Bruce Joel Rubin

Bruce Joel Rubin (born March 10, 1943) is an American screenwriter, meditation teacher, and photographer. His films often explore themes of life and death with metaphysical and science fiction elements. Prominent among them are Jacob's Ladder, My Life and Ghost, for which he received the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Ghost was also nominated for Best Picture, and was the highest-grossing film of 1990. He is sometimes credited as "Derek Saunders" or simply "Bruce Rubin".

Early life Born to a Jewish family and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Rubin is a 1960 graduate of Detroit's Mumford High School.

His love of theater began at the age of five when he saw his mother acting in Mary Poppins at a local high school. He later became an actor and director in high school plays.

Rubin traces his interest in filmmaking to viewing the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries at the Krim Theater in Detroit when he was a teenager. He attended Detroit's Wayne State University for two years, then transferred to NYU film school in 1962. His classmates at NYU included Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, who became the director of Jennifer, Rubin's first student script.

While still at NYU, Rubin got a job selling hot dogs and beer at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Every day he spent his lunch break at the Johnson's Wax Pavilion watching a 20-minute movie, To Be Alive! by Francis Thompson, about the commonalities of growing up in cultures across the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia. It was viewed on three separate 18-foot screens, and a single-screen version won the Oscar for documentary (short subject). At the end, the narrator states, "Simply to be alive is a great joy." This inspired Rubin, who said he "wanted to bring that feeling into the world somehow — that it's wonderful to be alive." but an LSD experience inspired his departure on a spiritual quest a year later. He meditated in Greece and then headed for Tibet, hitchhiking through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he "felt embraced and expanded by each culture." He lived in ashrams in India, a Tibetan monastery in Kathmandu, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok and a Sikh temple in Singapore. He spent a month in Japan, and a week sleeping amidst excavations in the temples at Angkor Wat. But it wasn't until Rubin returned to New York City that he met his spiritual teacher, Rudi, only a few blocks away from where he began his journey. And once again, he tried to establish a film career.

David Bienstock, an independent filmmaker who was Curator of Film at the Whitney Museum in New York, was a friend of Rubin's and hired him as an assistant. Rubin later became Assistant Curator of Film and helped establish The New American Filmmakers Series, a launching pad for independent filmmakers and a precursor to Sundance. Rubin and Bienstock also began writing a science fiction screenplay, Quasar. Rubin recalled, "We came up with a story about an astronomer who discovers what he thinks is a giant quasar, but it turns out to be something that spiritually changes his life. That was the breakthrough. My spiritual life and my creative life merged. It all became one journey, one unfolding." The script was later optioned by Ingo Preminger, producer of the Oscar-winning movie MASH, but when Richard Zanuck, President of Warner Brothers, said he didn't understand the ending, the option expired. Zanuck would later produce Rubin's film Deep Impact.

About Jacob's Ladder, Rubin wrote: The script idea for Jacob's Ladder began as a dream: A subway late at night; I am traveling through the bowels of New York City. There are very few people on the train. A terrible loneliness grips me. The train pulls into the station and I get off. The platform is deserted. I walk to the nearest exit, and discover the gate is locked. A feeling of terrible despair begins to pulse through me as I hike to the other end of the platform. To my horror, that exit is chained, too. I am totally trapped and overwhelmed by a sense of doom. I know with perfect certainty that I will never see daylight again. My only hope is to jump onto the tracks and enter the tunnel, the darkness. The only direction from there is down. I know the next stop on my journey is hell. Partly that came out of my own fear and despair, because nothing in my life seemed to be working. In Illinois, I felt like my story had evaporated completely. My story was, 'You don't have a story.' Here you are, living in a cornfield. No friends. No work. Your wife is supporting the family. Basically, in my mind, the story was over. I could have given up my filmmaking goals and settled into a different kind of lifestyle... My story would have been: 'Okay, you tried.' Instead, I woke up from my subway dream and said, 'That's a great opening for a movie.' I then tried to write my way out of hell... Their younger son Ari, a pilot, screenwriter and former board member of the WGA, was in law school in 2018. Their son Joshua has worked as an award-winning writer of major video games like Assassin's Creed 2 and Destiny. In 2018 he was involved in the development of virtual reality projects, and worked as an Interactive Narrative Consultant with clients in the U.S. and Europe.

Rubin is gay, which his wife has long known about.

Credits

Screenplays (produced) Brainstorm (1983) Deadly Friend (1986) Ghost (1990) Jacob's Ladder (1990) Sleeping with the Enemy (1991, uncredited) Deceived (1991) My Life (1993) Deep Impact (1998) Stuart Little 2 (2002) The Last Mimzy (2007) The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) Ghost: The Musical'' (2012, book and lyrics)