The winner of ten GAYVN nominations and five awards for Best Editingwanted to be a movie star. After repeating his New York stage role in Kevin Glover’s The Boys of Cellblock Q, he took work editing, first with Glover’s company, Aries Post, then at All Worlds, and independently since 2003.
You might say he showed a flair for it, editing five of the last six GAYVN Best Videos. This year not only did he win, but the movie he edited, BuckleRoos, took ten other awards to boot.
Of his contribution to this and other movies, Rosen says, “I am excellent at puzzles, and I believe these are just puzzles.Sometimes you have to lose good stuff. Each director has his own attention span. I just tune in to what they were thinking at the time and match it up. I kind of am trying to help the director direct it, I’d say.
"Sometimes there’s not a hell of a lot of choice as to what goes in. It can be tedious. A lot of times I get, say, twenty hours for a ninety-minute movie — and I think, Omigod, this is never going to come together, but then, somehow, it does come out looking good. People say, ‘How did they have sex that long?’ — not thinking that it’s assembled from different pieces.
"I have a background in music. I’ve taken dance, I’ve taken directing, and I’ve acted, so I guess I have a kind of internal rhythm. I try to think, If I was the performer, what would I want? I try to be each person in a scene. I try to make sure that the acting has pace and connection. As the viewer, I want it consistent, I want continuity so that I don’t think, Woops! There was a cut! I don’t want to notice any editing. I want to see the subject, I want to see composition, I want to see good lighting, I want to see the performers looking their best. So I try to keep all of those things in my mind as I’m editing. Then I clean it up for the sound, put the sound effects and/or music in, and then titles. Is that too simplified?”
Of the much-praised Best Threesome in BuckleRoos, he says, “There was a lot of good stuff to use there. I can’t say that I’ve done anything different on that scene than I’ve done to any other scene. It’s that there was better quality to work with. I can take some credit for the final result, but it’s the directors, Jerry Douglas and John Rutherford — they knew what they were doing.
"Actually Jerry does pretty much select most of his cuts. He sends me his cut list, I edit the sex scene and clean up whatever doesn't work, then at the end of the process Jerry comes in and we finalize it. Wash West does the same. Most of the other people I work with, they’ve shot it, and they trust me to do it the way they would think it should be done.”
Is editing, as some people say, the ultimate artistic gesture in moviemaking? “I wouldn’t say that. It goes through so many eyes and I’m just the final eye. The cameraman is looking at it and lining up the shots. The director is also doing that. I’m the final step. I just have to look at what they’re looking at and make it all make sense. It’s too collaborative to take that much credit for it. I just take it and make it the best it can be.”
Has he considered directing? “Nobody has offered, but I feel that if I could get a script together I could sell somebody on it. I would write it — that’s the hard part. I think things to death. Obviously, a porn script is not that hard. It’s only a few pages to write. But I’ve been agonizing over it, because I want the right script to be my first. I did direct one movie anonymously. I didn’t get to cast or edit it. It turned out well, but of course, I would have liked to have more control over the final product. But I’ve also been too busy.”
One thing he’s been busy at is performing. “Probably about five years ago I just decided that I was tired of looking at these guys having fun, and I wanted in on it, I wanted to do some of my favorite boys. I think I’m up to about thirty-four movies now under the name of Andrew Addams — I was the ‘Gringo’ in Lust in Translation, which I also edited! And I actually just finished a gay vampire movie that’s going to be a theatrical release. It’s called Scab. Great name, huh?”
A movie star at last!
