelson) who plots the perfect crime; The Little Bank Robber, a children's comedy about a little girl (portrayed by producer Leon Vicman's daughter Wendy) trapped in a bank while it is being robbed by two comical burglars (Bruno and Josip Elic); The Choppers, a below-the-underground classic about car-parts thieves and The Case of Patty Smith (1962), a pro-abortion melodrama which Bruno, a staunch anti-abortionist Catholic, regretted having done. 1962 also saw the release of a film made four years earlier, The Devil's Hand, starring Robert Alda and Linda Christian, in which Bruno played a devil worshipper.

The last motion picture VeSota directed was Invasion of the Star Creatures. The story behind the making of this film, another 1962 release, is complex but, again, begins with Jonathan Haze and the reader is referred to the chapter on Haze's career. While working in Mexico on Code of Silence, VeSota had become friends with a fellow who later became an executive with Ararat Productions, the film company headed by producer Berj Hagopian and actor-director Mel Welles. Welles had previously purchased the script from Haze, his Little Shop of Horrors co-star, with money charged to the production company. When Welles and Hagopian split, the script, originally titled The Monster of Nicholson Mesa, remained with the company and Bruno was hired to direct at the suggestion of his friend. With actor Mark Ferris (who played the bumbling Colonel Rank in the picture) Bruno re-write Haze's script and it was retitled Invasion of the Star Creatures. It was then budgeted for twenty-five thousand dollars and a six-day shooting schedule (a request for two extra days was turned down).

Invasion of the Star Creatures is a hokey eighty-one minute black and white film about two beautiful alien women, Professor Puna (Delores Reed) and Dr. Tanga (Gloria Victor), who plan to conquer the Earth with the aid of an army of vega-men, monsters consisting of men dressed in burlap bags dyed green with vegetables sticking out at odd corners of their suits*. They run into

*The suits were designed by Burt Shomberg, who also did the paintings used in the film The Fall of the House of Usher (1961).

two zany soldiers, Philbrick (Bob Ball) and Penn (Frankie Ray), who eventually capture the girls' affections and disarm them completely -- a masculine fantasy of romantic love. The movie ends with the two domineering women having been transformed into submissive servants of the bumbling soldiers, whose very incompetence is suggested as an attractive trait.

Ultimately, the failure of Invasion of the Star Creatures is due neither to script nor budget, but to the choice of the two leads. The garish humor of the piece needed no embellishment; unfortunately, that is precisely what it got from Ray (a former manager of tragicomedian Lenny Bruce and, later, of Shecky Green) and Bob Ball, an associate of Bruno's since Chicago. The jokes are played heavily, assuming the proportions of a desperate burlesque-comic interlude and all the ingenuity of director and script matters nought save to the most discerning viewer. The most encouraging directorial touch occurs in the runbys through a supposed cave in which the aliens have their hideout. Instead of a multitude of undistinguished shots taken from separate angles, VeSota had one cave set built with two or three parallel entrances and exists, then shot the entire sequence from one straight-on position, a la Jerry Warren master shot, jump-cutting after each exist so that each re-entrance would be on a different plane. But no plot or directorial invention could obscure the fact that what the film really needed to fulfill its potential as a wacky little comedy was the anarchic style of the Marx Brothers or the low-key tongue-in-cheek sarcasm of Miller and Haze, for whom it was written in the first place.

Bruno himself had a cameo role in Invasion of the Star Creatures as a bad guy who is knocked out by superhero Ball in a fantasy sequence that takes place when the alien girls attach mind-reading machines to the soldiers' heads. Completed on schedule, the film was double-billed with The Brain That Wouldn't Die, a serious effort about an unscrupulous scientist (Jason Evers) who keeps the head of his fiancée (Virginia Leith), decapitated in an auto accident, alive, hoping to transplant it onto another woman's body.

Bruno's final stint as a director came a few years later with an obscure television drama, The Broken Glass, by Ronald Collier, a futuristic treatment of a meeting between Judas Iscariot and Caiphas that starred Fred Hoffman and David Manning. It is rarely seen.

After Star Creatures, VeSota returned to acting. During one particular lull in activity, however, he accepted a job as make-up man on the eerie Curtis Harrington picture Night Tide (1963), concerning the romance between a sailor (Dennis Hopper) and a mermaid (Linda Lawson). Harrington, a knowledgeable film buff whose work as a director reflects his eclectic tastes, had seen Bruno in Dementia and, upon discovering who his makeup man was, implored VeSota to do a bit in the film. When Bruno demurred, Harrington promised to buy him the best meal in Santa Monica. That clinched it. Bruno is seen walking down a flight of stairs as Hopper is ascending and the fat man turns sideways and holds his tummy up to let Hopper pass.

Most of VeSota's filmwork in the sixties was in television. He had, of course, done much episodic tv in the fifties (Passport to Danger, I Led Three Lives, Lineup, Mr. Lucky, etc), but more and more he would come to rely on the small screen for earning a living until finally he would literally throw in the towel on feature work. But, before he did so (and perhaps explaining why he did so), there were the Jerry Warren pictures.

Jerry Warren's work is better explained in the chapter on Katherine Victor, who was the only significant screen personality Warren pictures generated. By the time VeSota began working for him, Warren, the producer-director of some of the lowest-budgeted feature films on record, had turned to an even thriftier means of production: dubbing foreign films into English and splicing in lengthy expository scenes with American actors to plug up any plot loopholes (or simply to elongate the picture for future television sale). Sometimes he combined footage from as many as three different sources, omitting the sound and cementing them together with narrative, and little concern for coherence.

