Bruce Joel Rubin

Bruce Joel Rubin was born on March 10, 1943 in Detroit, Michigan, USA.

In the mid-60's, Bruce was hired as an assistant film editor at NBC working on the critically-acclaimed evening news program The Huntley-Brinkley Report (1956), but an LSD experience sparked a spiritual quest with a desire for answers and a teacher. He meditated in Greece then headed for Tibet, hitchhiking through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. 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 on the floors of the temples at Angkor Wat, which was still being excavated from the surrounding jungle. Bruce eventually returned to New York where he finally found his spiritual teacher and began trying to establish a film career.

Bruce's love of filmmaking began in his teens when he saw the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries (1957) at the Krim Theater in Detroit. After two years at Detroit's Wayne State University, he transferred to New York University film school.

At NYU, Bruce nearly failed the only screenwriting course he took. His classmates included Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, who directed Bruce's first student script, Jennifer (1964).

Bruce was hired as an assistant by his good friend, David Bienstock, an independent filmmaker who was Curator of Film at the Whitney Museum in New York. While there, Bruce gradually became Assistant Curator of Film and helped establish a program called The New American Filmmakers Series, an important launching pad for independent filmmakers in the early 70's. Together they also began writing a science fiction script, Quasar, optioned by Ingo Preminger, who'd just produced the Oscar-winning movie MASH (1970), but the option expired after Richard D. Zanuck, President of Warner Brothers, said he didn't understand the ending. Almost 30 years later, Zanuck was a producer on Bruce's film, Deep Impact (1998).

Sons, with Blanche Rubin, Joshua Rubin (born 1972) and Ari Rubin (born 1980).

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

On Rubin's script, The George Dunlap Tapes that Brainstorm (1983)(1983) was based on: "Dunlap dies at the end of Rubin's script. The camera pulls back to reveal that the screen is really a video monitor. As the life of George Dunlap ends, a caption flashes 'End of tape. Rewind.' The entire movie of Dunlap's life has been a replay of a tape. The camera dollies back further and thousands of tapes are visible on thousands of monitors. They are all 'life tapes' that were made and stored millions of years before, thanks to the invention of the Dunlap machine. There are no physical beings left, only lives recorded on full sensory tapes." Cinefantastique magazine, January 1984.

In 1984, on the same day Bruce and his wife sold their Illinois home, two weeks before they were to leave for LA, Bruce's LA agent called and said he would no longer represent him because his work was "too metaphysical and nobody wanted to make movies about ghosts." Bruce was devastated, but his wife was not. "So we ended up moving to Hollywood with no money, and within a week I had a house and an agent. I had a writing job. I was very lucky." Creative Screenwriting magazine.

He is a writer, known for Ghost (1990), Deep Impact (1998) and Jacob's Ladder (1990).