Toby Ross is an American film director who made gay pornographic films in the 1970s and 1980s and later on went to produce non sexual and cult films. Many film aficionados consider Ross the only missing link between Adult films and commercial independent films, as Ross calls it The Antarctica of the film business. He was born in Landsberg am Lech, Germany, to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. At the age of eight, his mother having remarried an Austrian Jew, he moved with his mother and stepfather to Israel. He served two years in the Israeli army. After studies in Los Angeles, attracted by stories of the freedom in San Francisco, he moved there in the 1970s.