B stands for Best Friend - and Bruce’s happens to be Sam Raimi.
According to Bruce in “If Chins Could Kill”: “My first brush with Sam was a fleeting memory. It was in the hallway of West Maple junior High School. Sam was dressed as Sherlock Holmes, playing with dolls in the middle of the hallway and I just walked around him, and headed on down the hall.”
The two boys would eventually reconnect during a high school acting class. Bonding over poorly received pantomimes, they eventually realized they harbored matching ambitions and started on the long path toward best friendhood.
By his junior year, Bruce was such a fixture at the Raimi household that Sam’s mom Celia put him in charge of babysitting her youngest son (and Bruce’s eventual co-star), Ted, and Bruce was often pressed into service to chauffeur Ted to his cello lessons. Celia would eventually be the only female attendee besides the bride at Bruce’s first wedding.
After both boys graduated highschool and tried college, they decided to forgo the rest of their formal education to form a limited partnership with their friend Rob Tapert. Renaissance Pictures would eventually allow the three men to co-produce “Darkman,” “Crimewave” and the original “Evil Dead” trilogy before Bruce left the company to concentrate on his acting career.
Bruce and Sam have an interesting working relationship. Sam knows he’s Bruce’s best friend and uses that to his full advantage, pushing Bruce to the limits of his own endurance. Sam’s not above poking Bruce with a stick, manipulating him into playing stuntman to mollify a dyspeptic actor, or having his extras throw potatoes at Bruce’s head to make a scene look more realistic. "Make him go through torture!“ was Sam’s request for Army of Darkness, and it’s a maxim that paid off in the end: their partnership was voted the 26th Greatest Actor/Director collaboration of all time by Empire Online.
Though according to Bruce, he and Sam don’t hang out as much as they’d like to due to their busy schedules, they continue to carry on a lively email correspondence, and they also continue to cultivate a fruitful professional partnership. Bruce last worked with Sam on Raimi’s blockbuster "Oz: The Great and Powerful”, where he cameoed as a Winkie Guard.
Fun Fact: Sam and Bruce’s partnership has given birth to six movies, a production company…and an acrobatic act. Back in high school, the two performed under the name “The Bonzoid Sisters” at children’s parties for spare money.
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