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August 1st 2001
By
David Sereda
This is my story of how I discovered Pamela Anderson, the very first
professional photographer to recognize that she was born with amazing beauty and
charm, destined for orbit in the solar system of Hollywood minds. It is the story of how I knew her struggle with the transformation of her
body, her passion for fame, the creation of an altered image, the creation of
the “Wham, Bam, Thank You Pam.” It is my story of trying to help her along
the way, a casual friendship, and eventually Pam’s rejecting my friendship and
helping hand.
I discovered Pam back between 1986-87, when she was just out of High School from Comox, British Columbia, a small town on Northern Vancouver Island. She had just moved to the big city of Vancouver, and was working at a fitness club called “Trendsetters.” When I first saw her, she looked like a blooming blond sunflower and had a face that was so bright, it could melt anyone who attempted to gaze. I knew I was looking at a future world sensation, but I had no idea really, what was being born.
Pam was so fit and strong looking, well tanned from artificial rays (she only dreamed of California from a sun tanning booth back then) and she was training to become a female body-builder. She had strong arms, was quite wide in her mid-section, big thighs, and wanted to gain even more weight in muscle than she already had. That was her first ambition, to become a female bodybuilding champion, and perhaps follow in the footsteps of Rachael McLeish. This girl was destined for a career in the physical fitness industry, so she thought at the dawn of time.
We talked at the club for a bit and I told her I thought she could really make it big as a model. I wanted to take some pictures for her. A few days later, Pam jumped in the car with me, so happy looking and excited, I had never seen such joy on anyone’s face in a long time, not since I watched cartoons of “Mickey Mouse” and “Daffy Duck” back in 1967. We drove somewhere to take some pictures of her outside. I took a few rolls of snap-shots of her, and we talked a lot about Pam’s future ambitions. She asked me if being a bodybuilder was a good idea if she wanted to model. I told her that if she wanted to be a fitness star alone, she could do some modeling in that world, but that if she wanted to go mainstream, she would have to abort her plan to be a bodybuilder and lose the excess muscle, and go lean. I suggested a New Age fruitarian diet. She struggled with the idea for a long time. Pam was pretty, but not the kind of model who could make it in a mainstream way, not yet anyway. I saw the potential.
I also told Pam that I had been a professional photographer in L.A. (not a big name) for some time, had shot 4 Pepsi adds (big deal for a small town girl), did some small adds, catalogs, and a lot of portfolio building for models. I told her she should go to L.A. I could show her around down there. Maybe someone would notice her.
I showed the pictures I did of Pam to my stepmother Trish Sereda, who was just starting a clothing company for fitness wear called “Hot Skins Bodywear” (now a big name in the fitness clothing arena), and Trish just loved her. Before Hotskins Bodywear was even a company, I organized a very low-budget photo shoot, using no professional lighting (just a few giant 500-watt light bulbs) and we dressed Pam up in the new designs and took pictures. We shot the pictures in the swimwear store in Vancouver called “Reach the Beach.”
I even designed my own swimsuit and dressed Pam up in it and took these photos of her, her very first swimwear shoot. I was not very experienced in shooting swimwear, as we can see, and Pam was my first swimwear model . Her body was cute back then, but not the Pam people see today.
During the shoot, Pam was spotted by an executive for a company who wanted her for a TV infomercial in Los Angeles. The magic was already starting to happen. It was for one of those things you take to the beach that looks like someone cut a tent in half and used it for sun protection. A few weeks later, Pam was flown to Los Angeles for the commercial. She got paid in American dollars instead of Canadian Pesos. She was ecstatic just to get a little commercial, but even more ecstatic to see California, a place she could only dream about before she died her hair blonde.
Pam always called and always stayed in touch with me. She was so grateful in those days for favors that helped her along the way. Pam was now quitting the whole “body-building thing,” and wanted to create a new and more lean look for herself. She was still working out, but in a different way. She looked great, but was still a little big. Her bust size was medium and nice looking at the time, far from what happened after Earth collided with Venus (the Boom Job), and Pam wanted more love than ever from men. But success was not instant. Pam really worked hard on her image.
