Bruce Joel Rubin: Scripts of the Hereafter

Rubin ponders the imponderable in scripts like GHOST and JACOB’S LADDER.

By Sheldon Teitelbaum

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin has his head in the clouds. In less thana decade, he has become Hollywood's resident maven of the Hereafter. Driven by long-standing and deep-rooted metaphysical impulses, Rubin, 46, knows the terrain like no one else in the industry. And each of the films based upon his screenplays— the 1983 Douglas Trumbull movie BRAINSTORM, last year’s surprise hit GHOST, and director Adrian Lyne’s horror encore, JACOB'S LAD- DER —has strived, albeit with mixed success, to render a celluloid-based road map of the Great Beyond.

The ectoplasmic Patrick Swayze in Rubin's GHOST, which tumed out to be the biggest boxoftice hit of last year.

Rubin, in the window of a Vietnam hut, filming the opening of JACOB'S LADDER.

Indeed, Rubin's career can best be understood as a Autzpah laden attempt to sneak a movie camera into the next world and to return with the footage—and himself—intact. If the prospect of death leaves Rubin, a resident of theslightly less-than-heavenly San Fernando Valley, relatively undaunted, he found that filtering his personal sensibilities through a director—a plight common to most screenwriters—can be purgatory.

In BRAINSTORM, Rubin’s eclectic metaphysical imagery—culled from the commonalities of the world’s major religions—clashed with director Douglas Trumbull’s Christian religiosity, ultimately losing out to it. “The angels flapping around in there were not mine,” declared Rubin.

Indeed, the only scene in BRAINSTORM Rubin felt captured his idea of how it might actually be to die was where scientist Louise Fletcher

separates from her body, and moves into what Rubincalleda “bubble memory mode.” Recalled Rubin, “That idea came from an earlier script I wrote called QUASAR. In it, people who had just died would speed alongside their memories, which were like runningtrains, intersecting with them in a kind of chromosomic network. To me, that'sa very real image, and very exciting.”

Though Rubin objected to the Christian symbolism of BRAINSTORM—not found in his script—he relied heavily on just such imagery in writing GHOST. “That proposed a heaven and a hell that was purely Judeo-Christian,” said Rubin. “Asachild I hadanOld Testament with these wonderful Babylonian drawings. They contributed heavily to the sense of Hebraic imagery you find it in all my scripts.”

GHOST, according to Rubin, offersa sense of how one’s passing might be governed by the tenor of one’s life. As in some Far Eastern religions, Rubin believes that death represents an unraveling of ego, but only for those prepared to let go. Those who are not become trapped, and it is this captivity which becomes hellish. As directed by Jerry Zucker, Rubin’s script outperformed such boxoffice sureties last summer as DICK TRACY and TOTAL RECALL, “It was an amazingly effective movie,” said Rubin, “mainly because we all

Louise Fletcher's death, captured in a memory bubble, in Rubin's BRAINSTORM.

got out of the way of this incredibly sweet story.”

GHOST deftly addressed a widely-held sense that there is no real justice in the universe,a prospect Rubin's Judaic valuesystem could not abide. It also expressed another thought dear to Rubin—that there are no immutable barriers between this world and the next. Butas a gritty depiction of the shape and texture of that universe, however, it was strictly Spielbergian—diffused light, cotton candy clouds and sugarcoating.

Twice thwarted in his enduring attempt to do death right without actually taking the plunge himself, Rubin banked on Lyne’s JACOBS LADDER, to come up with the goods. “In JACOB'S LADDER,” said Rubin, “we find a man on a journey that isinexplicable, He is seeing archetypal demonic forms that belong in medieval times, not in the 20th century American experience. In my script, Jacob was a renegade Jewish existentialist—a philosopher who had no religion, justa universal sense of absurdity. Jacob had bought into the existential idea that man lives and dies for no particular reason, and ends in darkness. A man of that nature, I thought, would be the most prone to be

Beis. Tim Robbins as Jacob, saved from death by an ice bath that lowers his raging fever, or already dead as Rubin suggests?

