Bruce Joel Rubin

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." ==Career==

In 1966, Rubin became an assistant film editor at NBC's evening news show, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, 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. About ''Jacob's Ladder'', Rubin wrote: The film My Life, released in 1993, was Rubin's directorial debut. In the next 30 years, in Los Angeles and later in New York, Rubin would write more than 30 scripts and get 11 produced while continuing his meditation practice and teaching weekly meditation classes. Rubin has stated, "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." Rubin wrote the book and lyrics for Ghost the Musical (the musical adaptation of Ghost) which premiered in the United Kingdom in March 2011 and opened on Broadway in Spring 2012. Rubin's creative focus has turned to photography: ==Personal life==

Rubin and his wife, Blanche, split their time between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and he teaches weekly meditation classes in Dutchess County, New York. Blanche is an artist with a Doctorate in Art Education. She taught at Indiana University, Northern Illinois University, and California State University at Northridge, and was the Program Evaluator at the J. Paul Getty Institute for Education in the Arts, where she helped create a national program. 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) ==References==