My Adam Ross article.

Producer took chance on new filmmakers

THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2009

By JOE SCOTT
Special to Go Triad

The first time I interviewed Greensboro film producer Adam Ross, my assignment was to write a story on his low-budget sci-fi action film "Children of the Hunt."

Sitting in a lawn chair a quarter-mile from the set his family owned in the woods, Ross was this scruffy, wild-eyed scarecrow of a man. My assignment was to write 600 words, but our recorded interview lasted nearly two hours as Ross talked about 3-D filmmaking, transcendental meditation, Richard Donner's original Superman movie and the realistic potential of human time travel. I asked maybe two questions.

And although there was no way that even a fraction of what Ross said could fit into a 600-word feature on his film, I didn't regret a single moment of our conversation.

On May 24, Ross died of a heart-attack after contracting spinal meningitis. He was 37.

That Ross would die as the result of a rare bacterial infection was cruelly ironic, for he was a severe germaphobe.

He didn't share food, would only buy shoes straight off of delivery trucks to ensure other people had not worn them and removed the laces from all of his sneakers and boots so he would never have to touch them for fear of contamination.

"I can almost see him now saying, 'I told you so!' " says Matt Pennachi, a friend of Ross' who lives in Durham.

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