Bruce Kessler, who directed episodes of exhibits together with The Monkees, It Takes a Thief, The Rockford Information, McCloud and The Commish when he wasn’t driving race automobiles, designing boats or circling the globe in a yacht, has died. He was 88.
Kessler died Thursday at his house in Marina del Rey after a short sickness, his brother, writer and columnist Stephen Kessler, advised The Hollywood Reporter.
Survivors additionally embrace his spouse, actress Joan Freeman, maybe finest often called the love curiosity of Elvis Presley’s character in Roustabout (1964). She and Kessler have been collectively for 54 years and married for 33.
Kessler served as second-unit director on Howard Hawks’ Pink Line 7000 (1965), an motion movie about inventory automobiles that starred James Caan, earlier than embarking on a three-decade profession as a director for tv.
His credit included The Flying Nun, Adam-12, Marcus Welby, M.D., Get Christie Love!, Baretta, Swap, CHiPs, The A-Workforce, The Biggest American Hero, Hunter, Hardcastle and McCormick, The Fall Man, Riptide, MacGyver, The Commish and Renegade, with the final episode of his profession airing in 1997.
Bruce Michael Kessler was born in Seattle on March 23, 1936. He and his household moved to Los Angeles in 1946, and his dad and mom, Jack and Nina, launched a women swimwear firm in partnership with designer Rose Marie Reid.
With the success of the enterprise, they relocated to Beverly Hills, and Kessler would turn out to be buddies with James Dean and Steve McQueen, future actors who have been racing lovers.
Kessler earned the nickname “Little Lead Foot” as a teen, and when he was 17, he competed in newbie auto races driving a Jaguar XK120 owned by his mother.
Kessler was purported to trip with Dean in his silver Porsche to a street race in Salinas, California, in September 1955, however “as a consequence of a last-minute change of plan drove up with one other pal,” Stephen Kessler wrote final month in a column for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Dean would die in a automotive crash that day.
“My brother was 19 on the time, and that little bit of luck was emblematic of his subsequent charmed life, on the monitor and off,” he added.
In 1958, Kessler suffered critical accidents in a fiery crash in the midst of the night time within the rain whereas driving a Ferrari within the 24 Hours of Le Mans (his co-driver was fellow American Dan Gurney). A yr later, he spent days in a coma after a race accident in Pomona, California, then retired from the game after one more critical crash in 1962 in Riverside, California.
Bruce Kessler (left) with actor Steve McQueen earlier than a 1959 race in Pomona, California. Kessler would endure a critical harm in a crash that day.
CBS through Getty Photographs
Shifting to indicate enterprise, Kessler directed and produced The Sound of Pace (1962), a 19-minute, dialogue-free documentary in regards to the Scarab race automotive, which he helped construct. The brief performed on the Cannes Movie Pageant and acquired him work as a technical adviser on racing and chase sequences for motion films and as a script supervisor.
After his expertise with Hawks, Kessler directed two first-season episodes of The Monkees in 1966 and helmed the 1968 movies Angels From Hell, set on this planet of motorbike gangs, and Killers Three (1968), starring Robert Walker Jr.
He would direct two different films, The Homosexual Deceivers (1969) and the Andrew Prine-starring Simon, King of the Witches (1971), in addition to a number of telefilms, together with 1977’s Homicide in Peyton Place.
The adventurous Kessler and naval architect Steve Seaton helped design the primary leisure motor yacht for the corporate Delta Marine, a 70-foot vessel that Kessler christened Zopilote and launched in 1985.
“On the time, nobody had any thought what an iconic and groundbreaking trawler yacht she would turn out to be,” Milt Baker wrote in Soundings journal. “On the planet of offshore cruising boats, Zopilote proved to be a game-changer, and it wasn’t lengthy earlier than Delta ceased constructing fishing boats and shifted completely to yachts — hefty offshore yachts like Zopilote, then bigger and fancier superyachts.”
In 1990, Kessler and Freeman left California aboard Zopilote certain for the South Pacific, a 35,000-mile circumnavigation. After they arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from Europe after the ultimate leg in 1993, Zopilote had turn out to be solely the sixth powerboat to finish a visit all over the world, Baker famous.
Kessler later helped construct the Seaton-designed, 64-foot Spirit of Zopilote, which was delivered in 1997. He and his spouse lived and cruised on it for the following 27 years. He wound up logging greater than 100,000 nautical miles (and 25,000 hours) as captain of his personal vessels.
Survivors embrace his different brother, Rick.