&6God is not something merely to be argued about or believed in as an act of faith, but something to be known, something you can tune in and touch while you are alive. 39

terrified of archetypal, demonic images. Having no religious background, he is perhaps the most vulnerable to experiencing them.”

Jacob's Jewishness has been washed out of Lyne’s film. Rubin admitted that was a shame, not least because Jacob’s predicament works, he acknowedged, as a nifty metaphor for modern day, secular Israel, which sometimes appears inadvertantly to be caught up in the Christian scenario of the End of Days.

“There is, infact, a partin the film which did not survive which is about an apocalypse,” said Rubin. “An individual experiencing their own demise will experience an intimation of the world’s demise. There was originally a sense in the film that the world wasactually coming to an end.”

The sense of personalapocalypse infusing the script later found echoes in Rubin's own

climb up the ladder of accomplishment as a screenwriter. In 1981, JACOB'S LADDER was voted by American Film's writer Stephen Rebello as one of the ten best scripts never made (see 16:1:19). JACOB'S LADDER languished in Hollywood for nearly a decade. It was read by every studio in town, admired by all who saw it, attracted big name directors like Ridley Scott, Sidney Lumet and Brian DePalma (Rubin's old schoolmate), but was pronounced by all impossible to make for less than the gross budget of HEAVEN'S GATE.

Rubin had long entertained notions of directing JACOBS LADDER himself, figuring it would help—though by no means assure—the accurate translation of his story to film. But Rubin was genuinely delighted to land a director of Lyne’s distinction. And though they often fought vigorously to preserve their respective visions

of the film, the collaboration between them was— insofar as anyone can tell—a match made in, well...

Rubin said he got his first inkling of the true nature of Heaven from a Tibetan monk who had anabiding passion for actress Elke Sommer, expressed in the dozens of nude photographs tacked to the walls of his hut. This was during the ‘60s, when Rubin wandered the world looking for the usual big answers he wasn't finding within his own tradition.

“Though raised asa Reform Jew,” said Rubin, “I was rarely satisfied in my deeper spiritual yearning by any of my religious practice. | always founda sense of emptiness, of talking about, but not touching, the truth | was hungry for. Talking about truth is no substitute for experiencing it.”

The monk, Rubin discovered, was looking for his own answers—mostly about life in America. And when Rubin described the middle-class American home he had grown up in, the monk became convinced that Rubin had, in fact, come to Katmandu from Heaven.

“It took me a while to understand that he was right,” said Rubin. “For people who have never experienced such ameni-

The film is but a ghost of the potential of Rubin’s famed script.

By Charles D. Leayman ___

The final draft of Bruce Joel Rubin's script of JACOB'S LADDER (published by Applause Books) is an undeniably gripping read that monopolizes the attention with its very first page. A hellish firefight in the Vietnam jungles whips in a flash to the hero's entrapment in a New York subway, and from then on the script exudes a burgeoning menace that stamps its vivid imagery on the mind's mental screen with indelible impact. Rubin's professed concern with issues of spirituality, with ultimate questions of life and death, resonates through his tale ofa haunted Nam vet who suddenly spies demons in the peripheral vision of his life. Finely detailed, with an eye and ear sensitivetotheebband flow of ordinary peoplecaught in extraordinary circumstances, Rubin’s script immerses its beleaguered protagonist in a cloven-hooved demonology out of Dore and Bosch. While Rubin’s last effort, the surprise mega-hit GHOST, traded in feel-good metaphysical kitsch, his JACOB'S LADDER exhibits an Old Testament sternness and psychological insight that impart an epic, magisterial quality that director Adrian Lyne’s film version fails to capture.

Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins ina warm, heroic performance) is a Manhattan mailman and

divorced father, sharing an edgily happy relationship with the strong-willed Jezzie ( Elizabeth Pena), another postal employee. As he begins to undergo demonic apparitions, his rising panic triggers flashbacks to a nightmarish incident in Vietnam and to memories of his youngest son, Gabe, who died beneath the wheels of a truck. With his visions becoming ever more fearsome, Jacob discovers that the other surviving members of his platoon are experiencing similar visitations.

Singer is unexpectedly contacted by an ex-hippie who served as a U.S. Army chemist in order to beat jail and who concocted a lethal drug (“The Ladder”) capable of tapping the user's most primal aggressions. The platoon’s members were used as guinea pigs to test the drug's effectiveness, but only managed to massacre themselves. Jacob now realizes that the “demons” are cither

Heavenly light sutfuses Jacob's climactic salvation as Tim Robbins reunites with dead son B.J Donaldson, director Adrian Lyne's secular vision of Rubin's script.

drug-induced fantasies, military agents intent on suppressing the past, or actual metaphysical messengers from beyond.

In an invaluable afterword to his scriptchronicling the tortuous evolution of JACOB'S LADDER from page toscreen, Rubin acknowledged the conceptual differences between his and Lyne’s approach to the material. Where the writer favored an elaborate iconography of horned devils and radiant angels drawn from the familiar Western religious tradition, the director preferred a less spectacular, more interiorized scenario that would locate Heaven and Hell firmly within this world. Goneare the script’s winged furies materializing through walls and wrestling for Jacob's soul seen in production sketches when Cinefantastique hailed Rubin’s script as an unfilmed masterpiece in 1981 [16:1:19].

Lyne amid the charnel house atmosphere of the film's hellish hospital basement.

Gone is the script’s stormwracked apocalypse in which Jacob confronts the most hideous spectre of all (and the Devil's supreme ally): himself. Gone is the beatific vision of Eden that Jacob experiences on being given an antidote to The Ladder by the repentant chemist. Gone is the latter's severed head. Lyne has produced a consistently more secular (and economically feasible) version of Rubin's script that retains Jacob’s climactic “salvation,” but does so without the overtly theological trappings.

Even without disembodied

. torsos, Lyne can conjure properly Guignol moments when he chooses (as FATAL ATTRAC- TION proved), and there are several set pieces in the film that remain intensely true to the dark spirit of Rubin's letter. Jacob's subway ordeal when the demons first present themcontinued on page 60

JACOB'S LADDER A TriStar reteme of & Caruleo Pieters production. 10/90, 11} sui, Im Doky & color. Director, Adrien Lyme. Producer, Alan Marshall. Executive producers, Maro Kassar & Amirew ¥ apne. Director of photography , Jeffrey 1. Kimball. Editor, Tom Wolf. Production designer, Brien Morris Principal ert director, Jeremy Conway, Art dierctor, Wray Steven Graham. Set decorstor. Kathiern Dolan & Leticia Stetle-Serre Costume . Een Mirajnick. Special fle, , Gordon J. Smith Music, Maurice Jarre. Sound; Tod A. Mulitand, Andy Nehon, Steve Pederwn & Michart Gethin Screemptey by Birt Joel Rubin.

Jacob Singer Tien Hoabebens Jeune birebeth Pene Leu Danny Aiebo Michart Matt Craven Paal Pruitt Taylor Vince Geary Daron Alexander Sarah Patrica Kabermbver Prank Eriq Le Salle George Ving Rheemes Dow frien Teranting

ties, what could be more like Heaven than a house with hot and cold running water, central heating, a washing machine, dishwasher and television? This was what primitive and aboriginal or medieval societies had always imagined the Next World to be.”

It was not, however, a concept Rubin, a native of Detroit, could easily share. Judaism had little use for prolonged contemplation of an afterlife, preferring to accentuate the here-and-now. But Rubin felt driven toward a transcendentalism Judaism does not provide those not extremely well versed in its practices and teachings.

