- 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.
- 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wife sold their Illinois home, two weeks before they were to leave for LA, Bruce's LA agent called and said he would no longer represent him because his work was "too metaphysical and nobody wanted to make movies about ghosts."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.
- 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'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.
- During Bruce's last year at NYU, one of his jobs was selling hot dogs and beer at the New York World's Fair. Every day at lunch Bruce would go to the Johnson's Wax Pavilion to see a 20-minute movie, To Be Alive! (1964) by Francis Thompson, about the commonalities of human experience, filmed in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia, and viewed on three separate screens. A single screen 70mm version won the short documentary Academy Award that year. Bruce was always moved by the ending, when the narrator said, "Simply to be alive is a great joy," and has commented, "I wanted to bring that feeling into the world somehow--that it's wonderful to be alive".
- 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.
- In New York, after returning from a nearly two-year global spiritual quest, Bruce worked an assortment of jobs from sound recording to film editing. He worked with the Joffrey Ballet Company on the multimedia rock ballet Astarte, and with Francis Thompson-the director of To Be Alive! (1964), a documentary short he'd admired while working at the New York Worlds Fair-on another three-screen film, Cathedral at Chartres. He was Assistant Director for his former NYU classmate Brian De Palma on Hi, Mom! (1970) starring a young Robert De Niro. Then he worked with De Palma and Robert Fiore on Dionysus in '69 (1970), a two-screen film interpretation of an off-Broadway play.
- 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.
- Sons, with Blanche Rubin, Joshua Rubin (born 1972) and Ari Rubin (born 1980).
- 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 M*A*S*H (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).
- Son of Sondra Rubin.
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