Biography

Spent a year and a half travelling in India and Tibet, staying for awhile in a Nepalese monastery.

Spent a year teaching college Communications in 1982 while awaiting final production on Brainstorm (1983).

Graduated from New York University in the 1960s.

Bruce's early screenwriting career got a boost from an article written by Steve Rebello for American Film magazine in December 1983 titled, One in a Million, listing ten of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood, scripts that he said "were just too good to get produced." Rebello had read 125 scripts recommended by respected industry connections. The final ten screenplays included The Princess Bride (1987), Total Recall (1990), At Close Range (1986) and Jacob's Ladder (1990). Rebello wrote: "Admirers of Bruce Joel Rubin's Jacob's Ladder flat out refuse to describe this screenplay. Their only entreaty? 'Read it. It's extraordinary.' And it is... page for page, it is one of the very few screenplays I've read with the power to consistently raise hackles in broad daylight".

Bruce's script, The George Dunlap Tape, was rewritten and produced in 1983 as Brainstorm (1983) with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood (in her last film). Bruce borrowed money to go to the LA premiere of Brainstorm. While in LA, he had lunch with his NYU classmate Brian De Palma who advised if he wanted a career in LA he had to move there. "I had heard that a thousand times and never wanted to believe it because of the terror of moving to Hollywood and not having anybody answer your phone calls. But my wife took it to heart, and when we arrived back in Illinois she quit her job, put our house on the market and said we're doing it. It was the most courageous act I've ever experienced." Creative Screenwriting magazine.

You need to get what I call "the lump of clay" on the table. You can't mold it until it's there. So if you get ten pages down and then start being judgmental and critical of your work, you'll never get that lump of clay on the table.

I could do an entire sequel to Brainstorm (1983) just from the script material that wasn't used, but of course, it's unlikely I'll ever get that chance. There is a major flaw in our copyright system, that fertile ideas can be bought and sold and left to decompose in studio vaults. [Interview in Cinefantastique magazine, March 1986]

[on writing Jacob's Ladder (1990)] The film was beginning to feel shallow, stagnant. I felt trapped. Something was missing. For nearly three days I stopped working. I felt the script was a disaster in the making and I grew terribly depressed. I didn't want to proceed. I had come to this point in many scripts, that moment of total devastation, where you realize that what you are writing is absolute garbage, that you have strayed from your path, and that you are deluded to think you were ever a writer in the first place. How a writer overcomes this obstacle is in many ways what determines his success or failure. It is a time of battle, of sacrifice, of killing your babies as some writer once said. It is a terrible and ultimately liberating struggle, if you get through it. It weds you to your material in a blood ceremony that makes it yours. It becomes your life. [Jacob's Ladder, Applause Books, 1990]

Each film was an attempt, successful or not, to witness and explore the unseen world of our lives. I wanted to speak to adults and to children and to touch the inner mystery of our shared being.

[on being offered to write the script for Deadly Friend (1986) ] At first I said, 'I can't write that. I have integrity. I didn't come to Hollywood to make horror films.' The next morning, as I was meditating and feeling very smug about turning down the job, I heard [my deceased meditation teacher] Rudi's voice in my head, as clear as could be. He said, 'You schmuck! There's more integrity in providing for your family than in turning down jobs. Get up right now, go to the phone, call the producer and say you're going to do it.' I've had a long enough spiritual practice to know that when your teacher speaks to you from beyond the grave, you listen. I got up and called Robert M. Sherman and said, 'I want this job.' He said, 'It's yours.' That film, Deadly Friend, turned out to be a joy to make and a lifesaver on many levels...There were a lot of other benefits from working on that film, one of which was getting to know Wes Craven. [Jacob's Ladder, Applause Books, 1990 and brucejoelrubin.com]