A Fond Farewell

Matthew Ross, the now-former managing editor of Filmmaker Magazine, has left for LA to pursue his own filmmaking career. Jason Guerrasio is Filmmaker's new managing editor. As a sort of tribute, here is a piece I wrote about Mr. Ross last year:

The managing editor of Filmmaker Magazine sits amid the steady hum of computers in his spacious but windowless office, having just completed work on the spring issue of “the magazine of independent film,” three months in the making.

Matthew Ross, 30, has been the managing editor of Filmmaker since he joined the magazine in 2003. He is one of only two staff editors at a magazine that reaches over 60,000 readers each issue, many of whom are filmmakers themselves.

As managing editor, Ross oversees all production, content and photo shoots; acts as chief contact for the magazine’s editorial staff, writers, publisher, designer and advertising director; represents the magazine at film industry events and film festivals; and, of course, writes features and reports for the magazine.

“While we’re in production, which takes place about three weeks every three months,” Ross says, “I’m sort of like the assistant director or production manager of the magazine. The rest of the time, I’m finding stories for us to cover.”

Born and raised in Manhattan, Ross attended Harvard University, where he studied film production and graduated in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual and Environmental Studies. Like many of his colleagues at the magazine, Ross is also an aspiring filmmaker. His short film Curtis and Clover premiered at the 2001 Hamptons International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Starfish Award. He recently completed another short film, Lola, which should hit the festival circuit later this year.

Ross sees his career in journalism as part of a balancing act, a way to pay the bills while he simultaneously works on his career as a filmmaker.

“Writing and directing movies is never a hirable job at the start,” Ross says. “I’ve always loved writing – especially writing about movies. Writing about movies was the one thing I knew could do right off the bat.”

Immediately after graduation, Ross went to Los Angeles, where he briefly worked for Dimension Films and Miramax Films and found freelance production work on various documentaries. But, he says, “I wanted something more intellectually stimulating. I kind of fell into journalism by accident.”

Ross wrote for several online publications during the dot com boom, including Directors World, EditorsNet and 2-pop. Less than a year later, however, the boom went bust and he found a job at Variety.

He returned to New York as a staff film reporter, but says now that even though he loved working for Variety, he “didn’t want to be a business reporter.” Ross left Variety in January of 2002 and soon began working for indieWIRE Publications, where he was senior editor, overseeing all editorial content.

He left indieWire at the end of 2002 and began working for Filmmaker shortly thereafter.

“It was time to leave,” he says. “I was always a huge fan of Filmmaker. Plus, a quarterly magazine offered a more flexible schedule.”

While at Filmmaker, Ross has continued to write freelance articles for Variety, the Village Voice, indieWire and the Criterion Collection, among other publications. He has written and will be directing his first feature film, Plays Well with Others, with Cynthia Nixon attached to star, and is already working on his second feature, a psychological thriller titled Frank & Lola.

“Filmmaker has been very good to me,” Ross says. “But my ultimate ambition is to make films.”