About 2 years after I first met her, Pam wanted to work in the movies in Vancouver, and she asked me for a favor. She was so open-minded, and willing to get exposure, she wanted to work in movies as an “Advanced Skills Extra.” It just so happened that my brother hired all the extras on “21-Jump Street” and he was more than happy to give her a job. Pam seemed thrilled to be working on a TV show, even if it was just something like extra work. I heard from by brother, Tim Sereda, that people really liked Pam on the set and she started chatting with the actors and stuff, and she got people to take a great liking to her. But no one offered her an acting job. A famous guest star offered to take her to Los Angeles with him. Pam didn’t go as she was scared and had a boyfriend (I guess she didn’t like the guy). People started asking about her. Pam was developing a lot of self-esteem and she knew that she had what men liked.
It was around the time that Pam was working on “21 Jump Street” that she got the idea to go to L.A. She asked me to take her down there with me, and she could get around town and get to know people. I wasn’t going back to L.A. just yet, so I didn’t know what to do. Pam had a boyfriend who she wasn’t fond enough of (a yuppie who drove a real BMW), and one day called me to tell me she broke up with him was now going out with a photographer in Vancouver named Daniel Ilicic. He was a really good photographer and Pam wanted me to come down to the photo studio with her and meet Dan. We all sort of became friends. Pam was really in love with this guy, as he was handsome, a bodybuilder (her type at the time), and a great photographer who was working a lot. He had an amazing studio and the technology to make Pam’s portfolio very impressive. Pam was on the move getting guys to jump through the hoops like well-trained animals in the circus. I jumped too, and really well. But Dan was a better photographer than me.
Dan Ilicic was always photographing Pam and always trying to use her as a model to sell his photo add ideas to big sponsors. In Canada, Beer is the biggest business. Canadians drink more beer than American automobiles drink Saudi oil. Dan asked me to help him photograph Pam by a swimming pool for a Labbatts beer idea. I helped them out. I jumped through that hoop for free, just like a good dog. Dan was always showing Pam’s pictures to Labbatts and at first, they always said “no.” Pam was no instant success. She had to struggle almost like everybody else, but nothing like spawning salmon.
Later, Dan made a Labbatts “Bluezone” girl poster of Pam, which is now a legendary photo of her. He showed it to Labbatts Beer and they were not interested in her right away. They turned her down.
Pam asked me to take some of her now amazing photos down to L.A. and show them around. She wanted to get an Agent in L.A. and I was going to try and help her jump through another hoop (I never got treats). I was shooting for Pepsi through an Add Agency in L.A. called Tracy Locke on Wilshire boulevard. I showed her pictures to the Art Director named Michael Krause, and he said she was “cute, but that there are a million blondes in L.A.” but he would think about it. Not all that amazed, and not all that brilliant.
I then showed Pam’s whole lot of pictures to L.A. Models and they expressed some interest in Pam. They wanted to meet her.
Later, Pam was discovered on the big screen of a Canadian Football League game. Pam test shot for Playboy in Vancouver, and she told me she got accepted to fly down to L.A. She went down to meet the people in Los Angeles. She loved L.A. and came back disheveled over an offer from Playboy magazine that she didn’t like. They wanted to shoot her for a cover wearing furs. Pam was a deep animal lover and there was no way she was going to wear fur. She flat out turned them down.
After doing the cover for Playboy, the Canadian Beer commercials started. Suddenly Pam was being accepted. She was now getting to experience being on film. Again, Pam asked me to take her to Los Angeles with me. I was driving down there all the time. I never ended up doing it because her career was taking off too fast.
Within a few months, Playboy offered Pam a cover that did not offend her. She went down and shot the cover. When she came back, I remember meeting her and her boyfriend, and both of them were jazzed. Pam was going to be a big star. They got engaged to be married that August. Dan was certain they would be married. The date was to be August 21st. Hey, that is my birthday, I thought. What an auspicious day.
By the time Pam had shot two covers and then did her first centerfold, her and Dan were fading fast. Pam moved to Los Angeles, and had wealthy and powerful men throwing offers at her to marry her. She called me all the time. I too moved back to L.A. in Malibu, and would always, about 2 times a week, get calls from an excited Pam telling me stories. She knew she was going to be a big star.