“God is not something merely to be argued about or believed in as an act of faith, but something to be known,” said Rubin. “The potential is there in every human being to know God ina personal sense. God is not something to be met with or dealt with after you leave this world, but something you can tune into and touch while you are alive.

“Expressing my sense of the Hereafter has probably been the prime motivating factor for my writing. | want to make people understand through film that there is more to their lives than their sensory reality informs them.”

Perhaps for this reason, Rubin said he does not like last summer's FLATLINERS, another in a spate of movies oriented similarly to his own. Starring Kiefer Sutherland and comely Julia Roberts, FLATLINERS tells of a group of medical students whoarrange their own heart-stoppage and subsequent revival to experience the act of dying without actually passing irrevocably into the next world.

“IL found FLATLINERS disturbing,” said Rubin, criticizing scriptwriter Peter Filardi. “It depicted the departure from this world in every single case as a terrible experience. This is irresponsible of the writer, and frankly, | don’t think he took the notions he was planting in the public mind seriously. As someone who is aware of how these concepts can rebound within the public consciousness, [take my responsibility as a writer very seriously.” o

Aero PADDDN

Canadian effects expert Gord Smith on how Rubin’s hellish imagery got abandoned.

By Gary Kimber

Meat, chaos, war. Those are the buzzword’s Toronto effects man Gordon Smith used to describe his work on JACOB'S LADDER. Smith provided the bloody combat effects for a trio of films by Oliver Stone—SALVADOR, PLATOON and BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. Smith and his EfxSmith company were once again called upon to recreate the carnage of Vietnam with heightened realism by director Adrian Lyne. But Smith's far more interesting contribution, visualizing Jacob's demonic visions, is all but lost amid Lyne’s strobe lighting and frenetic cutting.

Smith and co-workers, including Evan Penny, Ray MacIntosh and Joe Ventura, worked on creating a series of thirty hellish makeups—dubbed with names like Tripehead, Laughing Boy, Cleaverhead, Split-Face and Dog Boy— glimpsed only fleetingly, almost subliminally in the film. Smith said Lyne and producers Brian Morris and Alan Marshall weren't very specific about the kinds of hallucinations they wanted Jacob to see, leaving much of the conjuring up to Smith. He estimated only about half of the concepts realized came from Lyne or Morris or other departments like costuming.

And when Smith was presented with ideas, the descriptions tended to be vague.“Likea sea of egg, but dripping only a certain way, and through it an eyeball, muscles stretching off,” is how Smith described the kind of inspiration he was given. “It's a nice description,” groused Smith, “but how the fuck do you make something like that?” But though Smith worked mightily to make concrete and physical the stuff of Jacob's visions, in the end Lyne rendered them vague once more.

Smith said Morris and Marshall provided images to communicate the visual look they

wanted, including artwork by English painter Francis Bacon, Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger,and baroque photographer Joel Peter Witkins. “You got the impression talking with them that they didnt necessarily want to do what was in Bruce Joc! Rubin’s script,” said Smith. The Giger look was soon discarded as being too recognizable to the public, according to Smith, leaving the production to focus on Witkins’ images of real freaks coupled with the violent sense of movement suggested by Bacon, “representing chaos.” Also suggested for inspiration carly on were the paintings of Hicronymous Bosch which Smith rejected because “they cartoon too easily.”

Smith was somewhat defensive when asked why neither Bacon nor Witkins are credited in the film. “We used their works like we used cattle, by dissecting them and casting their interiors,” said Smith, referring to how the film's bloody body parts were created. “There is nothing new in this world. Everything is a copy of something else. We pushed past both of those gentlemen.” To give the makeups the jarring effect of rapid intense movements, images

