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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.

Living primarily off of a trust fund his family had set up for him, Ross hadn't been a film producer for very long.

But in the three years since he founded Adam Ross Productions, he financed five feature films, including the low-budget action films "Dawn of the Redneck Samurai," "Children of the Hunt" and "Dogs of Chinatown"; a zombie movie titled "Z-13"; and his favorite project, the 3-D horror short-film anthology "Vault of Darkness."

"When you step back and look at it, he's kind of a gangsta'. He did things," says Matthew B. Moore, the film director who collaborated on most of Ross' films. "A lot of people look at him as the guy who wore a jean jacket for a shirt, but he's got a good $400,000 invested.

"He didn't play, he wanted to be Adam Ross, film producer on the boat with cigars and martinis."

Moore first met Ross while searching for an office space for his own film production company, King Coyote Productions.

"I found a couple of things, and then, of course, this big, 6-foot-3, goofy guy goes, 'Oh, you don't want that, you want my office!' " Moore says. "So then I went upstairs and checked out this horrible mess with tons of equipment in it, and sure enough, it seemed to be the spot for me."

After watching Moore work with his crew members on a short film, Ross felt inspired to start his own production company as well.

The first of Ross' films to reach completion was "The Dogs of Chinatown," a martial arts shoot-em-up written, directed and produced by Blake Faucette and Micah Moore.

"The funny thing is, we had done some test footage originally for 'Dogs,' and we had planned on showing it to investors," Faucette says. "Adam happened to be the guy in the room as we put it on to play for a group of friends, and he wanted to pay for it."

Faucette considers the split-decision to fund his first feature a huge leap of faith, especially since Ross had never seen any of the short films he and Micah Moore had made before. Ross also sought no creative control over the project whatsoever.

"Basically, he just gave me some money and said, 'Go make your movie,' which is pretty awesome, because not a lot of people do that," Faucette says.

Ross' friends and associates believe they will be able to complete the rest of the feature films by early winter, with the hopes of taking them to L.A. and attracting potential film buyers.

"That's including the 3-D film," says Adam Hulin, one of Ross' friends who was hired to work for Adam Ross Productions. "Even though that's the one that requires the most work, as long as I've known Ross, that's the one thing above all else that he wanted to do.

"That was the big one for him, to make a 3-D feature."

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com