Pam said that when she got famous, she was going to help the world and really do something for humanity. She wanted to help animals and the cause of abuses against them. I was an environmentalist on the side of trying to write movie screenplays and photography. I had by then planted over 500,000 trees in British Columbia. I had cleaned up oil spills, protested against cruelty to elephants in the circus, and was working with a very important scientist from M.I.T on non-radioactive nuclear power.
When Pam first got into the L.A. scene, she was meeting with people that she would talk to about these causes that both of us were concerned about, and about the solutions that I was working with. She had talked to Steven Segal, John Peters (Producer of batman who wanted to Marry her – she told me she wanted a younger man and could not marry him), and many more.
Pam’s new image wasn’t quite born even just yet. One day I bumped into Pam at a club on Sunset called “Black and Blue” and she was with Scott Bao, her new boyfriend and another man who was her new manager. Pam changed. Her boobs were huge and she was so skinny. All of a sudden, “Shazam,” Pam had undergone this huge change, which she described as her new manager’s idea to make Pam into a “Bridgette Bardot” type, or was it really Bridgette Bardot after she met Austin Powers and traveled to the future in Austin’s “Time Travel Machine?” Pam not only had Bridgette’s passion for saving animals (men excluded), but looked an amazing amount like her. I love the real Bardot.
Soon Playboy gave in and had welcomed the new Pam and was doing new photo shoots of her. Pam’s image was nearly alien to the Pam that I first had met. The innocent, loving and caring side of Pam was hidden obscured by clouds of her distant past. She became a supper sex symbol overnight. She was mingling with the stars and soon forgot her friend with whom this whole thing started with. She didn’t call me anymore and I didn’t care.
I would hear stories about Pam
on the news and see her all over the place in the press. I was struggling deeply with environmental issues and losing interest in
photography and trying to get Hollywood producers to make the movies from the
screenplays about the environment I was writing. No one was interested in my writing, nor the hole in the ozone layer
evaporating my mind. I became
deeply involved with scientific solutions for a better environment, directed a
non-profit foundation and spoke in Congress in a debate on Nuclear fusion, in
association with a panel of brilliant physicists who wanted to change the world
and end nuclear waste and radioactivity back in 1992. We lost our battle there. From
1992 – 1994, I founded a company called “The Green & Blue Corporation”
with a wealthy Saudi partner, and we tried to raise funding for these amazing
solutions for clean energy and environmental clean-up. We met the richest people on the planet and they all said “no.”
I spent 6 years living in a tent after that, froze to death while flooded by a river of water (now I am a ghost), and had hit the bottom. All of that is true but the Ghost part. I lived through it all. I tried calling out to Pam, who was now a superstar, for help. I thought she and all her movie people might care. No one would let me talk to her. I just remember Pam being my friend, and wanting to share the same vision I did, to help heal this dying Earth. Pam was too swept away by fame and didn’t seem to care about the vision anymore.
I thought we would fly to the Congo and save the Gorillas together, join Greenpeace and fight off baby seal killers, make love in our igloo (my male fantasy), fly to the Bahamas and save the whales from being exploited for their underwater music, then go on stopping the Chinese from killing tigers so that they can make tiger penis soup (this is true, really, they do that) for aphrodisiacs, get Hollywood to stop nuclear testing in Nevada and fund Dr. Bogdan Castle Maglich’s non-radioactive, helium-3 fusion and retire as multi-millionaires in the snow.
Instead of my amazing plan, Pam Anderson became "Pamela Lee" and did not answer my calls. She did not even know that I existed. While all the while I helped her wherever I could in the beginning, and I am not her claim to fame, she would not lend a hand to me when I asked for it, even to this day. Perhaps fame destroys memory, perhaps it destroys more than that.
Do people really sell their souls to Satan for fame?
Anyone interested in this story and photos for media or magazines, or to help with David Sereda's Charities, please contact DavidSereda@Hotmail.com and be sure to visit his site @ http://www.UFONASA.com
Book-mark this page... MORE Photos are coming SOON !
Through special arrangement with David Sereda, PamWatch will be be making available Pamela's very first swimwear shoot, along with many other NEVER before seen photos of Pam !!!
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