were photographed at as little as three frames per second, then projected at twenty-four. Mechanics were also built to vibrate arms, legs and heads, used only infrequently during filming. With blood and gore and “meat” key to the film's Vietnam-based imagery, it's somewhat surprising tolearn that Smith, now in his late thirties, had to conquer a phobic reaction to the sight of blood. Smith was recently the subject of a CBS 48 HOURS segment on phobias. He noted that it was his line of work that actually helped him overcome his fear. Not surprisingly, Smith said he doesn’t like the kind of movies he’s called to work on—he also did the giant, bloody rat creature of GRAVEYARD SHIFT. “I don't go to horror movies,” said Smith, “I hate them. Those with major phobias don't see movies that are going to scare the shit out of them. If the illusion is complete I'm going to pass out in the popcorn.” Smith noted with pride that the meat in JACOB'S LADDER, while it may have looked real, was all synthetics created in his . A neat surrealistic touch Smith devised that was left on the cutting room floor had eyes inside the body parts open Ps and stare at Jacob.

Smith, a horror specialist with a surprising phobia for blood and guts.

CINEFANTASTIQUE.

June 1991

LAAs BA THD ic@ Aa

lif | Wr yulet tar i Vind Rew as THE ANIMATRONIC WONDERS, BEHIND THE SCENES

Raphael in red,

and Leonardo, s mean, green and f

on the screen.

ae - | . > : TERMINATOR 2

Volume 21 Number 6 The effects heavy facing

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES Arnold's good guy cyborg

Kevin Costner on swinging into sword & sorcery action

Blake Edwards left the devil’s best scene on the cutting room floor.

By Dan Scapperotti

Blake Edwards, the man who gave the world Inspector Clouseau in the successful PINK PANTHER comedies, directed SWITCH for Warner Bros, a comedy-fantasy set to open April 19th. Steve Brooks plays an unrepentant male chauvinist bumped off by vengeful ex-girlfriend JoBeth

Above: Makeup designer Smithson puts finishing touches on Final steps not shown include painting, blending the appliance

Williams, who finds himself in Purgatory, confronted by the Devil and God. Brooks gets sent back to Earth in the form of Ellen Barkin, the gender “switch” of the title

Edwards’ script included a comedy gag sequence where the Devil was to appear in full makeup, an effect dropped from the final film. Mike Smithson, hired to create the unused demon makeup, had done sculpting and design work on several genre films including THE FLY, GHOST- BUSTERS Iland THE BLOB “Blake really wanted a kind of cliche demon,” said Smithson “It started out as a traditional red devil with the mustache and the pitchfork.”

In the cut sequence, Barkin presses up on an elevator only to have it descend, the walls smoking, to open up ona Hellish landscape complete with the Devil (Bruce Payne). “The devil has this really cheapo demon mask on,” said Smith-

Payne. Below. Payne undergoes applica’ es to exposed skin with makeup, and the addition of hair pieces

Bruce Payne in the devil makeup by Mike Smithson, dropped trom director Biake Edward's SWITCH. Inset The original mask-behind-a-mask concept.

son, “likea Vac-u-form Halloween mask. He walks into the elevator and he pulls the mask off and the prosthetics underneath are almost exactly the same as the mask, only looking real.”

Smithson designed, sculpted and applied the demon makeup, and the Vac-u-form mask. “It actually changed quite a bit from the original mock-up to what I finally brought on-set,” said Smithson. The makeup took four and a half hours to apply, consisting of an ecight-piece overlapping appliance wtih rigid foam horns. Chris Goehe did the mold work for Smithson and Eric Jenson ran the foam

latex. They shot Payne in front of a blue screen at the Culver Studios and planned to matte in the Hades landscape background later.

“I had to go on-set while Edwards was shooting with Ellen Barkin,” said Smithson “It was kind of a makeup test on the run. I changed the color of the Devil to a marbled human paint scheme and Blake seemed to really like that, so that was how it was filmed.”

Smithson, however, saw his three months of work go down the drain when Edwards decided to drop the elevator gag after it was in the can, “It wasa real throwaway gag,” said the disappointed makeup artist.0

ion of the foam rubber prosthetics for the missing throw-away gag and the devil's distinctive rigid rubber horns.