Bruno, out of desperation ("I felt horrible about doing them, but I made a buck") acted in five Warren films in a two-year period between 1964 and 1966. In The Violent and the Damned, a Brazilian film about a chain-gang escape starring Arturo De Cordova, Bruno played a diplomat; in Attack of the Mayan Mummy, which incorporated extensive footage from several Mexican films, he was a newspaper editor who listens to a professor's strange tale of an archaeological expedition that ended with the resurrection of a vengeful mummy. VeSota consequently decides to suppress the story because the professor offers no proof; with Curse of the Stone Hand, composed of two Chilean films and American footage starring John Carradine and Katherine Victor, Bruno gave the entire narration of the film on a small tape recorder while sitting in the bushes of Griffith Park in Los Angeles with Jerry Warren and Miss Victor; and in Creature of the Walking Dead, he had much the same type of role as in Attack of the Mayan Mummy, spending his entire screen time sitting behind a desk as a police inspector listening to several people tell their stories.

Of Attack of the Mayan Mummy, Bruno recalled: "I was playing a newspaper editor listening to this professor's story. It was in the middle of summer. It was so hot in this room, a little go-go agent's office, because of the camera lights. During the shooting of the scene, I could feel the sweat running down my brow, onto my nose and dropping to my chin and G.J. Mitchell, who's playing opposite me, he's sitting there and he's so nervous trying to remember his ten pages of dialogue to be done in one take while sitting in one position using a one-direction mike for the two of us. G.J.'s cracking his knuckles and I thought he was going to blow his line any minute and he's watching the sweat coming down my brow and on my nose and popping on my chin and on my shirt and it doesn't phase Jerry Warren one bit -- he's just sitting there waiting till his film runs out. He doesn't give a damn what you're doing. That was Jerry Warren. I swear, he is the only person I ever met in Hollywood who set out to make a bad picture on purpose."

Bruno worked for Warren one more time, in the obscure She Was A Hippy Vampire (1970), originally filmed in 1966 as The Wild World of Batwoman but held up in release by court suits (see chapter on Katherine Victor). VeSota's role is superfluous. He has a few scenes as a Mr. Seltzer of the packing division of Ayjax Company, a firm whose new development, an atomic hearing aid, is stolen by a mysterious culprit who calls himself Ratfink. The movie remains Warren's most decadent.

During the next five years, VeSota's work in features diminished. He was a minister in Hell's Angels on Wheels; a KGB agent who wants to send the heroine adrift in outer space after embalming her with Lenin's corpse in Universal's The Perils of Pauline, made as a tv pilot but released as a feature; a Nazi scientist in A Man Called Dagger; a police technician in Bunny O'Hare with Ernest Borgnine and Bette Davis as bank robbers and again was a Russian spy in Disney's Million Dollar Duck (1971), his last movie appearance.

In television, Bruno had his most lucrative assignment in the semi-regular role of Sam Tucker the bartender in Bonanza, a part that lasted through the final three seasons of that show's run. His performance as a Sydney Greenstreet-ish character to Aram Katcher's Lorre in an episode of It Takes a Thief, ave rise to some talk about a series but nothing materialized and another pilot in which he would have had the running part of a minister, Mr. Paracelsus, Who are you?, based on the H.G. Wells short story, "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham", failed to sell. The series would have starred Jack Hawkins as the detective who tracks the notorious Paracelsus, able to transfer himself into the body of anyone through the use of magic. The $350,000 pilot, directed by Peter Tewksbury, has never even screen on tv.

The remaining years of Bruno's life were largely uneventful. He lived in Culver City near MGM studios with his wife and children. Jobs, on shows such as McMillan and Wife and Kojak trickled in, but there was little excitement. Often, Bruno, who never learned to drive a car, would amble down to the nearby Crest House Restaurant on Washington Boulevard. He was a talented caricaturist and he would sit for hours with a cup of coffee, sketching the employees and patrons of the establishment and his work still lines the walls.

In contract with many of the characters he'd played, in private life VeSota was a teetotaller and stern but loving head of a tightly-knit family. He was unabashedly in love with his wife, Jebbie, an Irish lass with bright red hair and eyes of blue who works as a specialist teacher in reading and math.

"Acting is a child's game" Bruno philosophized during the last interview he was to give. "I don't mean it's childish, I mean it's a child's game. We more or less perpetuate our youth through acting. We're always acting, we're playing parts; we don't want to face the reality of being ourselves. We're the happiest when we're acting. I think any actor would say that…..And the only way I've been able to do it with a wife and six children is because my dear wife, Genevieve, has put up with my play-acting. She has sacrificed everything, financially and many other ways, just to allow me to be a child and continue my playing… It's not that I'm a selfish person, carrying on my work looking forward to a career that I haven't fully attained. I've sacrificed (too), but at the same time I tremendously appreciate my wife's sacrifices. Not that I'm a bum. I try to make a buck, very hard, anyway I can, as long as it's honest and moral." Then, this declared, Bruno said with a smile, "My only vice is smoking cigars."

In return for the invention and integrity this actor brought to his screen performances in a generation of movie history, one vice was permissible.

On September 24, 1976, Bruno VeSota died of a heart attack. The funeral was held several days later. An actors' eulogy was delivered by this writer. Those assembled included Jonathan Haze, Yvette Vickers, G.J. Mitchell and Ben Roseman.