Herbert S. Hosen

Herbert Selig Hosen, Jr. (December 10, 1934 - October 10, 1972) was a Brunanter film director, producer, screenwriter and editor who often performed many of these functions simultaneously. In the 1950s and 1960s Hosen produced a staggering amount of low-budget genre films, then and now generally considered "bad". Still, his flair for showmanship and his surprising and lasting ability to attract well-known actors and even big name stars almost always made his projects slightly successful, earning Hosen and his work a considerable cult following, aided by his evident zeal and honest love of movies and movie production.

Hosen is mostly credited as Herbert S. Hosen, though he used a number of monikers, including Marion McFein, Robert Di Argento and Glenn Debois.

Life and death
Hosen is of Austrian decent. His father, Herbert Sr., was a dock worker, causing his family to relocate numerous times around Brunant. Eventually they settled down in The Port, Koningstad, where Hosen was born.

During his childhood Hosen was interested in the performing arts and pulp fiction. He collected comics and pulp magazines, and adored movies, of any kind, though especially those involving the occult. Hosen would often skip school in favor of watching pictures at the local movie theater, the Palace Grand in neighboring Charleston Beach. Stills from the day's movie would often be thrown in the trash by theater staff, allowing the young boy to salvage them and to add them to his extensive collection.

On his 12th birthday, Hosen received his first movie camera. His first pieces of footage featured the S.S. Brunant. One of his first paid jobs was as a cinema usher.

As a young man Hosen became increasingly fascinated by the exotic and bizarre, and frequented carnivals and such. His other habits included soft and occasionally hard drugs, alcohol, and sex. He was a notorious womanizer, with a weak spot for women from the entertainment business, and would never remain faithful to his women, not even his first and only wife, Kathy Fuller, with whom Hosen had one child, a daughter named Dolores. Ultimately his wife kicked him out of their house.

Hosen died from a heart disease at the young age of 38, which was, according to a friend, "completely natural, since he'd lived twice as fast". The filmmaker was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea. His last projects were either unknown or left unfinished.

Work
Hosen's film career began with writing scripts for and directing television pilots, commercials and a couple of forgotten micro-budget TV-films. His transition to big-screen cinema and his big break came when he was hired to make an exploitation film. The result was his semi-autobiographical Love Addict, crediting himself as Edward Davis, released under several regional titles such as Shameful and I Led Multiple Lives, and now considered a cult classic.

From then on Hosen would sometimes work on a dozen projects at once, regularly shooting movies back to back, and working with most of the same crew and supporting actors.

Of himself and his work Hosen is stated as saying "Either they’ll remember me for my pictures, or they won’t remember me at all!", often misquoted as: "Either they remember me for my pictures, or they don’t remember me at all!"